Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Black educator, baseball player, and civil rights activist Octavius V. Catto was murdered by a white supremacist on election day.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A companion lesson to the Eyes on the Prize segment on school desegregation.
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Born on this day, Ella Baker was a civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s whose career spanned more than five decades.
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Harriet Tubman planned and guided a significant armed raid (becoming the first woman to do so in the Civil War) against Confederate forces, supply depots, and plantations along the Combahee River in coastal South Carolina.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech titled “The Other America” focusing on economic inequalities and white complicity in the North.
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent four volunteers to Rock Hill, South Carolina to sit-in.
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Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, was murdered. The death of Martin and acquittal of the man who shot him sparked the national and global Movement for Black Lives.
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Two hundred and eighty one Africans aboard The Antelope ship were brought to Savannah by the U.S. Treasury.
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While politicians debated the implications of taking down the Confederate flag after the white supremacist murder of nine African Americans at Emmanuel AME Church, Bree Newsome scaled the South Carolina state flag pole and took the flag down.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Barbara Ransby. 2024 (Second Edition). 512 pages.
This biography chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
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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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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. 3 pages.
This timeline activity builds on students’ viewing of the 2022 film, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, and involves collaborating on a new timeline of Mrs. Parks' life.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
A high school social studies teacher describes a classroom simulation where students experience the effects of decades of racist federal housing policies.
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The Columbia Uprising took place in Columbia, Tennessee on February 26, 1946, when Black residents collectively defended themselves against rioting police officers and local white supremacist militants.
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Teaching Activity. By Jessica A. Rucker. 2021. Rethinking Schools.
A high school teacher and her students question “Who owns and controls hip-hop?” — and put the hip-hop industry on trial.
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Teaching Activity. By Gretchen Kraig-Turner. 2024. Rethinking Schools.
A high school science teacher revises her lesson on the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee to center resistance.
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Paul Cuffee and other free Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to give African and Native Americans the right to vote.
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Isaac Woodard Jr., a Black army sergeant, was beaten and left blind in both eyes by white police officers within hours of being discharged from the army.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Henry Adams. 2026. 286 pages.
The testimony of Henry Adams, who traveled to the nation's capital to tell an unforgettable story of violence, resistance, and social action in the post-Civil War South.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jeanne Theoharis and Brandy Colbert. 2021.
This biography of Rosa Parks accessibly examines her six decades of activism, challenging young readers’ perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Teaching Activity. By Alma Anderson McDonald.
A teacher looks back on her childhood to discover the meaning of environmental racism. Linda Christensen offers ways to teach about this story with students.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Kellie Carter Jackson. 2026. 304 pages.
A reframing of the past and present of Black resistance — both nonviolent and violent — to white supremacy.
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In the summer of 2026, the Zinn Education Project will host and facilitate a Teaching for Black Lives study group for educators across the United States.
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Book — Non-fiction. By bell hooks. 2014. 206 pages.
Examines the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of Black womanhood, Black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the Black woman’s involvement with feminism.
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 20 pages.
Teaching about racist patterns of murder, theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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