11.7 World War II and Movements for Equality

This inquiry set is designed to introduce eleventh-grade students to the ways in which World War II served to advance movements for equality. Historians regard the war effort as an important turning point for the modern civil rights movements because of the demographic, economic, and ideological transformations that took place during that era. The documents in this collection span a variety of ethnic, racial, national, and gender perspectives. While they focus most heavily on California’s centrality on the home front of the war effort, the documents do address the national context through legal, political, and military policy. The explanations for students and teachers are longer in this inquiry set than in other sets, because many of the primary sources are photographs that can help engage students. However, in order for students to understand the historical significance of the sources, they must learn about the context behind the images and how these documents portray important moments in the war effort and the communities represented by the documents.

Sources 1 and 2 depict ways in which women participated in the war effort, both as members of the armed services and as workers. World War II famously brought married women into the workforce in numbers never seen before. Although the intent of the Rosie the Riveter campaign was for female workers to temporarily fill job vacancies, World War II helped advance the overall numbers and percentages of all women working outside the home for wages.

Sources 3 and 4 focus on Japanese Internment and a dissenting opinion in the Korematsu case. Japanese internment certainly demonstrated the limitation of the allied claim to participation in the war on behalf of human rights, but the ways in which Japanese Americans experienced internment, and its effects, highlights how this community experienced World War II.

Sources 5 through 8 focus on the ways in which African American men and women experienced the war through the lenses of work, military service, and the famed Double Victory Campaign, which sought to fight for victory abroad against fascists and at home against racists.

Sources 9 through 11 depict how the ethnic Mexican community experienced the war effort through the Bracero Program, and through civil rights.

Collectively, these primary sources can help provide students with a foundation to explore not just how the war fundamentally transformed America’s role in the world, but also how the war transformed communities.

A visual literacy activity is also central to students’ investigation into the sources in this collection. There is a visual literacy frame and step-by-step instructions for teachers to guide students as they explore the literal and also the artistic elements of many of these documents. While the activity uses the Source 7 NAACP poster as the model, this activity may be replicated for students to engage with a number of sources in this collection. Deceptively simple for what they display and how they appeal to students, visual sources can be challenging for students to discern meaning; this activity can be a useful frame as students practice analyzing visual sources alongside text-based documents.

This literacy strategy helps students to interpret Source 7, a poster advertising a July 1944 conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading civil rights organization. The strategy engages students in a multimodal (visual and textual) analysis of the flyer, through which they will practice noticing various types of text details and discuss how they work together rhetorically to create a call to action.

Directions

1. Provide context. This literacy lesson will have students working collaboratively to figure out the meaning of various pieces of the poster. Because students will improve their multimodal literacy skills by engaging in this effort, less context may be more here. For example, even if students are not already familiar with the NAACP, the poster includes the full name (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), from which students should be able to determine enough of its purpose to understand the goals of the poster. It may be enough, initially, to simply tell students that these posters appeared in 1944 and have them briefly summarize what they know about what was happening in the country in 1944. Teachers may find they need to provide context as they go if, for example, students are not familiar with the concept of Jim Crow or if they are unable to recognize the Japanese Rising Sun or Nazi flags.

2. Interpret and discuss text. Use the Student Handout to guide students in a multimodal analysis of some of the components of the poster and how they work together to create a call to action. The handout asks students to consider three components of text: language, image, and text features (placement, bold type, capitalization, etc.).

Briefly explain and/or model each component of the worksheet so students have a sense of what to pay attention to for each part.

Give students time in pairs or small groups to talk through some responses to the prompts in each part and take notes as needed. (A pair or small group structure works best here to provide opportunities for verbal processing and collaborative inquiry while engaging as many students as possible in the task.)

Have students share out some of their observations for each section. Keep a class list on the board and add to it as needed. (See handout key for ideas.) As students share observations of what they notice (about image, text features, or language), push the class to think about why the authors of the poster might have made these choices and how they work together with one another. (See handout key for ideas.) After analyzing the three separate components, ask students to consider the last set of questions: What do you think are the goals of this poster? What message is the NAACP trying to send? Who might be the audience? You may choose to talk through these ideas as a class or in small groups before asking students to write individually, depending on how the class conversation has gone.

3. Extend the learning. To connect with current events and/or student experience, and to provide more opportunities for reading multimodal texts, writing, and speaking, consider these follow-up activities:

Using the same framework of looking at images, text features, and language, analyze some more current calls to action that contain a visual component (in the form of flyers, protest posters, web pages, etc.) about school, community, or national issues relevant to students’ lives. How are the techniques similar or different from those used in the 1944 poster’s call to action, “Come, let us take counsel together!”?

For practice with multimodal writing, have students collaboratively draft their own call-to-action flyers or posters about a national issue related to equality that they are interested in. For extra speaking practice, ask them to present and discuss their rhetorical choices.

Handouts

11.7 World War II and Movements for Equality Student Handout

11.7 World War II and Movements for Equality Teacher Key

• The Library of Congress. The Library of Congress’ Primary Source Analysis Tool supports an inquiry model of instruction by asking students to first observe, then reflect, then question. Their customizable tool includes specific prompts for student interrogation of books and other printed materials, maps, oral recordings, photographs and paintings, and many other types of primary sources.
• The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). NARA has developed a vast collection of document analysis worksheets, ready for classroom use. Their website offers teachers a wide collection of customizable tools – appropriate for working with photographs, maps, written documents, and more. NARA has also customized their tools to meet the needs of young learners, and intermediate or secondary students.

internment, xenophobia, racial violence