Prof. Grace Leslie (AAAS) began her lecture with the iconic face of Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most famous figure of the civil rights movement. However, she did not begin by quoting his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Instead she drew attention to the controversy surrounding a quotation by Dr. King that the committee in charge of his memorial altered. It was still included on his memorial statue in Washington, DC. To celebrate Black History Month, the Black Student Organization sponsored a lecture Feb. 2 in the International Cultural Center to commemorate the civil rights movement.

The night's only speaker, Leslie spoke about the disparity between the reality of events of the civil rights era, how it is taught in classrooms today and why this matters. She first presented this lecture to her class, "The Civil Rights Movement," last semester. Due to the class's popularity and student support, she presented her lecture to an enthusiastic audience.

Throughout her class last semester, she returned to the same questions with her students, including "Why do we tell the history of the civil rights movement the way we do, why do we remember certain people so clearly at certain moments and not at all others, [and] why do we forget some people completely?"

Her lecture and class on the civil rights movement seek not to necessarily instantly find the answers to all of these questions but to investigate the past in order to redefine our present knowledge. "What are the real life consequences of our somewhat distorted memory of the civil rights movement, and how does that continue to echo into our present?" Leslie asked.

Leslie introduced three symbols of the Civil Rights Movement that she believes are the most important, beginning with the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools.

While most classrooms focus entirely on the positive implications of the Supreme Court decision, Leslie chose to explore the complicated history behind the case. She described that taking action in dismantling the "separate but equal" laws required "taking life in your own hands. … It was more of an opening shot in a coming battle opposed to the end of the war," she said.

Leslie also discussed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the product of Rosa Parks' resistance against daily discrimination towards African Americans on the Montgomery bus system. "The story is that she sat there and she was on the bus and she was tired. Rosa Parks was tired, but she wasn't tired from a day's work. She was tired from a lifelong work of activism. Decades of hard, often thankless and dangerous civil rights work." Leslie focused on the rarely covered details that surrounded Parks' struggle for civil rights. She reminded us that Parks' defiance had been similarly demonstrated years before.

Leslie exposed the controversial decision of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to choose Parks as their figure of civil rights instead of Claudette Colvin, who "wasn't married, was pregnant and from the wrong side of the tracks," she said. The NAACP believed her background would cause them to lose their court case, so they waited for another incident of discrimination, Rosa Parks', before they presented their case to the Supreme Court. Leslie stressed that while Parks was the preferred story, there were other examples of defiance that were not deemed respectable because of the individuals' backgrounds.

The last symbol of the civil rights movement she chose to speak of concerned Bayard Rustin, a little-known civil rights leader who taught Dr. King about Gandhi's pacifist beliefs, but whose credibility diminished after his homosexuality was announced. "In the Cold War, United States homosexuality was not only seen as perverted, but homosexuality was seen as a gateway to Communism," she said. His community consequently excluded him and only the well-respected civil rights leader that acknowledged him was A. Philip Randolph. He asked Rustin to organize the legendary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Despite his overwhelming success as deputy organizer, Leslie acknowledged that he is often ignored in classrooms because of his controversial history.

Students found her lecture to be eye-opening and said that their once-positive understanding of the civil rights movement had now changed, as they considered the new aspects mentioned in the speech. They agreed that rather than relying on well-known events, it is better to consider the era as a whole, from all points of view.