Organizing Archives

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

Book — Non-fiction. By Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl. Ten Speed Press. 2020. 176 pages.
Paired with dynamic paper-cut art, readers explore several centuries of U.S. politics, culture, art, activism, and liberation.

At the River I Stand

Film. Directed by David Appleby, Allison Graham, and Steven Ross. 1993. 58 minutes.
Documentary film on the African American sanitation workers' 1968 fight for human dignity and a living wage in Memphis.

April 7, 1954: Norfolk’s African American Baseball Fans Win Desegregation Victories

A successful boycott of the Norfolk Tars by Black sports fans leads the team to desegregate both the players and stadium seating.

Crip Camp

Film. Directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht. Netflix. 2020. 107 minutes.
A groundbreaking summer camp galvanizes a group of teens with disabilities to help build a movement, forging a new path toward greater equality.

July 4, 1963: Hundreds Non-Violently Protest Gwynn Oak Amusement Park’s Segregation Policy

Hundreds of civil rights demonstrators amassed on Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore, Maryland, to protest the park’s segregation policy.

People’s History of Fourth of July: Beyond 1776 - On July 4, 1876, suffragists crash the Centennial Celebration at Independence Hall to present the “Declaration of the Rights of Women” | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

July 4, 1876: Suffragists Crash Centennial Celebration at Independence Hall

Members of the National Woman Suffrage Association crashed the Centennial Celebration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to present the “Declaration of the Rights of Women.”

Drawing by an elementary school student for the cover of the Lincoln Collective’s recruitment pamphlet.

July 1, 1970: The Lincoln Pediatric Collective Forms to Serve Bronx Community

Over three dozen young doctors bucked prestige and embraced justice in the summer of 1970 when they began work at Lincoln Hospital, a run-down, underfunded public hospital in the South Bronx that also the site of an occupation by the Young Lords.

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.

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.

Dec. 26, 1907: New York City Rent Strike

Months of organizing work by 16-year-old Pauline Newman culminated in the start of the largest rent strike in New York City’s history.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

Book — Non-fiction. By Alondra Nelson. 2013.
Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Alondra Nelson documents the Party’s focus on health care.

9to5: The Story of a Movement

Film. Directed and produced by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. Working Women Documentary Project LLC. 2021.
While Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" song is well known, this documentary captures the real-life 9-to-5 organizing to address issues of working women in the early 1970s that led to a union.

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

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

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.

No #DAPL crowd | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

April 1, 2016: Standing Rock Sioux Oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline

The Standing Rock Sioux and allies founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the Bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access to protest the route's construction, and to raise awareness of its threat.

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

Book — Non-Fiction. By Elizabeth Hinton. 2021. 224 pages.
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.

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.

Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America

Book — Non-fiction. By Wesley C. Hogan. 2009. 463 pages.
An innovative study of what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) accomplished and, more importantly, how it fostered significant social change in such a short time.

July 19, 1881: Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike

Black women in Atlanta who washed clothes for a living organized an effective Reconstruction era strike — with clear demands, strategic timing, and door-to-door canvassing.

What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should

By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian

Black Panther Party history holds vital lessons for today’s movement to confront racism and police violence, yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Black Panthers.

This local organizing that Panthers engaged in has been erased in the textbooks, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, as the Panthers grew, so did what they organized around. They fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education, and much more.

Why We Should Learn About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement (If We Knew Our History) | Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

On March 8, 1971 — while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold — a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find.

Delivered to the press, these documents revealed an FBI conspiracy — known as COINTELPRO — to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement. The break-in, and the government treachery it revealed, is a chapter of our not-so-distant past that all high school students — and all the rest of us — should learn, yet one that history textbooks continue to ignore.

Abolition/Earth Day | Zinn Education Project

An Earth Day Message: Take Heart from the Abolition Movement

By Bill Bigelow

Imagine for a moment that it is 1858 and you are an abolitionist. Talk about discouragement: The previous year, in its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no Black person — whether enslaved or free — was entitled to become a U.S. citizen. A few years before, Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which vastly expanded the U.S. government’s authority to seize and return to slavery individuals who had fled to freedom — or even those Blacks born free in the North. Many Northern Blacks crossed into Canada rather than live in constant fear.

And abolitionists were waging not just a moral struggle against the enslavement of human beings. Slavery was the largest industry in the United States, worth more than all the factories, banks, and railroads combined. In effect, the abolition movement aimed to expropriate without compensation the wealth of the most powerful social class in the country.

Howard Zinn at 90 — Lessons from the People’s Historian

By Bill Bigelow

This week — August 24 — would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print, A People’s History of the United States. “That book will knock you on your ass,” as Matt Damon’s character says in the film Good Will Hunting.

Fists of Freedom: An Olympic Story Not Taught in School

By Dave Zirin

It has been almost 44 years since Tommie Smith and John Carlos took the medal stand following the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and created what must be considered the most enduring, riveting image in the history of either sports or protest. But while the image has stood the test of time, the struggle that led to that moment has been cast aside.

When mentioned at all in U.S. history textbooks, the famous photo appears with almost no context. For example, Pearson/Prentice Hall’s United States History places the photo opposite a short three-paragraph section, “Young Leaders Call for Black Power.” The photo’s caption says simply that “. . . U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists in protest against discrimination.”

Changing the Climate in School

By Bill McKibben and Bill Bigelow

Maybe you’ve heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: we are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways — and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.

Then again, if you’ve been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this.

That’s because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense. Individual teachers around the country are doing outstanding work, but the educational establishment is not.

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