Bill Holiday
Witnesses to history
There could be no predicting the consequences of a 13-year-old junior high school student hearing a public address announcement stating that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. I was captivated by the images on television from Friday afternoon, Nov. 22, 1963, through the president's burial on Nov. 25. The haunting cadence of the funeral dirge is still with me now, 60 years later.
I began my classroom instruction of the Kennedy assassination during my first year as an educator in 1972, and I have taught the assassination for over 50 years. I've taught teachers and students alike in classes ranging from two or three days to a full-semester class at Brattleboro Union High School in 2006. I have made numerous presentations to historical societies, libraries, service organizations, a humanities council, and conferences.
BHS/BUHS athletes, girls’ tennis team named to Athletic Hall of Fame
Inductees’ ‘outstanding contributions have enriched the athletic programs and brought honor to the school’
The Brattleboro High School/Brattleboro Union High School Athletic Hall of Fame announces its creation and the induction of its class of 2021. All went through an official nominating process that culminated in their selection by the 10-member Hall of Fame Committee. According to the organization's website, “The purpose of...
‘The civil rights movement was won by people, not processes’
A teacher recalls an impromptu workshop by a civil rights leader who organized an event that set off a chain of events that led to landmark federal civil rights legislation — the same civil rights leader who was openly abusive to his wife and who would soon be charged and convicted of incest. In 2021, what do we make of this complicated legacy?
As a minister and a leader of the civil rights movement, Rev. James Bevel initiated, strategized, directed, and developed two of the major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Campaign. In 1963, Birmingham's Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth had invited Rev.
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‘He took away the fear’
I met Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth in 2004 at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where he was a featured speaker in an interactive field study, “Alabama's role in the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” The Alabama Humanities Foundation invited K-12 educators from across the country to participate in this intensive institute, which featured lectures by scholars, interactions with leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, travel to key sites dedicated to the preservation of civil rights history in Birmingham,
‘A lot of people didn’t know that Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to give up her seat’
(1)Many school systems in the United States begin their instruction of what is called the modern civil rights movement with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. A few will go back as far as the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case in order to establish an identity and setting for the modern civil rights movement. Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but...
‘If everybody walks, nobody fails’
Janice Wesley Kelsey was 16 years old during the spring of 1963 when she became involved in the civil rights movement. Her motivation to join the movement had nothing to do with civil rights. Kelsey had a friend whose mother was involved in the movement. This was before there were latchkey kids, so when her friend's mother went to the movement, her friend had to go to the movement, too. That friend would come back to school talking about the...
Help us honor Vermont’s Civil War soldiers
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War in the United States. On the grounds where Brattleboro Union High School and Brattleboro Area Middle School now stand, more than 10,000 of Vermont's soldiers were mustered into service, and more than 4,600 veterans of the war were mustered out. The site was also home to a field hospital. In 1906, a large monument honoring the men who passed through Brattleboro in service to the Union cause...