Standing Up

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
Writing activity for students to complete the narrative of women workers striking at a glove-making factory, exploring possible outcomes.

Teaching Activity. By Dale Weiss. Rethinking Schools. 3 pages.
A teacher’s reflections about a curriculum unit on women’s rights contextualizes the history of the feminist movement within the broader struggle of people working for greater equality in the United States.

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 7 pages.
This lesson teaches some of the nuts and bolts of labor unions and then moves beyond to ask students to consider what rights they have at work, and to recognize that “rights” depend in large part on what people have fought for and won.

Book — Fiction. By Katherine Paterson. 1995. 192 pages.
A young girl works in the mills and gets involved in labor activism.

Book — Historical fiction. By Lynn Rubright. 2008. 89 pages.
Historical fiction inspired by incidents in the early life of sharecropper Owen Whitfield, the organizer of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Book — Fiction. By Harriette Gillem Robinet. 2003. 142 pages.
Historical fiction chapter book on the Haymarket labor struggles and massacre.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched in New York.

Italian-born immigrants, workers, and anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Boston, Massachusetts.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act was signed into law after years of struggle and grassroots organizing.

Brazil’s military police gunned down 19 peasant farm workers in the Via Campesina movement who were marching for land sovereignty in 1996.

During a Spring filled with pro-immigrant activism, on this day the largest number of people gathered in over 100 cities in the United States to protest new anti-immigrant legislation.