Theme: African American

African American

The Color Line

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 6 pages.
A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.
Teaching Activity by Bill Bigelow
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Echoes of Enslavement

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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Rosa Parks and Ericka Huggins at a Black Panther Party free breakfast program.

Framing Black Power Through the Life of Rosa Parks

Teaching Activity. By Tiffany Mitchell Patterson and Jessica Rucker.
In this lesson, students explore the core ideas of Black Power through a gallery walk with images and quotes connected to the life of Rosa Parks, and then consider how to define Rosa Parks’s activism.
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How We Remember: The Struggle Over Slavery in Public Spaces

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Cierra Kaler-Jones, Ana Rosado, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students read about sites of memory in How the Word Is Passed and imagine how to commemorate what occurred there. They then compare that to how the respective site is currently commemorated and described by docents.
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Teaching A People’s History of the March on Washington

Teaching Activity. By Jessica Lovaas and Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools. 2021. Updated in 2023.
A lesson with case studies from Los Angeles; Birmingham, Alabama; Brooklyn; Detroit; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Albany, Georgia; and Cambridge, Maryland — to introduce students to the diverse struggles across the United States that were represented at the March on Washington.
Teaching Activity by Adam Sanchez
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A Black Women’s History of the United States

Book — Non-fiction. By Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross. 2020. 288 pages.
A history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are — and have always been — instrumental in shaping our country.
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Detail of book cover showing Black laborers and families walking down a dirt road.

Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class

Book — Non-fiction. By Blair L. M. Kelley. 2023. 352 pages.
This book uses personal narratives to highlight the community and networks of resistance that Black laborers built in the face of racism and segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Teaching for Black Lives (Book) Zinn Education Project

Teaching for Black Lives

Teaching Guide. Edited by Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au. 2018. Rethinking Schools. 368 pages.
Essays, teaching activities, role plays, poems, and artwork, designed to illuminate the movement for Black students' lives, the school-to-prison-pipeline, Black history, gentrification, intersectional Black identities, and more.
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How to Make Amends: A Lesson on Reparations

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Alex Stegner, Chris Buehler, Angela DiPasquale, and Tom McKenna.
Students meet dozens of advocates and recipients of reparations from a variety of historical eras to grapple with the possibility of reparations now and in the future.
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How Should Rosa Parks’s Legacy Be Memorialized?

This lesson by Cierra Kaler-Jones invites students to consider how Rosa Parks’ legacy is memorialized by critically examining her statue at the U.S. Capitol. Students learn the fuller story of Rosa Parks’ life and use that information to determine how they would memorialize her legacy.
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