The Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association was founded with a dual mission to organize mutual aid for its members and to pass federal pension legislation that would compensate every formerly enslaved person.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jesse Olsavsky. 2022. 294 pages.
Tells the story of how vigilance committees organized the Underground Railroad and revolutionized the abolitionist movement.
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Abolitionist John Brown was executed by the state of Virginia for leading the infamous Harpers Ferry Raid.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 9 pages.
Students are invited to solve a mystery, using historical clues, about the real story of the Draft Riots.
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The Ku Klux Klan bombed the home of labor and voting rights activists Harry T. Moore and Harriette Moore — killing them both. Harriette Moore taught elementary school, secretly teaching her students Black history in the face of bans by the state superintendent.
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White people attacked and killed many Black citizens who had organized for a Black sheriff to remain in office during the Vicksburg Massacre.
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Teaching Activity. By Mimi Eisen and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 47 pages.
A follow-up lesson to “Reconstructing the South,” using primary source documents to reveal key outcomes of the Reconstruction era.
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A Black labor organizer’s imprisoned for having “communist literature” was freed following a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Amy Nathan with Sarah Keys Evans, and illustrated by Jermaine Powell. 2025. 72 pages.
Chapter book about how Sarah Keys Evans was arrested at a North Carolina bus station in 1952 for not moving to the back of a bus. She went on to challenge the arrest in court.
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Joseph H. Rainey, from South Carolina, was the first African American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Justene Hill Edwards. 2024. 336 pages.
Following the Civil War, tens of thousands of the formerly enslaved deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank, but their trust was betrayed when the Freedman’s Bank collapsed within the decade.
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Benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress with Paul Robeson was held in Peekskill, New York.
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Aaron Henry (Mississippi state NAACP president, pharmacist, drugstore owner) and the Coahoma County NAACP organized an effective Christmas shopping boycott in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
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At 17 years old, Gary Tyler entered Louisiana State Prison — commonly known as Angola — as the state’s youngest Death Row prisoner and remained there for 41 years before gaining his freedom.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jelani Cobb. 2025. 496 pages.
Collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Gary Tyler with Ellen Bravo. 2025. 288 pages.
In the tradition of books by Albert Woodfox and Angela Davis, this memoir of a wrongful conviction and time spent on death row in Angola prison shows how incarcerated people care for each other and fight for justice.
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Vernon Dahmer was killed when the Ku Klux Klan fired bombed his home. This was one day after Dahmer offered to pay the election poll tax for anyone who could not afford it.
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Apply for a mini-grant to teach the 15th Amendment in 2020, the 150th anniversary of the Constitutional right to vote regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
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Book — Non-fiction. By Wallace Terry. 1985. 320 pages.
Oral histories of twenty Black veterans who tell their stories of being in the Vietnam War.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Kimberley Phillips Boehm. 2014. 360 pages.
Examines how Black people’s participation in the nation’s wars and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Steven W. Thrasher. 2026. 400 pages.
Explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions.
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White members of the Northern Student Movement broke off to form a new group that was soon called People Against Racism, which organized white people by creating suburban freedom schools, developing school curriculum, raising the alarm on “law and order” politics, and through other means.
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On its way to Washington, D.C., the Poor People’s Campaign was attacked by the police in Detroit.
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A group of African Americans presented a petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives.
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Belinda Sutton petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a pension as reparations for the wealth she produced and was stolen from her while she was enslaved.
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