This story is part of a series. Read more about educators in Auburn and Spanish Fort from The Alabama Education Lab.
About a decade ago, Marlisa Wiggins, a Tuscaloosa English teacher, had a revelation that would change her career.
Wiggins turned on the news and was surprised to see her mother’s old Stillman College classmate recounting “Bloody Tuesday,” the day in 1964 when police and white mobs assaulted dozens of protesters demonstrating against segregation in Tuscaloosa. The march, led by Rev. T.Y. Rogers from First African Baptist Church, occurred a year before Bloody Sunday.
“I had never heard of it, and it just drew me in,” Wiggins said.
The news segment inspired Wiggins, a 17-year educator, to dig into other undercovered topics – and encourage her students to do the same. She now teaches an entire course devoted to local African American history at Central High School.
The course, called “History of Us,” began at Central in 2019 through a partnership with history instructors at The University of Alabama. It has now expanded throughout the district and is one of few in-depth Black history courses offered in Alabama public schools.
UA associate history professor John Giggie, who helped develop the course, said the class has had some meaningful impacts in just five years.
A handful of Central High students have pursued history degrees, and have even worked with Giggie after graduation. And at Northridge High, the course has been gaining popularity. This year, more than 200 students have signed up for an upcoming Black history seminar.
State history experts have also taken an interest in the course’s model, he said.
“The goal was to use local history to explore national themes, which is what sort of drives this experience of Black history,” he said. “Every community can look hard and see itself as a touchstone for local but also national themes of history.”
A ‘touchstone’
Wiggins starts her course with a lesson on the school itself. Wiggins is a 1999 graduate of Central High, which was then the district’s sole public high school. Known as an athletic and academic powerhouse, Central had a sprawling campus and served, for the first time in Tuscaloosa, an integrated student body.
Marlisa Wiggins is a 17-year-educator and an English teacher with Tuscaloosa City Schools. Her "History of Us" high school course helps students research stories of local civil rights heroes. Credit Marcia Criss.Marcia Criss
Shortly after the system was released from a desegregation order in the late 1990s, the district allowed two other high schools to be built on separate sides of town. Central’s remaining population is 90% Black, compared to 87% at Bryant High School and 36% at Northridge High School.
Most of Wiggins’ students live in west Tuscaloosa, she said, where the names of local civil rights figures are sometimes hidden in plain sight. But it’s often not until students take her course that they begin to make those connections.
“They are seeing names all the time and they think nothing about it,” she said. “So when I mention Dinah Washington, T.Y. Rogers, McDonald Hughes, at first it doesn’t register but once we start researching, it draws them in.”
Wiggins herself was shocked to learn that she had family members who sang in Rogers’ choir. Other students in her class learned that they had connections to Black business owners and community figures who played an important role during Jim Crow and the broader civil rights movement.
Getting to know those local figures, Wiggins said, can teach students about more than just the past.
“When you learn about your own city, you realize that you have to do a service to the next generation,” she said. “T.Y. Rogers and all these other people, they weren’t thinking about themselves. They were thinking about the people that will come in behind them.”
“I always ask them,” she added. “What should we do to have our names on a building or on a street?”
‘What makes them who they are’
Mary Gaston has been teaching the course at Northridge since 2021. Several of her students, she said, ride past First African Baptist Church on the bus every day, but once they learn about the site’s significance, they take on a bigger appreciation for their surroundings.
Some even discovered that they had close ties to the Bloody Tuesday demonstrations, she said. One student realized his grandfather was in the Deacons for Defense, an armed African American self-defense group who protected Rogers during the march and the meetings leading up to it.
“The goal is for them to see that they’re valuable, especially in their own community and that their voices matter and they’re important,” she said of her students. “They really do have a strong desire to learn about who they are and what makes them who they are.”
Gaston was raised in Wilcox County, home of Gee’s Bend, a community formed by the descendents of enslaved people, and just a stone’s throw from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the fight for African American voting rights.
Gaston, who is white, didn’t know a lot about the area’s rich cultural history growing up. But she doesn’t shy away from sharing her experiences with the class.
Her mother grew up without running water and heat, she said, and dropped out of school when she was 16 to work. She eventually went back to school and got her master’s degree.
In her class, Gaston also talks about themes like class structures and intergenerational poverty. Those discussions have led some of her students, she said, to become the first in their families to pursue college.
“As an adult looking back, I definitely think that the way I grew up has a lot to do with the type of teacher that I am,” she said.
Find the ‘unsung trailblazers’
Teachers don’t always need a special course to incorporate more Black history into their classes, Wiggins and Gaston said.
They both incorporate lots of site visits and hands-on work in their courses. For Gaston, art projects can help students make meaningful connections to the material – “They blow my mind every single time,” she said.
And there are African American pioneers that can be taught in all core subjects, Wiggins said. But it’s important to dig and find those “unsung trailblazers.”
In her own course, she discusses barbershop owner Rev. Thomas Linton, Stillman student Maxie Thomas, library founder and civil rights worker Ruth Bolden, and some of the city’s first Black educators: Maude Whatley and Jeremiah Barnes.
“It can be something as innocent as looking at the building names in your own city and street names in your own city, and ponder on it,” she said. “Figure out who that person once was.”