In the News

Conservatives have made headway on censorship; since the fall of 2021, PEN America has tracked more than 4,000 efforts to ban books — including several by Zinn — dealing with race, gender identity, and sexuality from libraries and schoolrooms. . . . But progressives are also mobilizing and groups including the Zinn Education Project, Red, Wine and Blue, PEN America, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Library Association, and Honest Education Action and Leadership Together/Race Forward, are pushing back and organizing teach-ins, teacher trainings, and study groups in support of academic freedom and public education.

Make no mistake, our ancestors did fight back, from Day One, and to even hint that they didn’t plays into white supremacist-based beliefs and attitudes. Seriously, have these T-shirt makers never heard of Nat Turner? Granted, even before Florida’s most recent “anti-woke” efforts, Black history hasn’t exactly been taught well in the nation’s public schools. But at the very least, most of us learned about the 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, that resulted in as many as 65 white people being killed. [The] Zinn Education Project breaks down what was happening [in another example of Black resistance.]

At least 25 states have enacted laws that will make it easier to remove books from school libraries, ban certain lessons on race, gender and sexuality, and limit the rights of transgender students, according to a Washington Post analysis. On this edition of Your Call, we speak with teachers who are fighting back against Republican policies to ban books and whitewash US history. For the hour, we talk with teachers Ben Hodge in York, Pennsylvania, Adam Tritt in Melbourne, Florida, and Jesse Hagopian, with the Zinn Education Project, in Seattle, Washington about how they are fighting back against attempts to ban the teaching of true history in classrooms.

Today, Rinderle is believed to be the first teacher in Georgia to have been fired because of a trio of vaguely worded 2022 state laws that ban teachers from teaching “divisive concepts.” Georgia isn’t the only state censoring, even firing, teachers. Since 2021, 18 states have passed laws that restrict teaching about racism and sexism, according to Education Week, and 15 have laws restricting or banning discussion of LGBTQ+ people or issues, according to the Movement Advancement Project. “We’re at a point where there needs to be a collective response,” says Zinn Education Project co-director Deborah Menkart.

Judy Richardson, a civil rights veteran and film producer based in Maryland, spoke at a Teach Truth Day of Action hosted by the Zinn Education Project at the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. on June 10. The event, which featured marches and book swaps, aimed to counter book banning and censorship. Richardson handed out copies of a book she co-edited, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, as part of a contraband book drive. She said, in part, “Our book shows that regular folks really can organize to change the racist, anti-gay, anti-human conditions we face. [. . .]  if young people — children of color and white children — see themselves in this history — in Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and Julian Bond and Anne Braden and Betty Garman Robinson and Maria Varela — then they'll know that they can change things, too — just like the youth leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. That's why young people like Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Justin Jones and Justin Pearson and Ash-Lee Woodard and so many other young activists have grounded themselves in this history — the truth-telling history — and been energized by it.”

When elementary school teacher Katie Rinderle read aloud the international, best-selling children’s book My Shadow is Purple to her fifth grade gifted class at Due West Elementary School in Cobb County, Georgia, she never suspected that she was risking her 10-year career. Less than a month later, the Cobb County School District gave Rinderle the choice to resign or be terminated for violating the district’s policies. She refused to resign. On May 5, she was told she would be terminated by the district, and she was issued her official notice of termination on June 6. “Teachers are concerned that they will be subject to a complaint for simply teaching honestly about U.S. history,” said Deborah Menkart, executive director of Teaching for Change, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building social justice in the classroom and co-director of the Zinn Education Project.  

In this episode of Future Memory, a Monument Lab podcast, co-host Li Sumpter receives a history lesson from Jesse Hagopian, Seattle-based educator, activist, and die-hard advocate for antiracist education. He shares childhood memories that impacted his view of himself, his future path, and his role in the Black Freedom Struggle – a fight that has deep roots in Seattle and the very high school Jesse attended as a youth.  Jesse is an organizer with the Zinn Education Project, author of the upcoming book Teach Truth the Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Anti-racist Education and co-editor of the books Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice and Teaching for Black Lives.

In this episode of the Valley Labor Report — the only union talk radio show in Alabama — co-host Adam Keller talks to Greg, an Iowa educator, and Zinn Education Project co-director Deborah Menkart about the importance of teaching truth in the face of book bans and mounting attempts to suppress an inclusive history in classrooms.