| Zinn Education Project

The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World

Book - Non-Fiction. By Dave Zirin. 2021. A book about the politics of sport, and the impact of sports on politics, reveals that essential dimension of the new movement for racial justice in the United States.

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People

Book - Non-Fiction. By Kekla Magoon. 2021. An account of militant revolutionaries and human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.

More than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don’t Learn About from Their Textbooks

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

In legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are introducing bills to curtail what educators — in public schools and universities — can say and teach about racism and sexism. This latest moral panic from the Right comes on the heels of recent legislation dangerously curtailing the rights of transgender people — especially young people — and enacting another round of voter suppression. It is paramount that we organize to defeat these threats to the health and safety of LGBTQ people, voting rights, and the freedom of educators to tell the truth. It is also worth reminding ourselves — and our students — of other times in U.S. history when powerful politicians manufactured threats and whipped up fear to neutralize progressive challenges to the status quo — the McCarthy Era being a well-known high-water mark of state repression.

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

Book - Non-Fiction. By Elizabeth Hinton. 2021. The rebellion and movement for Black lives of 2020 had clear precursors, this book explains, and any attempt to understand that crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

When South African Apartheid Was Overthrown: Lessons for the Movement for Black Lives Today

In this online class, Gerald Lenoir and Jesse Hagopian discussed the history of the anti-Apartheid (SA) movement and how it is relevant to students' lives and the movement for Black lives today.

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

Book - Non-fiction. By Kate Masur. 2021. The movement for equal rights 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.