On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance

Lesson. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom following the Civil War. It’s followed by a chapter from the book Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution.

Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez and Nqobile Mthethwa. 25 pages.
A mixer role play explores the connections between different social movements during Reconstruction.

To facilitate bringing the Seizing Freedom podcast to the classroom, we are sharing teaching ideas for selected episodes, beginning with “A Powerful Black Hand.”

Podcast. Written and hosted by Kidada E. Williams. 2021.
A Black history podcast tells stories “drawn from archives of voices from American history that have been muted time and time again.”

Digital collection. Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedman and Abandoned Lands, including new and unpublished records that document the formerly enslaved, freedpersons and their descendants.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established within the War Department to undertake the relief effort and social reconstruction after the Civil War.

The first “Redeemer” government is established in Tennessee after conservatives gain control of the state’s General Assembly, ushering in an era of Jim Crow segregation laws.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the third of the Enforcement Acts, a Reconstruction-era bill that empowered the federal government to intervene when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are violated.