Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin and Jeanne Theoharis. 6 pages.
This lesson expands students’ knowledge of how Black Montgomery secured a victory in the 1955–56 bus boycott by asking them to pay close attention to activists’ tactics — and what they did as white resistance mounted.
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Teaching Activity. By Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 7 pages.
In this activity, students investigate Rosa Parks’ activism — and the gender and racial injustice to which it was a response — before and after her famous bus refusal.
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Famed civil rights lawyer and politician Z. Alexander Looby’s North Nashville home was dynamited in an assassination attempt.
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Black leaders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana formed the United Defense League (UDL) to protest bus segregation and persuaded thousands of Black residents to boycott buses until an agreed upon compromise was met.
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The popular, educational Bell Laboratories Science series aired a new chapter in the series on prime-time television which warned that CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel use could warm the earth to a degree that melts the polar ice caps and creates a catastrophic rise in sea levels.
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Led by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), sugar workers on 33 of Hawai’i’s 34 plantations went on strike, which lasted almost three months and led to substantial improvements in pay, housing, and working conditions.
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In an act of civil disobedience against the whites-only Greenville County Public Library, eight young Black people entered the library, began reading, and were subsequently arrested. They became known as the Greenville Eight, and the library finally desegregated months later after many legal battles.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Terry Catasús Jennings and Rosita Stevens-Holsey, illustrated by Ashanti Fortson. 2022. 288 pages.
A biography of Pauli Murray, a queer civil rights and women’s rights activist who fought in the trenches for many of the rights we now take for granted.
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One Sunday in September of 1950, dozens of African American children marching down the main street of Old Fort carrying signs saying, “We Want Our School Back” and “What Happened to Our School.”
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In attempt to end segregation at the William R. McKenney Central Library in Petersburg, Virginia, a group of African American students held a sit-in.
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The “Marching Mothers” of Hillsboro sued the school district and began daily marches to desegregate elementary schools in this town in Ohio.
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Film. Directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. Media Education Foundation. 2016. Three versions: 21 min./45 min./84 min.
This film helps students recognize how the media and politicians consistently frame “Palestinian resistance as terrorism and Israeli aggression as self-defense.”
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Book — Non-fiction. By Wesley C. Hogan. 2019. 368 pages.
This comprehensive collection documents and assesses young people’s interventions in the fight for democracy in the United States.
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