“The primary cause of the Houston riot was the habitual brutality of the white police officers of Houston in their treatment of colored people.” —The Crisis magazine.
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Book — Historical fiction. By Tonya Bolden. 2017. 240 pages.
A moving account of the Civil War massacre at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Stewart Burns 1997. 392 pages.
A documentary history of the Montgomery bus boycott that reverberates with the voices of those closest to the boycott.
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Film. By Elizabeth Deane and Dion Graham. 2004. 174 minutes.
Through the voices of several historians and dramatic re-enactments by actors, PBS’s Reconstruction: The Second Civil War uses the stories of ordinary citizens to paint a picture of the Reconstruction era.
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Teaching Activity. By Alma Anderson McDonald.
A teacher looks back on her childhood to discover the meaning of environmental racism. Linda Christensen offers ways to teach about this story with students.
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Teaching Activity. By Rosemarie Frascella. Rethinking Schools.
Our extractive fossil fuel-based economy has always demanded that some people’s homes and health be sacrificed for the benefit of more privileged and powerful others. This article explores how one teacher engages her students in thinking about how “sacrifice zones” play out in their lives.
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College student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs (21) and high school student James Earl Green (17) were killed by the police during an anti-war protest at Jackson State College.
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Lorraine Hansberry was an author and activist who wrote “A Raisin in the Sun.”
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Mary Turner, a young African American woman who was eight months pregnant, was lynched in Lowndes County, Georgia.
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Medgar Evers made a 17-minute speech on WLBT in a rare and historic exception to the white supremacist only voice on Mississippi radio and television.
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Air Force veteran James Meredith began the March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.
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Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.
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Nine African American churchgoers were gunned down inside a church in an act of white supremacist terrorism.
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Black and white protesters attempted to desegregate a pool in St. Augustine, Florida. The owner dumped acid into the protester-filled pool in an attempt to force them to leave. Police officers eventually dragged protesters out of the pool and took them to jail.
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Killed by the police only twelve years later, today Tamir Rice was born.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 29 pages.
Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
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Two hundred and eighty one Africans aboard The Antelope ship were brought to Savannah by the U.S. Treasury.
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Jonathan Ferrell was killed by police in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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During a clear sign of Reconstruction era voter suppression, a Black militia was accused of blocking a road and punished with the Hamburg Massacre.
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The bodies of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, were found in the Mississippi River. They had been tortured and murdered by the Klan two months earlier.
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Protest and civil unrest broke out in Cleveland following years of escalation of racial tension.
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The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 was signed, providing land to the formerly enslaved, lands which had been stolen from the Native American inhabitants.
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White mobs, incited by the media, attacked the African American community in Washington, D.C., and African American soldiers returning from WWI. This was one of the many violent events that summer and it was distinguished by strong and organized Black resistance to the white violence.
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The U.S. Army firebombed a fort on the Apalachicola River in Florida.
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The bodies of three lynched civil rights workers (James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman) were found in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
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