Lesson. By Bill Bigelow. 17 pages.
This role play engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom following the Civil War. It's followed by a chapter from the book Freedom's Unfinished Revolution.
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Article. By Emilye Crosby and Judy Richardson. 2015.
Key points in the history of the 1965 Voting Rights Act missing from most textbooks.
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Article. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries.
History and significance of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
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Teaching materials and guides on the 15th Amendment's significance in 2020 — its 150th anniversary and an election year.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Hasan Kwame Jeffries. 2010. 372 pages.
History of the role that activists in Lowndes County played in spurring Black activists nationwide to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways.
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Article. By Howard Zinn. Excerpt from Chapter 5 of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
Howard Zinn’s first-hand account of Selma’s Freedom Day in 1963.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Carol Anderson. 2018. 368 pages.
This history of voter suppression highlights the aftermath and challenges to the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Lawrence Goldstone. 2020. 288 pages.
This young adult book documents the long and ongoing struggle for voting rights for African Americans.
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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.
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Picture book. By Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson. Illustrated by Benny Andrews. 2006. 32 pages.
The life of Civil Rights Movement activist and Congressman John Lewis.
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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.
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Profile.
Summer initiative to register African American voters in Mississippi.
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An unexpected hurricane crashed into the Gulf Coast and devastated Galveston, Texas, leaving thousands of people dead and even more left houseless. The storm’s turmoil and destruction allowed white terror and fraud to flourish.
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“Granny D” Haddock completed a 3200 miles walk from California to Washington, D.C. to call for reform of the U.S. system of campaign finance.
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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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Article. By Howard Zinn. From Chapter 6 of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
Zinn describes the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voting rights campaign called Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Miss.
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Book — Non-fiction. By SNCC Digital Gateway. 2024. 22 pages.
Provides concrete ways for people to engage with and learn about SNCC’s work and the role of women within SNCC, explore primary source materials, and connect contemporary issues in their own lives and communities to central themes in SNCC’s history.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove. 2019. 624 pages.
Tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital.
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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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Five-year-old Anthony Quin and his mother and siblings protested against the election of five Mississippi Congressmen from districts where Black people were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance, they sat on the steps and police-instigated mayhem ensued.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 2025. 36 pages.
This is a unit with three lessons. The first invites students to think critically about key issues that confronted the framers of the Constitution — examining the perspectives not only of the elites attending the actual Constitutional Convention, but also of enslaved African Americans, poor white farmers, and white workers. The other two lessons are: The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won? — with students exploring whose interests the Constitution advanced — and Federalist Paper #10: Suppressing “Wicked Projects,” a critical reading activity on James Madison's seminal defense of the Constitution.
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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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Paul Cuffee and other free Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to give African and Native Americans the right to vote.
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Profile.
Brief biography of Ella Josephine Baker, 1903–1986, activist and civil rights organizer.
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