Book — Historical fiction. By Jewell Parker Rhodes. 2025. 208 pages.
A chapter book on the experience of a late 19th century era Black family participating in the Oklahoma Land Rush.
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The elected and interracial Reconstruction era local government was deposed in a coup d’etat in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Hiram Revels was sworn into office as senator from Mississippi, becoming the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate.
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Wyatt Outlaw, a Union veteran who became the first Black town commissioner of Graham, North Carolina, was seized from his home and lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan known as the White Brotherhood, which controlled the county.
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Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson’s veto and passed the first of four statutes known as the Reconstruction Acts, which outlined the process of readmission to the Union.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Kate Masur and illustrated by Elizabeth Clarke. 2024. 192 pages.
This graphic history reveals the hopes and betrayals of Reconstruction, a critical period in American history.
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Rutherford Hayes became the 19th President of the United States with a devastating impact on Reconstruction.
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The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the Senate.
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Robert Lewis was brutally beaten and hanged from a tree by a crowd of nearly 2,000 people after being accused of assaulting Lena McMahon, a local white woman. No one was held accountable for his murder.
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Following a suffrage bill that recognized women’s right to vote and hold public office in Wyoming, Black women there became the first to vote in a U.S. territory in 1870.
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The Carroll County Courthouse Massacre left 23 Black people dead when an armed white mob attacked an ongoing trial.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Judith Giesberg. 2025. 336 pages.
The story of formerly enslaved people who spent years searching for family members stolen away during slavery.
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Film. By Sam Pollard, Catherine Allan, Douglas Blackmon and Sheila Curran Bernard. 2012. 90 minutes.
Reveals the interlocking forces in the South and the North that enabled “neoslavery” post-Emancipation Proclamation.
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The Ku Klux Klan carried out the Colfax Massacre in response to a Republican victory in the 1872 elections.
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Teaching ideas and discussion questions for How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state — discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting — in this lesson based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Karen L. Cox. 2021. 224 pages.
Tells the story of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments across the United States.
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The federal government compensated the “owners” of enslaved people for their “loss of property.” The people whose labor, skills, knowledge, and families were stolen for generations were not compensated nor given any assistance for the transition to freedom.
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke in Philadelphia at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, urging African Americans to continue organizing for justice.
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Learn about the people’s history of Decoration Day (Memorial Day) and the Memorial Day Massacre.
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The 14th Amendment to the constitution was passed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
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Juneteenth — June 19th, also known as Emancipation Day — Juneteenth — is one of the many commemorations of people seizing their freedom in the United States.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez and Nqobile Mthethwa. 25 pages.
A mixer role play explores the connections between different social movements during Reconstruction.
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African Americans tested their right to vote and when denied, cast their own “freedom ballots,” on election day in Norfolk, Virginia.
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