Teaching Segregation and Inequality in Housing and Education
Desegregation Josh Davidson Desegregation Josh Davidson

Teaching Segregation and Inequality in Housing and Education

Reading by Emilye Crosby
In recent years, there has been an outpouring of wonderful work documenting the structural basis of housing and educational segregation and inequality. This list of materials supplements the resources provided as part of Emilye Crosby’s “A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act: A Case Study of SNCC’s Work in Lowndes County and the Emergence of Black Power.”

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A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act
Voting Rights Josh Davidson Voting Rights Josh Davidson

A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act

Lesson by Emilye Crosby
This lesson uses a case study of Lowndes County, Alabama and three SNCC-related documents from the early 1960s—just before and after the Voting Rights Act—to explore the impact of the Voting Rights Act (and 1964 Civil Rights Act) on every day southern Black citizens: What did the legislation mean to them? Did they achieve their goals? 

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César Chávez on How It Began
Labor and Land Josh Davidson Labor and Land Josh Davidson

César Chávez on How It Began

Interview with César Chávez by Luis Torres
In an interview just before his death in 1993, César Chávez related the story of how the fledgling National Farm Worker Association (NFWA) union became involved with Filipino workers belonging to the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the strike against major grape growers.

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Sarah Louise Keys
Desegregation Josh Davidson Desegregation Josh Davidson

Sarah Louise Keys

Reading by Deborah Menkart
The story of Pfc. Sarah Louise Keys, who refused to relinquish her seat to a white Marine and move to the back of the bus as she traveled from Fort Dix, N.J. to her family’s home in Washington, NC. The driver emptied the bus, directed the other passengers to another vehicle, and barred Keys from boarding it.

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Judge Carlton Reeves Offers a Lesson in History
Student Engagement Julia Salcedo Student Engagement Julia Salcedo

Judge Carlton Reeves Offers a Lesson in History

Reading by Carlton Reeves
In February 2015, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves read a powerful statement to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old Black man named James Craig Anderson in Jackson, Mississippi in 2011. He addressed the history of lynching, his vision for Mississippi, and questions of justice.

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Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence
Transnational Solidarity Josh Davidson Transnational Solidarity Josh Davidson

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence

Reading by Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his first major speech on the war in Vietnam. In this speech he links the escalating U.S. commitment to the war in Vietnam war with its abandonment of the commitment to social justice at home. He calls for a “shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society” and for us to “struggle for a new world.”

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Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid
Voting Rights Josh Davidson Voting Rights Josh Davidson

Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid

Lesson by Sara Evers, Julian Hipkins III, Deborah Menkart, and Jenice L. View
This lesson explores one of the most important events in the fight for true democracy in the U.S., when a coalition of grassroots activists challenged the Mississippi political system, the federal government, and the national Democratic Party to abide by the U.S. Constitution.

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Freedom Song: Tactics for Transformation
Voting Rights Josh Davidson Voting Rights Josh Davidson

Freedom Song: Tactics for Transformation

Lesson by Alana Murray
Freedom Song is by far one of the best films for secondary students about the Civil Rights Movement. Aimed primarily at secondary students, this lesson seeks to provide students with the critical viewing skills needed to analyze the complex interplay between oppression and resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.

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South African Unions Struggle for Justice
Transnational Solidarity Josh Davidson Transnational Solidarity Josh Davidson

South African Unions Struggle for Justice

Lesson by Bill Bigelow
The South African anti-apartheid movement is often mischaracterized in the U.S. as simply a fight for political rights, culminating in the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first freely chosen president. However, Black unions linked their political objectives for an end to racial oppression to their campaigns for higher wages and better working conditions. This lesson invites students to imagine themselves as Black union activists at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s and poses them problems that confronted real-life organizers at the time.

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The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
Labor and Land Josh Davidson Labor and Land Josh Davidson

The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms

Reading by Vann R. Newkirk II
A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. Through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.

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African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century: An obscure legal loophole is often to blame
Labor and Land Josh Davidson Labor and Land Josh Davidson

African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century: An obscure legal loophole is often to blame

Reading by Leah Douglas
In the years following the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land, roughly 14 percent of all farms in the U.S. Today, African Americans compose less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmers and 1 percent of rural landowners.

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