The Myth-Busting History of Edna Griffin
Lesson by Katy Swalwell and Jennifer Gallagher
While we often associate activists with one struggle — such as voting rights, housing, education, or transportation — there are countless people who were active all their lives and engaged in multiple struggles around multiple issues. We share the story of Edna Griffin from Iowa as one example. Students could research the lives of many others, such as Katherine Johnson, Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, Rayford Logan, Paul Robeson, and Anne Braden. They could also examine stories of contemporary activists in their community and nationally.
For the past several years, we have been teaching an elementary social studies methods course at Iowa State University in which the vast majority of our teacher candidates came from small towns in Iowa. Because the U.S. Civil Rights Movement was one of the few social studies topics that many of them remembered learning in elementary school, and because it seemed to provide a good opportunity for them to make multicultural connections in the curriculum, our candidates often expressed excitement about teaching this content to their future students. What we quickly learned, however, was that their understanding of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement frequently reinforced a traditional (and problematic) narrative. Their general idea of the history went something like this: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, which took place in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, won legislative victories that helped to end racism thanks to universally beloved leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
Edna Griffin served in the Women’s Army Corps at Fort Des Moines during WWII. Source: Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center
As this book and other resources so powerfully demonstrate, we know that this traditional narrative is simply not true. First, many important events also occurred throughout the North, where deep oppression existed and persisted due to the actions of individuals and institutions from the nation’s earliest days — oppression that continues today. Second, while landmark legislation and court decisions have indicated some progress in many cases, these often had more symbolic value without any kind of enforcement or corresponding cultural shift in norms and beliefs. Third, any successes the movement’s national figures did enjoy could not have taken place without the thousands of “ordinary” people operating at the local and regional level. Their activism, in concert with organizations, employed creative and courageous acts of resistance that pushed for change. Importantly, there was not universal support for these efforts, nor was there consensus about how best to move forward.
Beyond being simply false, the traditional narrative of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement also works to prevent people from being aware of and responsive to current oppression (Kohl, 1991). For example, when Northerners, especially those who are white, believe racism is a Southern problem, then it is much more difficult for them to be aware of and respond to the racist practices and structures in their midst. The same is true if they believe that problems were resolved in 1968 or that the efforts of activists during the 1950s and 1960s were widely celebrated and supported. For those of us who want to become involved in social movements, it is essential that we understand how it takes years and even generations of work with others to make change — and that, within those organized efforts, there will be disagreement and uncertainty about which strategies are best. Not knowing how messy social movements are, how important grassroots leadership is, or how slow and unsteady progress can be gives the false impression that it should be easy to do this work or that there is something uniquely complicated about today’s circumstances that makes our efforts an inevitable failure and a waste of time. Ultimately, an understanding of the complexity in the past equips us to be more effective activists today.
Because we were concerned that our well-intentioned teacher candidates would likely perpetuate the traditional narrative without opportunities to identify and critique it, we developed this lesson that explores the life of Edna Griffin as a counter to the traditional narrative. This short activity prompts students’ critical thinking about the myths of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, why they persist, and why we should disrupt them.
The case of Edna Griffin is particularly compelling because there are so many connections to make with each of the traditional narrative myths our teacher candidates held. Born in Kentucky in 1909, Griffin was a longtime activist who grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods in New Hampshire and Massachusetts before attending Fisk University, where she studied sociology, protested Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and supported a teachers’ strike. In the 1940s, she moved to Des Moines, Iowa so that her husband could attend medical school. She served in the Women’s Army Corps at Fort Des Moines during World War II. Later, she became a leader in the Iowa Progressive Party and the local chapter of the Communist Party. She helped end racial discrimination at Katz Drug Store in Des Moines — a local business known for not serving African Americans that refused to serve Edna and two other African Americans ice cream in 1948.
Edna Griffin. Source: University of Iowa Libraries.
Though they denied doing so during trial, the group’s intention was to use their lawsuit as a test case. Their victory set precedent several years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott and spurred the enforcement of Iowa’s 1884 Civil Rights Act — though the actual practices of Katz Drug Store did not change until the business felt the economic effects of pickets, boycotts, and sit-ins that Edna helped to coordinate.
One of the tactics that her lawyer used was to emphasize the fact that she was a well-educated, upper-middle-class WWII veteran and mother of young children — despite her radical politics, close associations with working-class people, and active community involvement that defied traditional gender norms. Edna also strategically drew upon broad language of democratic ideals that appealed to moderate whites who had supported America’s antifascist efforts during World War II. Through her organizing of the purposefully multiracial, multireligious, multipolitical party Committee to End Jim Crow at Katz she linked the direct action of more radical groups to the work more relatively moderate organizations like the NAACP had been doing in the Iowa courts.
The FBI kept a file on Edna Griffin for 17 years as part of COINTELPRO, a covert and often illegal surveillance program intended to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt progressive domestic political organizations. This is one of the materials provided in the lesson for students to examine.
For decades after the Katz case, Edna was deeply involved in fighting against continued discrimination in business services and housing, racial profiling by the police of African American men, and racist hiring practices. She sought to link these local issues with national efforts by founding a chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality, planning a march of 2,000 Iowans to honor the four children killed in the Birmingham bombing, and traveling with other Iowans to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
She was active in a variety of groups, including the ACLU and League of Women Voters; she helped to organize a labor union; and she was a frequent contributor to the Iowa Bystander, the longest running African American newspaper in the country.
She was also active in antiwar efforts throughout her life — petitioning to outlaw the atomic bomb, protesting the Korean War, and getting arrested when she was 75 for sitting in the middle of the highway to stop nuclear warheads from being shipped to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. These efforts garnered the attention of the FBI, which kept a file on her for 17 years as part of COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram), a covert and often illegal surveillance program intended to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt left-leaning domestic political organizations. After Edna passed away in 2000, her legacy is remembered through ongoing activism in Iowa as well as the naming of the Edna Griffin Bridge and the Edna Griffin Building in Des Moines — though from our experience, her contributions to the state have been visibly absent from Iowa social studies curriculum.
Edna Griffin’s life work thus provides a powerful counternarrative to the traditional framing of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. She was a woman living in the North who used court cases, boycotts, sit-ins, and protests to improve her community starting well before 1954. She linked these efforts to broader national organizations and figures — and knew the importance of grassroots activism that would take years of dedicated, continuous struggle to see any change. She was known for building alliances across a variety of social groups and organizations that could otherwise be in tension with one another. Through her decades of activism, she strategically employed a range of tactics from radical direct action to more moderate approaches rooted in a politics of respectability. She also made connections between racism and other social concerns like war, labor struggles, education, and criminal justice.
Griffin spent much of the rest of her life as a labor union, anti-war, and racial justice activist.
The FBI kept a file on Edna Griffin for 17 years as part of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), a covert and often illegal surveillance program intended to infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt left-leaning domestic political organizations. Griffin passed away in 2000.
Grade Level: 5–12. This lesson works best with students whose previous social studies education has exposed them to the traditional narrative of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Time Required: One to two class periods
Guiding Questions
How does the life of Edna Griffin challenge the traditional narrative of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement?
What is the traditional narrative of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement?
Why does the traditional narrative persist?
What are the consequences of the traditional narrative?
What are counterclaims to the myths of the traditional narrative?
How does the history of Edna Griffin provide evidence of counterclaims?
Objectives
Students will be able to create claims of counternarratives to the traditional narrative of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Students will be able to provide evidence from the life of Edna Griffin that supports their counterclaims.
Students will be able to identify ways in which the traditional narrative helps to perpetuate the racist status quo.
Materials
Unpacking the Traditional Narrative of the Civil Rights Movement in a Story Map of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
The Myth-Busting History of Edna Griffin Graphic Organizer
Edna Griffin Dossier (Resources 1–13)
Key Ideas for Educators