Picture Books. By Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Charly Palmer. 2022. 64 pages. This critical civil rights book for middle-graders examines the little-known Tennessee's Fayette County Tent City Movement in the late 1950s and reveals what is possible when people unite and fight for the right to vote.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace. 2021. 144 pages. Scipio Africanus Jones — a self-taught attorney who was born enslaved — leads a momentous series of court cases to save twelve Black men who'd been unjustly sentenced to death.
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Book - Fiction. By Michelle Coles. 2021. 368 pages.
A powerful coming-of-age story and an eye-opening exploration of the Reconstruction era.
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Books - Fiction. By Jewell Parker Rhodes. 2021. 256 pages.
A powerful coming-of-age survival tale exploring issues of race, class, and climate change.
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On Veterans Day, we share a collection of stories about African American veterans who fought in various wars and upon their return to the U.S., were murdered in the fight for democracy and human rights. We also share resources for teaching about the veterans who speak out against war.
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Books - Non-fiction. By Katie McCabe and Jabari Asim. 2020. 208 pages.
A young reader's adaptation of Mighty Justice: My Life in Civil Rights, the memoir of activist and trailblazer Dovey Johnson Roundtree.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Brandy Colbert. 216 pp. 2021.
History of Oklahoma including Trail of Tears, Reconstruction, Black towns, Red Summer, Jim Crow, Black and white newspapers, lynchings, Tulsa Race Massacre, and the ongoing fight for reparations and historical memory.
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Books - Non-fiction. By Jeff Chang and Davey D Cook. 2021. 352 pages.
An essential guide for understanding hip-hop music and culture.
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Teaching Activity. By Cierra Kaler-Jones.
In this lesson, students use key excerpts from How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith as inspiration for a project where they tell their and their loved ones’ stories.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Cierra Kaler-Jones, Ana Rosado, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In the lesson, students receive facts about each of the sites of memory in How the Word Is Passed and imagine how they might choose commemorate what occurred there. They then compare that to how the respective site is commemorated and described by docents.
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Juneteenth — June 19th, also known as Emancipation Day — is one of the commemorations of people seizing their freedom from slavery in the United States. Yet, if the right wing has its way, it will be illegal to teach students about Juneteenth.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Jarvis R. Givens. 2021. 320 pages.
Details the long assault on Black education that occurred from the period of enslavement through the life of one of the founders of the Black studies tradition, Carter G. Woodson.
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Book - Non-Fiction. By Kekla Magoon. 2021.
An account of militant revolutionaries and human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state — discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting — in this lesson based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.
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Book - Non-Fiction. By Elizabeth Hinton. 2021. The rebellion and movement for Black lives of 2020 had clear precursors, this book explains, and any attempt to understand that crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.
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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."
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Book - Non-fiction. By Rebecca Hall. Illustrated by Hugo Martinez. 2021
Rebecca Hall documents the process of her own research -- and what she learned -- about women who organized to challenge slavery. In graphic novel format.
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Teaching ideas and discussion questions for How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Mia Bay. 2021.
From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, this book explores racial restrictions on transportation and resistance to the injustice.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Kate Masur. 2021.
The movement for equal rights in the decades before the Civil War.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Tera W. Hunter. 1998. An examination of post-Civil War lives of African American women, focusing on their labor organizing, leisure, hope, and struggle.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Carter G. Woodson. 1933. Originally released in 1933, The Mis-Education of the Negro continues to resonate today, raising questions about the legacy of slavery and enduring white supremacy.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Vanessa Siddle Walker. 2018. This history tells the little-known story of how black educators in the South laid the groundwork for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and weathered its aftermath.
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COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party are back in the headlines. Let’s also make sure to teach this critical history in our classrooms.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy. Told from the perspective of Jo Ann Allen, this book tells the story of twelve Black students who integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee in 1956.
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