Educational Media Reviews Online

In The Pass It On Project, the ultimate Civil Rights Movement road trip doc, two industrious teachers take their Brooklynite junior high school students on an epic tour of the American South. Their mission, first and foremost, is to frame President Obama’s landmark victory in supposedly “post-racial” America within the context of the nation’s decidedly racist past. Educators will delight at the informative, inspiring and haunting images of the sites and sounds of the Movement included in the film, from the Woolworth sit-ins, to the Lorraine Motel, to Selma, to Birmingham as well as the unique intimate meetings we are privy to with activists and scholars, from the Rev. Samuel Kyles to Representative John Lewis to the unforgettably wonderful Joanne Bland. The students in the film, however, quickly grow road weary. Unresolved conflicts between two male students actually come to blows (ironically enough, right before their visit to The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change) and again, later, over which TV channel to watch. Some of their classmates seem to have moments of mortifying lazy brattiness, running late, begging to take breaks and lamenting the lack of Doritos. This is clearly demoralizing to the teachers, who cannot be blamed for hiding in their hotel room one night, drinking beer while questioning their career choices. The teachers, do, however, expertly channel the instance of physical violence into a lesson on how the Movement’s foundation in non-violence applies to issues facing youth today, and seem to successfully deliver their charges back home, each transformed by their experience.

The film unfortunately misses the opportunity to highlight the fascinatingly “dream fulfilled”-like quality of the students’ behavioral issues. A 14-year old girl drinking from a ‘colored’ water fountain in the segregated South could have only dreamed of two young, white female teachers safely leading an entire busload of students down the same roads Viola Liuzzo drove before her murder, engaged in active learning, with only mundane adolescent goofiness impeding their learning. So while there is a dramatic build up around the students failing to fully appreciate all the resources made available to them, there is no acknowledgement of the fact that this failure on the part of the students is exactly the mechanism of judgment—on the content of their character—that Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned.

This film is recommended for how effectively it passes on, or makes accessible, the resources that most students of the Civil Rights Movement—children and adults alike—would love to see first-hand. The institutions, displays and knowledgeable scholars they visit are a testament to how effectively artifacts from the Civil Rights Movement have preserved and made available to future generations in a meaningful way. Teachers may want to evaluate how much of the content related to the students behavior they would like to include in the classroom. The film would also seem to lend itself easily to inclusion in education courses at the college and university level, as well as in credential programs, not only because of the challenges faced by the teachers, but also because of the groundbreaking and innovative nature of their instructional project.