More than 450,000 New York City school children boycotted school as part of a protest for quality schools for Black and Latino students.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Heather McGhee. 2023. 240 pages.
This young readers’ edition analyzes racism in U.S. politics and policymaking, and provides a potential path forward through solidarity.
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In attempt to end segregation at the William R. McKenney Central Library in Petersburg, Virginia, a group of African American students held a sit-in.
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In one of the longest prison uprisings in U.S. history, incarcerated men at Ohio’s Lucasville prison launched an uprising that last for 11 days.
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Teaching Activity. By Nicolle Fefferman. 2025. Rethinking Schools.
The director of the Young Workers Education Project and a Prentiss Charney Fellow describes a high school simulation based on recent Starbucks workers’ organizing.
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A group of Philadelphians posted a broadside across the city calling for for independence from the British Crown, urging the colony’s militia to instead select delegates of “honesty, common sense, and a plain understanding, when unbiased by sinister motives.”
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Faced with heavy taxes and threats of land seizure by the government, farmers and working class people of western Massachusetts organized resistance to such policies, leading to “Shays’ Rebellion.”
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Teaching Guide. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 1988. 184 pages.
Role plays and writing activities project high school students into real-life situations to explore the history and contemporary reality of employment (and unemployment) in the U.S.
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Teaching Activity. Essay by Howard Zinn and lesson by Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 18 pages.
Students research and write stories about unsung heroes in U.S. history.
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Book — Non-fiction. By James Haskins. 1997. 128 pages.
Biography for middle school readers of Bayard Rustin.
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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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A general strike was called in Amsterdam to protest Nazi persecution of Jews under the German Nazi occupation.
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Activists circled the White House to protest the Keystone Pipeline, an oil system that transports crude oil from Canada to various locations in the United States.
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Five people were killed when the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis fired on an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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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 Say Burgin, Jeanne Theoharis, and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students learn to “talk back” to official accounts of the Detroit Uprising of 1967 by focusing on its root causes. They also get a fuller sense of Rosa Parks’s life and politics, and the Black freedom struggle outside of the South.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Marcus Rediker. 2025. 416 pages.
A sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins.
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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 Matthew F. Delmont. 2026. 368 pages.
The history of the Vietnam War with a focus on the African American experience in the antiwar movement and as returning soldiers.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
A role play allows students to examine issues of race and class when exploring both the accomplishments and limitations of the Seneca Falls Convention.
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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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Book — Non-fiction. By Susan Campbell Bartoletti. 2003. 208 pages.
Describes the conditions and treatment that drove working children to strike, from the mill workers' strike in 1834 and the coal strikes at the turn of the century to the children who marched with Mother Jones in 1903.
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Profile.
Brief biography of Ella Josephine Baker, 1903–1986, activist and civil rights organizer.
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Profile. Zinn Education Project.
Brief bios of two dozen women of note in the labor movement.
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