- Zinn Education Project

How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools.
The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.

Teaching Activity by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Stealing Home: Eminent Domain, Urban Renewal, and the Loss of Community

Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 9 pages.
Teaching about patterns of displacement and wealth inequality through the history of Chávez Ravine and the building of Dodger Stadium.

Teaching Activity by Linda Christensen

From the New Deal to the Green New Deal: Stories of Crisis and Possibility

Teaching Activity. By Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
The stories of twenty people whose lives were touched by the New Deal of the 1930s come to life in this classroom activity, intended to open students' minds to the possibilities of a Green New Deal.

Evicted!: The Struggle for the Right to Vote

Picture book. By Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Charly Palmer. 2022. 64 pages.
This critical civil rights book for middle-graders examines the little-known Tennessee's Fayette County Tent City Movement in the late 1950s and reveals what is possible when people unite and fight for the right to vote.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Book — Non-fiction. By Richard Rothstein. 2017. 368 pages.
A history of the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments that promoted racial segregation.

Teaching Activity by Richard Rothstein

Chávez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story

Film. By Jordan Mechner. 2004. 26 minutes.
A documentary about the politics and economics of land in the United States, based on the story of a Mexican American village razed in the 1950s to build Dodger Stadium.

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.

Segregated by Design

Film. Directed by Mark Lopez. Written by Mark Lopez and Richard Rothstein. 2019. 18 minutes.
An animated documentary of how the federal, state and local governments unconstitutionally segregated every major metropolitan area in the U.S. through law and policy.

aerial view of city map, representing different ZIP codes

Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code

Film. Directed by Judith Helfand. 2020. 54 minutes.
This documentary focuses on Chicago’s heat wave to look at how a weeklong tragedy is really a story about the “slow-motion disaster” caused by race and class inequality.