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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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke in Philadelphia at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, urging African Americans to continue organizing for justice.
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Learn directly from people's historians by listening to these audio recordings of Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online classes.
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Book — Fiction. By Kelly McWilliams. 2023. 320 pages.
This young adult novel introduces readers to the history of slavery and its legacy today, challenging the Lost Cause narrative offered to visitors at most plantations (prison labor camps).
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Enslaved Africans carried out the first recorded rebellion against slavery in what would become the United States, rising up at the short-lived Spanish colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, located in what is now Georgia or South Carolina.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Clint Smith and adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul. 2025. 272 pages.
Takes readers to historical sites across America, exploring the legacy of slavery to help readers make sense of our nation's past and present, and be better stewards of their own future.
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Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech in opposition to the Vietnam War, calling for a “revolution of values.”
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Illinois congressman Arthur W. Mitchell was ordered to move to the Jim Crow car of the train once it entered Arkansas.
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The Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial effort to gain economic justice for poor people.
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College student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs (21) and high school student James Earl Green (17) were killed by the police during an anti-war protest at Jackson State College.
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Twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School were fired when they refused to sign an oath denying membership in the NAACP.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Martha S. Jones. 2018. 266 pages.
The story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses.
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Book — Historical Fiction. By Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jeffery Boston Weatherford. 2024. 208 pages.
A portrait of a Black family tree shaped by enslavement and freedom, rendered in poems and artwork.
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Teaching Activity. By Bob Peterson. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
How a 5th grade teacher and his students conducted research to answer the question: “Which presidents owned people?” Available in Spanish.
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Barbara Johns (16-years-old) led her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
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A camp warden and guards shot dead eight prisoners being held at the Anguilla Prison in Georgia. The Anguilla Prison Massacre Quilt Project tells that story, drawing on records from the NAACP.
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Bernice Johnson Reagon (October 4, 1942 – July 16, 2024) was a song leader, composer, scholar, and activist.
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Teaching Activity. By Jesse Hagopian. 2025. 38 pages.
This lesson explores major examples of laws passed to suppress Black education in the wake of major victories for the Black Freedom Struggle, highlighting the historical context and motivations behind these legislative efforts.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Joshua Clark Davis. 2025. 424 pages.
An examination of the civil rights struggle through its work against police violence — and a prehistory of both the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements that emerged half a century later.
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