Civil Rights Movements Archives - Zinn Education Project

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Book - Non-fiction. By Kate Masur. 2021. The history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War.

The First Rainbow Coalition

Film. Directed and produced by Ray Santisteban. Nantes Media LLC. 2019. 56 minutes. In this documentary, Chicago's Black Panther Party forms alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing.

Black Panther Party in the News and the Classroom

COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party are back in the headlines. Let’s also make sure to teach this critical history in our classrooms.

Kids on the March: 15 Stories of Speaking Out, Protesting, and Fighting for Justice

A history of children's activism in the United States, focusing on 20th and 21st-century marches, strikes, and social justice movements.\ Book - Non-fiction. By Michael Long. 2021. 204 pages.

Julian Bond and the Southern Civil Rights Movement: Focus on Georgia

Resources for students and educators from a class about Julian Bond and the long history of the Southern voting rights struggle, told through first-person accounts.

Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana

Book — Non-fiction. By Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards, and Nick Weldon. 2021. This Reconstruction history graphic novel tells the story of Oscar James Dunn, a New Orleanian who became the first Black lieutenant governor and acting governor in the United States.

Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Book - Non-fiction. By Julian Bond. Edited by Pam Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis with an afterword by Vann Newkirk II. 2021. 356 pp. For over two decades, civil rights activist Julian Bond taught a popular class on the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This book contains the wisdom and teachings from that class.

Separate No More: The Long Road to Brown v. Board of Education

Book - Non-fiction. By Lawrence Goldstone. 2021. A portrait of the road to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Book - Non-fiction. Edited by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Patterson. Introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman. 2021. This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century’s longest campaign for Black civil rights.

A Disability History of the United States

Book — Non-fiction. By Kim E. Nielsen. 2013. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, this is the first book to place the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative.

The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

When our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system, the electoral college, from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they have no clue why this is how we choose our president. More importantly, they develop a stunted sense of their own power — and little reason to believe they might have the potential to create something better.

Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order

Books - Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 1968. A cogent defense of civil disobedience.

The Southern Mystique

Book - Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 1964. In one of his earliest published works, Howard Zinn writes about his experiences teaching and organizing with the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

What Our Students Should Know About the Struggle for the Ballot — but Won’t Learn from Their Textbooks

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: Young Readers Edition

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.

The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis with Komozi Woodard. 352 pages. 2019. This important work shows how the Jim Crow North maintained inequality in the nation’s most liberal places, and chronicles how activists worked to undo those inequities born of Northern Jim Crow.

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

Book — Non-fiction. By Martha S. Jones. 2020. 352 pp. This book excavates the lives and work of Black women from the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond.

A New Lesson on Rosa Parks

Bill Bigelow wrote a lesson about Rosa Parks' long life of activism, inspired by Jeanne Theoharis's stories in the People's Historians Online series.

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

Book — Non-fiction. By Barbara Ransby. 2005. 495 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.

The Rebellious Lives of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. In this mixer lesson, students learn about Rosa Parks' many decades of activism by taking on roles from various times in her life. In this way, students learn about her radicalism before, during, and long after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Theme: Civil Rights Movements

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

The First Rainbow Coalition

Black Panther Party in the News and the Classroom

Kids on the March: 15 Stories of Speaking Out, Protesting, and Fighting for Justice

Julian Bond and the Southern Civil Rights Movement: Focus on Georgia

Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana

Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Separate No More: The Long Road to Brown v. Board of Education

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

A Disability History of the United States

The United States Is Not a Democracy. Stop Telling Students That It Is.

The Southern Mystique

What Our Students Should Know About the Struggle for the Ballot — but Won’t Learn from Their Textbooks

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: Young Readers Edition

The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

A New Lesson on Rosa Parks

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

The Rebellious Lives of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Stolen Justice: The Struggle for African American Voting Rights

How History Got the Rosa Parks Story Wrong

Rad American History A-Z: Movements and Moments That Demonstrate the Power of the People

One Person, No Vote (YA edition): How Not All Voters Are Treated Equally

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy