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When I was working at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Baltimore the whole school engaged in reading the book and then we did different lessons. Because I taught Spanish, I did some lessons about the impact of her cells in the medical research environment in Mexico City. My niece, who is a doctor, shared how she used her cells for some of her investigations. The students were static to hear this information. Also we all enjoyed the book and learning about the injustices that Henrietta's family has suffered.

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Exploring BLM at School Principle of Globalism

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Exploring BLM at School Principle of Globalism

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Same Language, Different Accent: Hayfield Secondary Explores Globalism with UK Community Leaders — D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Students in Ariel Alford’s African American history class at Hayfield Secondary School (FCPS) learned from two artists-turned-educators based in the United Kingdom who shared their stories and curriculum modules designed to champion people of African and African diaspora heritage.

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Students Hear From HBCU Alumni at Montgomery Blair HS

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Students Hear From HBCU Alumni at Montgomery Blair HS

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For the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, the staff of Montgomery Blair High School (MCPS) planned a range of activities including talks on "The Role of Black LGBTQ Activists in Freedom Struggles" a "From Student to Activist Discussion," and a Double Dutch contest. Teacher Rebecca Hughes organized a panel discussion of ten Blair HS staff who are alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on Friday, February 10.

The HBCU alumni, most of whom graduated in the early 1990s, responded to a series of questions from the moderator, teachers, and students. The panel included alumni from Hampton University, Howard University, North Carolina Central University, Bowie State University, and South Carolina State University.

The moderator began by asking why each person chose to go to an HBCU. The responses included:

To liberate myself.

To read books where I could see myself and that did not start my history with slavery

So I could be in a place where I was in the majority from top to bottom (administration, professors, and students). It made me realize how white people must feel all the time.

To learn about the world and the world behind that one

Because my parents are HBCU graduates and I grew up watching A Different World.

My mother went to Howard, I did, and my son is going there now. Three generations.

I went to a majority white high school. Watching A Different Word made me want to have that same feeling.

When asked about the benefits of going to an HBCU, panelists pointed to having professors who believe in and support you, strong academics, a nurturing environment, and making friends for life.

There was good natured rivalry, with Howard University alum (including the moderator) reminding everyone that it is called "The Mecca." Kenneth Smith noted to students that while their conversation may sound like sibling rivalry, that if anyone who is not a HBCU alum is critical of HBCUs, they all stand firmly as a family together.

The session not only provided students an introduction to the benefits of attending an HBCU, it also opened the door for further conversations since the panelists are staff at the school. In fact, 24 Blair staff members are alumni of HBCUs and represent 15 different HBCUs.

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Students Hear From HBCU Alumni at Montgomery Blair HS - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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For the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, the staff of Montgomery Blair High School (MCPS) planned a range of activities including a panel discussion of ten Blair HS staff who are alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

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D.C. Area and Beyond Participate in BLM at School Week of Action 2023

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D.C. Area and Beyond Participate in BLM at School Week of Action 2023

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Gearing up for the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action is no small feat. While many educators in the D.C. area have been uplifting Black Lives Matter at School work with participation in the Year of Purpose, the Week of Action (held February 6-10, 2023) is a focused opportunity to uplift the guiding principles and national demands.

Read about how D.C. area educators prepared for this year's D.C. area Week of Action during their curricular planning meeting on January 7th and how educators in the D.C. area and beyond engaged in the annual curriculum fair. Then read below about how educators in the D.C. area and beyond brought the Black Lives Matter at School guiding principles and demands into their classrooms.

Check out Hannah Halpern's BLM at School Week of Action Sample 5 day schedule for her elementary school students.

Read an article featuring stories from the D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action at In These Times, " Black Educators are Reimagining A Better Education System."

Students Hear from HBCU Alumni at Montgomery Blair HS

For the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, the staff of Montgomery Blair High School (MCPS) planned a range of activities including a panel discussion of 10 Blair HS staff who are alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Read more.

Ofosu Jones-Quartey, author of Love Your Amazing Self: Joyful Verses for Young Voices, interspersed a read aloud of select verses from his book with mindfulness exercises at Rocketship PCS - Legacy Prep in support of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. Read more.

Self-Portraits and Braiding in Art at Seaton ES

Athena Kopsidas, art teacher at Seaton ES (DCPS), led students through projects that incorporated The Skin You Live In and Don't Touch My Hair! and art during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. Read more.

Sweet Cherie Brings Go-Go to Simon ES

At Simon ES (DCPS), K-3rd graders learned about the history and fundamentals of go-go and got a chance to play an improvised tune on Sweet Cherie's bedazzled keyboard. They danced when they heard their name called by the talker, just like at a go-go. The visit was especially joyful because one of the teachers, whose parents met at a Chuck Brown concert in 1972, was celebrating a birthday! Read more.

On February 23, Mimi Eisen, co-author of Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, was in conversation with Michelle Coles, author of Black Was the Ink, to discuss the parallels between the Reconstruction era and today. Participants in this virtual event had time to collaborate, share resources, and reflect on their own Reconstruction teaching and learning experiences. Read more.

Lots to plan and prep - but also feeling prepared - for Black Lives Matter Week of Action starting on Monday! As I phrase it to the kids - we focus on the ideology all year, but we focus on ACTION and ways to implement change during the week!
- Ms. Halpern (@Ms_Halpern) February 2, 2023

As a result of a Teaching for Black Lives study group, Cordley ES celebrated their first Black Lives Matter at School Week with a kick-off assembly and daily activities and questions to deepen the conversation.

Once a month, students visit their Hawk Families, which are cross-grade level groups of Kindergarten through 5th grade students. In Hawk Families during Black Lives Matter at School Week, students read the book I Am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes. After reading, students discussed what it means to matter and also wrote three positive affirmations with their group. Some positive affirmations that were brainstormed included:

The next day, students worked on posters that showed what they believed mattered and what they stood for. Students had lots of discussion about current events, as well as the injustice that many groups of people face.

On Friday, students participated in a "Continue the March" march and rally that called for equality, kindness, and acceptance.

The students had lot of local support, including the purchase of Black Lives Matter at Cordley t-shirts and coverage in both local papers. They were the only local school to participate, but they had 97% positive feedback from the parents in their community. There was some pushback in general because of the concern of this being a "political issue" in a school.

See local press coverage in the The Lawrence Times and LJWorld.

Hayward Unified School District (HUSD) endorsed the principles and demands of the BLM at School Week of Action, sharing a public statement in support of the BLM Week of Action, promoting the week of Action, and generating resources for educators.

Each Teaching for Black Lives study group member agreed to focus on the principle of "Unapologetically Black" and to host activities at various sites connected to that theme.Organizationally, HUSD aligned events and programming with BLM Week of Action.

They supported teacher leaders to understand and apply learning from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's work. She explains,

I take up the ways in which literacy was defined historically within Black communities, particularly in Black literary societies. And I found that literacy was synonymous with education. Literacy was also defined within the four frames of identity, skills, intellectualism, and criticality, the four-part equity model. In other words, as Black people were learning, they were cultivating each of those four areas of their lives. If we compare these four areas to schools today, I find that most educators are teaching skills only or their state learning standards. Yet, our students need more.

In sharing Muhammad's framework, HUSD supported their educators to lean into Black traditions in ways that support ALL learners to be seen, valued, heard, and loved. Towards that end, they encouraged all sites to utilize funds the district has made available through our LCAP [Local Control Accountability Plan] to devote purely to African-American programming.

As a result of these efforts, the Teaching for Black Lives study group formally adopted the HRLF [Historically Responsive Literacy Framework] as something to develop lessons around to share from the Teaching for Black Lives perspective.
Resources:

Woodland Hills Elementary
Brooke Dupuis
Fifth grade students read the Black Lives Matter at School coloring book and learned each of the 13 principles of Black Lives Matter, then made posters to bring awareness of Black Lives Matter at School week and hung them around the school. The students also read the book All Because You Matter to ground the new learning in history.

Fifth grade students went to younger grade levels to read and discuss the principles with them. Teachers then continued the conversations with younger students.

The students came to a better understanding of why we say Black Lives Matter and why it includes all of us. They had a better idea of how you can take steps to make change around you. They were motivated to be more active in their communities because they understood what types of action they could take.

The younger grades were motivated by the older fifth graders and felt comfortable asking them questions they may not have asked of their teachers.

Coliseum College Prep Academy
Charquita Arnold
Charquita Arnold, who usually coordinates the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action activities at the school, used some materials from Seattle Public Schools and created some of her own content.

Arnold shared that, "It was a deeepppp week." Students reviewed the 13 Guiding Principles and engaged in deep conversations with discussion prompts, and gave Black History Month presentations where they read the poem " Two Sets of Notes " by M. K. Asante Jr., which they received from one of their previous book club meetings. Everyone - staff included - enjoyed the experience. In reflecting on their learning, Arnold shared,

There was joy when students said, "Wow! I didn't know that Black women used their braids to plan escape routes," or the awe on students' faces when they learned in history [class] that Black people were auctioned. How they just learned that in my eighth grade class...I don't know. I paused because I thought he was joking and he was like, "Really ...I didn't know that."

Arnold noted that some of the empowering feelings of the week were dampened because some students harbor anti-Black sentiments. Arnold is a Black educator and had to remind herself to be strong. She noted that these beliefs are learned and internalized. She charged herself with interrupting anti-Blackness and guiding students out of those beliefs.

View lesson plans and schedules from the week here and here.

New York

Math, Science Research, and Technology High School
Sandra Stokes
When teaching about the Civil Rights Movement in her Civil Rights and Equality class, Sandra Stokes wanted students to be familiar with the grassroots women who fought for our rights, as well. Each day Stokes taught lessons on Septima Clark, Daisy Bates, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer and their roles in fighting for justice and the right to vote.

Stokes incorporated text, articles, and video clips about each woman. Students learned about their lives and sacrifices, and how they started organizations like SNCC and worked with young people their own age. The students were surprised to learn about all that these women did because they had only heard of Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

They were so inspired they wanted to create their own group similar to SNCC. When they learned about Fannie Lou Hamer, students were sad to hear that she was beaten and treated so badly. The students were proud that Fannie Lou Hamer went from sharecropper to activist.

Rochester School of the Arts
Meagan Harris
Teachers were able to choose from a number of lessons created and distributed by the school-based planning team and the Black Student Union club that focused on Black history or Black Lives Matter related issues. In middle school science, students discussed how the human race became differently pigmented due to region and migration. In English, students discussed race in To Kill a Mockingbird. Students also attended performances throughout the day.

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D.C. Area and Beyond Participate in BLM at School Week of Action 2023 - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Gearing up for the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action is no small feat. While educators in the D.C.

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Community as Resistance at Hayfield Secondary

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Community as Resistance at Hayfield Secondary

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For the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, Ariel Alford, African American History teacher at Hayfield Secondary in Alexandria, Virginia, married the "Black Villages" principle with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) "Black Resistance" Black History Month theme. Using the Black Panther Party as a primary focal point, students explored "Community as Resistance."

Students were first introduced to Black writers, poets, and photographers who have recorded the power of community among Black people. They eventually created unique visual presentations and taught middle school students at Hayfield what they learned.

Students closely analyzed photographs of the community by Andre D. Wagner and shared what words and sensory associations they make when they are part of a community. They raised questions like,

"What is community?"

"How have Black people expressed 'community' with one another - past and present?"

"What are some common spaces, places, or activities that bring Black people together in community with each other?"

"How have Black communities organized themselves to resist systems of injustice?

Students provided examples of community - barber shops, family reunions, and schools, just to name a few. Then they thought about how communities - collections of people - can band together and resist oppressive forces.

Reading about the Black Panther Party, students affirmed some knowledge they had already been exposed to. They were aware of the free breakfast program and the Party's belief in armed resistance. The students were surprised to learn about how intentional and comprehensive their community care programming was in wrapping around folks in need, and how widespread Black Panther Party chapters were across the country.

Students subsequently facilitated teach-ins via structured lessons with Allen Johnson's 7th grade English students. These teach-ins are an example of community action to directly respond to the attacks on teaching the truth in the state of Virginia under governor Glen Younkin's administration.

Resources:

Read a teaching story about Alford's class from the 2022 Week of Action.

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Community as Resistance at Hayfield Secondary - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Students were introduced to Black writers, poets, and photographers who have recorded the power of community among Black people, then created unique visual presentations and taught middle school students at Hayfield what they learned.

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow

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On February 23, Mimi Eisen, co-author ofErasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, was in conversation with Michelle Coles, author of Black Was the Ink, to discuss the parallels between the Reconstruction Era and today. They further discussed what current school districts' standards reveal about the present-day failures to accurately teach Reconstruction.

Participants in this virtual event had time to collaborate, share resources, and reflect on their own Reconstruction teaching and learning experiences. Attendees received a copy of Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle or a picture or YA book connected to the 13 guiding principles for Black Lives Matter at School.

Participants shared:

I appreciated Michelle's passionate energy talking about the book and the resources that inspired her writing. It's so wonderful that she made historical events relatable and engaging for younger readers. I loved her approach of using fiction to "distill" information about the Reconstruction era and make clear connections to events that are happening today.

Reconstruction is truly the missing link in the U.S. History Curriculum and it has allowed people to truly not understand why we are still where we are today.

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Mimi Eisen, co-author of Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction , was in conversation with Michelle Coles, author of Black Was the Ink , to discuss the parallels between the Reconstruction Era and today.

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What We Do & How We Do It: A Guide to BLM at School

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What We Do & How We Do It: A Guide to BLM at School

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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De'Ana Forbes, a member of the DCAESJ secondary working group, invited us to one of a series of Black Lives Matter at School events happening throughout the month at Freedom HS (PWCPS). During the sip n' paint, students across 9th - 12th grades enjoyed lemonade, sweet tea, and chips and salsa as they sketched and painted the Sankofa bird or Black power fist. Using the Pan-African colors as their palette, students transformed blank canvases into stunning recreations of the suggested images or totally original creations. You could feel the warmth and encouraging energy throughout the room. Forbes circulated the tables showering students with affirmations and reiterating Black joy and artistry being part of their artistic process as they worked. Some students painted independently, while others worked together and jointly showed off their final products.

While students worked, we had the opportunity to speak with French teacher Jahanzeb Akbar, who hosted the sip n' paint in his classroom. Having grown up just ten minutes away from the school in Woodbridge, Virginia, Akbar shared that he was in high school when Freedom was being built. At the time, Akbar said that within a year of its opening, students at other high schools referred to Freedom as "the ghetto" because of the sizable Black student population. He shared that the region of Prince William county where Freedom HS is located is diverse with many ethnicities represented and languages spoken, and that participation in the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action and Year of Purpose activities and organizing helps affirm Black community members at Freedom.

Read more about Week of Action activities in Forbes' classroom at In These Times " Black Educators are Reimagining A Better Education System."

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Sip N Paint at Freedom HS - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Using the Pan-African colors as their palette, students transformed blank canvases into stunning recreations of the Sankofa bird, Black power fist, or their own original creations

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Black History, Black Present, Black Future: Exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre from a Economics Lens

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Black History, Black Present, Black Future: Exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre from a Economics Lens

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Black History, Black Present, Black Future: Exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre from an Economics Lens — D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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By Kimberly Ellis and Vanessa Williams What is the Tulsa Race Massacre? How do we, as a nation, tell the story of the massacre? What is owed to the Black community as a result of the massacre? Ashley Bryant created two weeks of lessons to explore these questions in celebration of the Black Lives M

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D.C. and Beyond: Stories from Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action 2022

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D.C. and Beyond: Stories from Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action 2022

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The fifth annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action wrapped up recently and educators in the D.C. area and beyond participated in powerful ways. Social justice educators prepared in a variety of ways, including attending the D.C. area and national Black Lives Matter at School curriculum fairs. Read below for insight about how educators lifted up the 13 guiding principles and national demands of Black Lives Matter at School during this year's Week of Action!

D.C. Area Teaching Stories from the 2022 Black Lives Matter
at School Week of Action

Macfarland Middle School - DCPS

Sixth grade humanities teacher Melanie Holmes designed a week of lessons to engage students in learning about the Black Lives Matter at School national demands. After exploration of the movement, students crafted a call to action in support of one of these demands. Read more about Holmes' Week of Action plans.

School for Friends - D.C.

Early childhood educator Makai Kellogg attended this year's Black Lives Matter at School Virtual Curriculum Fair and was inspired to practice more empathy with her preschoolers as they are creating art. Looking to former D.C. public school teacher and artist Alma Woodsey Thomas as their inspiration, the Sea Lions created works of art similar to her work or their own originals. Read more about Kellogg's story.

School Within a School @ Goding - DCPS

DCAESJ elementary working group teacher co-leader Raphael Bonhomme integrated math and economics into a close study of Brian Flores's lawsuit against the NFL. Beginning with the hiring and eventual firing of Fritz Pollard, the first African-American coach in the NFL, Bonhomme traced historical and present lack of diversity in the NFL. Students reflected on what implications that has on the NFL, and sketched ways they can improve the league. View the slides.

Howard University School of Education

Our annual partner in Black Lives Matter at School, Howard University School of Education, curated a gallery walk of children's books centering Black characters, Black stories, and Black experiences at Founders Library during the Week of Action. Students of the School of Education led the activity and were supported by Drs. Altheria Caldera and Katherine Norris. Here are curated booklists around the 13 guiding principles for Black Lives Matter at School.

Howard High School - Howard County Maryland Public Schools

11th and 12th grade Modern World History & African American Studies teacher, Masami M. Stratton taught the 13 Guiding Principles. She organized the principles into five groups: Group 1 Restorative Justice, Empathy, Loving Engagement; Group 2 Globalism & Diversity; Group 3 Trans & Queer Affirming; Group 4 Intergenerational & Collective Value; Group 5 Black Families, Black Women, Black Village, Unapologetically Black. She then asked students to write: 1. What do they mean to you?; and 2. How should we practice them in our community/our school? Finally, Stratton asked students to draw posters illustrating these groups as affirmative & inclusive.

Stratton sought to emphasize that we are an inclusive movement, that we can only be as strong as our most vulnerable, so we must pay particular attention to those who are targeted (historically and in contemporary times). Stratton then displayed the students' work across the back of the classroom. Check out the photo album.

Moten Elementary School - DCPS

Laura Goemann, a DCPS teacher resident in a PreK 4 class, explored the book Sulweby Lupita Nyong'o. After a read aloud, the class discussed the book's plot, how Sulwe felt, and what Sulwe learned. One student recalled how the other children were mean to Sulwe because she was darker. Another student recalled that Sulwe's mom told her that she is beautiful. Goemann expanded upon this by highlighting how Sulwe learned that she is beautiful inside and out. The class also connected the book's discussion of inner beauty with their music teacher's ongoing discussions of inner light and how we show our inner light through kindness and compassion. The students reviewed ways in which they show their inner light, such as "being nice," "helping," and "giving hugs." The next day, Goemann played the class a video of Lupita Nyong'o reading Sulwe on the Netflix Jr. series Bookmarks. A discussion followed in which the class reviewed how to show inner beauty. They then made beautiful thank you letters for their custodian and cafeteria worker. The students presented their letters with excitement and gratitude, truly showing their inner beauty.

Georgetown Day School - DC

The lower school offered a menu of activities for the Black Lives Matter Week of Action, with suggestions for each day to align with the 13 Guiding Principles. In addition, the pre-K welcomed Dr. Denisha Jones, education justice advocate and member of the national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action steering committee, for a discussion of the guiding principles. As noted on the GDS website, "Students asked questions and gave heart-melting compliments to Dr. Jones. As the students waved good-bye, one gave a spontaneous 'Black Lives Matter!' cheer." One of the organizers for the event is one of the founding members of the DCAESJ early childhood working group.

Social Media Posts from the Black Lives Matter
at School Week of Action
Use the hashtag #BLMatSchool and tag @dcaesj on Twitter

"We're asking educators to reflect on their own work in relationship to antiracist pedagogy and abolitionist practice, persistently challenging themselves to center Black lives in their classrooms." 🔥

📸: The #BLMatSchool Week of Action: Literacy Edition Gallery Walk @HU_SOE! pic.twitter.com/Hk2DCVcgLI
- Report back about BLM at School Week of Action! (@dcaesj) February 1, 2022

Making learning relevant engages our students. We discussed the #BLM 13 guiding principles & rated their prevalence at DHS. They are now using their voice to write an essay providing evidence as to whether black lives matter to our students based on their actions. #BLMatSchool pic.twitter.com/Rh2oXs6rHQ
- Shelina Warren-Martin, Ed.S, NBCT (@shelinawarren) February 4, 2022

Week of Action: Beyond the D.C. Area

Lamberton Elementary School - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In Sheila Myers' 5th grade class, students read the 13 Guiding Principles in small groups and discussed what the principles meant to them. Then, students selected one principle to illustrate and created a design. Through collaboration with the art teacher, Myers' students painted their designs on t-shirts and cardboard. Students also learned about popular protest statements such as "I Can't Breathe" and learned about past and present freedom fighters. Students then showcased their work at the schoolwide march. Simultaneously, students made connections to the Black Families principle through their current novel study: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, discussing family separation. Check out the photo album.

Academy at Palumbo - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

High school Economics teacher Ashley Bryant created two weeks of lessons to explore the Tulsa Race Massacre and socioeconomic impacts on the Black community. Read more about Bryant's story.

Woodland Hills Elementary School - Santa Clarita, California

Out on the West Coast, Brooke Dupuis's 5th grade class embraced Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action with lessons, activities, and actions throughout the week and invited all of Woodland Hills Elementary to join in! On top of the 13 guiding principles coloring book, Dupuis's class made and displayed posters about Black Lives Matter at School, publicly announced the school's support of Black Lives Matter at School at a parent meeting, and had students visit every classroom in the school to explain the principles and demands to all other students in the school.

Dupuis reflected,

My students saw the importance for Black Lives Matter not just for Black students but for everyone. They also felt empowered to teach others and learned the principles more deeply so that they could.

Wyandotte HS - Kansas City, Kansas

Michael Rebne shared an activity related to centering Black women. In having students reflect on their connections - or the lack thereof - to Black women, it drove home how central they are to our shared humanity.

Students reflected:

My mother is a very strong woman who has inspired me by her work ethic and her determination.

I admire my 3rd grade teacher, she was a very passionate teacher, and even though I wasn't a great kid she still treated me equal to the other kids and wanted everyone to learn.

[I admire my] friend/old neighbor Keyale. Her mom does people's hair. I would spend nights over there and learn things all the time.

I remember my 3rd grade teacher...I always looked up to her because she made me feel safe and comfortable.

I admire my co-worker Ms. Yvonda because she is headstrong and just amazing overall.

Resource: WHS Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action 2022 Community Calendar

Community of Peace Academy - St. Paul, Minnesota

Caitie Ryan-Norton read The Undefeated, by Kwame Alexander, in class. Ryan-Norton regularly uses picture books to highlight important content in her class, and students loved the illustrations in the book! They asked a lot of questions about who was depicted in each picture, and spent a lot of time listening to music from artists on the artist page. They now have a class playlist that features some of the jazz musicians featured!

Books for Teachers: Donated by Publishers for the Week of Action

In support of the Black Lives Matter at School Curriculum Fair, a number of publishers generously donated titles related to the Black Lives Matter at School 13 Guiding Principles. We extend our appreciation to Astra Publishing House, Candlewick Press, City Lights Publishers, Haymarket Books, Heyday Books, The Innovation Press, Lee and Low, Lerner Publishing Group, Shout Mouse Press, Tilbury House, and Little, Brown Books.

Year of Purpose

The 13 guiding principles and national demands of Black Lives Matter at School can be uplifted throughout the year with the Year of Purpose. Beginning in the fall on October 14th with Justice for George Day and reaching into the summer with Juneteenth, the Year of Purpose is designed to intentionally create space and opportunity to raise certain guiding principles with accompanying calls to action. Prepare to participate in the Year of Purpose with the toolkit and continue tagging us @dcaesj and using the hashtags #BLMatSchool and #YearofPurpose.

Learn more about ways to formally endorse, amplify, and engage in Black Lives Matter at School.

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D.C. and Beyond: Stories from Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action 2022 - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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The fifth annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action wrapped up recently and educators in the D.C. area and beyond participated in powerful ways. Social justice educators prepared in a variety of ways, including attending the D.C. area and national Black Lives Matter at School curriculum fairs.

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom

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Tenth graders in Christy Gill's English class at HB Woodlawn Secondary Program (APSVA), learned about the 13 guiding principles as a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

As a warm up, students were tasked to answer the following questions,

What do you know about the Black Lives Matter Movement?

Why do you think the Black Lives Matter movement began?

What do you think are the core principles and values of the Black Lives Matter movement? What is a social movement?

Some of the students' answers included,

I think it began because African-Americans were/are being treated unfairly. A lot of assumptions were being made and acted upon.

The core principles are that Black lives will be treated just like everyone else.

A social movement is a movement made by people trying to fix something in this world that needs changing.

Gill explained that the Black Lives Matter movement started after the death of Trayvon Martin. Students discussed the death of Michael Brown and how unjust it was that both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed because of the color of their skin.

Gill engaged students in the Introduction to the Principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement lesson. In small groups, they discussed two to three of the principles. Each group wrote what the principles they were assigned meant to them in their own words and why their particular principles were part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Each group shared their answers with the classroom as a whole.

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Tenth graders in Christy Gill's English class at HB Woodlawn Secondary Program (APSVA), learned about the 13 guiding principles as a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. As a warm up, students were tasked to answer the following questions, What do you know about the Black Lives Matter Movement?

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Stories from the 2021 D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

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Stories from the 2021 D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

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Why Black Lives Should Matter to EVERYONE
Middle school students from the class of Lia Bengtson and Tarja Lewis at Kendall Demonstration School in D.C. created a video to kick off Black Lives Matter Week of Action at Schools. They challenged viewers to think about why Black lives should matter to EVERYONE. Continue reading.

Teaching 13 Guiding Principles in Early Childhood Classrooms
On February 15, 2021, 36 preservice and in-service teachers from Gallaudet University, Kendall Demonstration Elementary School, and the Maryland School for the Deaf gathered for a virtual workshop presentation titled Teaching about the Black Lives Matter 13 Guiding Principles in Early Childhood Classrooms. Continue reading.

Teaching Consent: Centering Empathy, Diversity, and Loving Engagement in Early Childhood
Makai Kellogg used the Black Lives Matter guiding principles and the book Don't Touch My Hair to discuss consent with young children at School for Friends. Continue reading.

Fourth Graders Discuss Don't Touch My Hair
Fourth Grade students at Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School read and discussed Don't Touch My Hair. Continue reading

Additional Approaches and Activities

Here are selected stories from teachers in the D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice Middle and High School People's History Curriculum Working Group.

We treated the Week of Action as a launch for the Year of Action. Each day during the Week of Action, we posted a school-wide trivia question. The prize was a book from the Social Justice Books list that matched the theme of a guiding principle. - Nicole Clark, Two Rivers PCS

My World History class studied how stereotypes about Africa were created by racism AND create more racism. We then studied ancient African empires and learned how to combat stereotypes when we hear them in the future. - Mollie Safran, Fairfax County Public Schools

In my D.C. History classroom, students looked at the origins of Black History Week/Month with a lesson created by Howard University professor Greg Carr on Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Black History Month. We then moved into tribute pieces and presentations of notable Black Washingtonians throughout DC's history. - Ben Williams, Capital City Public Charter School

I organized with students in our school district to get staff signatures on a petition calling for the removal of police from schools and instead fund counselors and restorative justice trainings. Since that week, we collected 200 teacher signatures. - Neha Singhal, Montgomery County Public Schools

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Stories from the 2021 DC Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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From February 1-5, 2021, Teaching for Change's D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice hosted the fourth annual D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

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Watch the Webinar: Black Lives Matter in the Classroom

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Watch the recording of our most popular webinar yet, "Black Lives Matter in the Classroom: A Conversation with Experts" with Laleña Garcia and Caryn Davidson, author and illustrator of What We Beli...

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Teaching #BlackLivesMatter - Teaching for Change

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Ideas and resources for teaching about #BlackLivesMatter and the long history of institutionalized racism.

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Black Lives Matter at School - Social Justice Books

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There are 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement. We seek to expand student understanding of these principles through the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action (scheduled for the first week of February each year) and beyond. Below you'll find a growing list of recommended titles that center each of the [...]

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Building the Foundation for Police-Free Schools

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Building the Foundation for Police-Free Schools

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By Mark R. Warren

Illustrator: Howard Barry

The police-free schools movement exploded onto the scene in 2020, in the wake of mass protests against racism and police violence. Most people had never heard about demands to defund or remove police from schools, but community groups in low-income communities of color had been laying the foundations for this movement for many years, led often by young people facing police abuse in schools.

On Oct. 25, 2015, student Niya Kenny filmed a white school police officer body slamming her classmate, a Black 16-year-old girl named Shakara, to the floor during math class at SpringValley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Deputy Sheriff Ben Fields placed Shakara in a headlock, flipped her desk over, and then dragged and threw her across the floor, all for allegedly refusing to hand over her cell phone. Yet it was Kenny and Shakara (we are withholding her last name for privacy reasons) who were arrested, charged with "disturbing school," and sent to juvenile detention. Another student who recorded the assault, Tony Robinson Jr., described the impact on students to WLTX-TV:

I've never seen anything so nasty looking, so sick to the point that you know, other students are turning away, don't know what to do, and are just scared for their lives. That's supposed to be somebody that's going to protect us. Not somebody that we need to be scared of, or afraid.

The video went viral online, aired repeatedly on television stations including major news networks, and led to a national outcry about the way police abuse Black children in schools. For young people and youth organizers with the Alliance for Educational Justice (AEJ), the incident demonstrated what they long knew: Police do not make schools safer. Rather, police are a key part of the system that criminalizes students of color and should be removed from schools.

AEJ, a national alliance of more than two dozen youth organizing groups working to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, dubbed the incident #AssaultAtSpringValley on social media and swung into action. Youth members of AEJ, led by the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC) in New York City, started writing love letters to Kenny and Shakara to show their support. When released from detention, Kenny attended a Youth Power conference sponsored by the Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing in Durham, North Carolina, where students from UYC as well as the Philadelphia Student Union and Power U Center for Social Change in Miami called her on stage and read the love letters to her. According to Onyx Walker from UYC, "Standing on that stage, hand in hand with youth from across the country, telling Niya we had her back, was a powerful experience for me. We were connected now."

AEJ also worked with Color of Change and local organizing groups to collect 150,000 signatures on a petition to have the criminal charges of "disturbing school" against Kenny and Shakara dropped. Along with the Malcolm X Center for Social Change, they delivered the petition to the Fifth Judicial Circuit solicitor Dan Johnson. In January 2016, Kenny and a group of youth leaders from New Orleans testified at a hearing of the United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and called for the removal of police from schools, a position the international group subsequently endorsed in its recommendations to the United States. Finally, some eight months later, the charges against Kenny and Shakara were dropped. Officer Fields, however, was never charged with criminal wrongdoing, although he was fired.

Maria Fernandez, a longtime youth organizer who coordinates the Advancement Project's police-free schools work, said the assault "energized a movement around criminalization that goes beyond suspensions."

"That changed everything for everyone," Fernandez said in a joint AEJ/Advancement Project report titled We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools. "It woke people up to what is happening. It made people more willing and ready to fight the fight around school police."

#AssaultAt and #EndWarOnYouth

When George Zimmerman was acquitted of the fatal shooting of Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, youth members of AEJ from across the country were attending the Education for Liberation Network's "Free Minds, Free People" biannual conference in Chicago. Fifty young people huddled together in the hotel room of Jonathan Stith, AEJ's national director. According to Stith, the "young people were really scared, they were terrified, they were heartbroken." The young people consoled each other but also committed to take action. Within a week, AEJ mobilized a delegation of 100 youth to go to Tallahassee, Florida, and join the Dream Defenders and Power U Center for Social Change when they occupied the Florida State Capitol, demanding an end to the state's "stand your ground" law that was used to justify Zimmerman's actions. Stith says the action helped shape a new direction for AEJ and the struggle for police-free schools:

That was a real powerful movement-building moment for us where . . . we were like, "Y'all are not alone in this struggle." Young people ultimately understood that Trayvon could have been all of them or any one of them.

The next year, Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, took to the streets to protest the shooting by a white police officer of unarmed Black man Michael Brown. Youth organizers affiliated with AEJ came to Ferguson to offer their support and organizing expertise. That summer they faced armed police and tanks in the streets of the city. When they returned to their hometowns, they realized that Black students in schools faced the same police as Black residents in Ferguson. Stith said Ferguson pushed AEJ to broaden its focus to demand an end to what it called the war on youth:

It seems like young people are dying every day and getting shot down by police. We're a movement-building alliance, so it became clear: Our stuff is bigger than education. School is our base. We believe schools transform society and society can transform schools. Coming back from Ferguson, young folk were saying it feels like there's a war happening to them, that they're dying every day, that it feels ever present.

The alliance developed an analysis that students of color were facing state sanctioned violence and launched a campaign to #EndWarOnYouth. AEJ also started a rapid response initiative labeling instances of police abuse at schools with the hashtag #AssaultAt and providing support to local organizing groups responding to violence. With the Advancement Project, AEJ developed protocols for local groups to follow, provided strategic communications, assisted in research and political education and analysis, and advised on campaign development strategy.

The rise in awareness of racist police violence and the militant response by the Movement for Black Lives emboldened AEJ members and other school-to-prison pipeline organizers. Before Ferguson, according to Stith, demanding police-free schools was seen as unwinnable. "But with Black Lives Matter happening, the question of police is up and people have gone to Ferguson. They came back ready to fight." The two movements - Black Lives Matter and educational justice - came together as it turned out that many Black Lives Matter activists had been trained in organizing when they were members of youth groups. Patrisse Cullors, for example, was trained as a youth leader by the Labor Community Strategy Center before she co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement. For their part, Stith and other AEJ organizers ended up writing the education platform of the Black Lives Matter movement.

AEJ's rapid response #AssaultAt campaign brought national focus to the move toward police-free schools, as it highlighted case after case of police violence across the country. In May 2016, a Philadelphia school police officer assaulted Brian Burney, a youth member of the AEJ-affiliated Philadelphia Student Union (PSU), for trying to go to the bathroom without a pass. When the officer refused to let Burney use the restroom, Burney threw an orange at the wall out of frustration. Officer Jeffrey Maciocha punched Burney twice in the face, slammed him down on the floor, and put him in a chokehold; he was later diagnosed with a concussion.

It was labeled #AssaultAtBenFranklin and the AEJ supported PSU in a campaign to demand justice for Burney and call for diverting funds that support more than 400 police officers in schools to pay for counselors, nurses, and restorative practices. After weeks of protests and rallies, PSU won a commitment from the district to reduce the size of the school police force and create a complaint system for students and parents, only the second school police force in the country to establish such a system. Meanwhile, Black parent organizers from the Journey for Justice Alliance came to Philadelphia to stand with young people, helping to build a consensus against the presence of police in schools in the wider educational justice movement.

By 2018, AEJ had identified 61 cases of police violence in its #AssaultAt campaign; by 2020, it had identified 145 incidents. While AEJ was able to document and support many of these students and groups, the alliance believed the cases represented only the tip of the iceberg of police abuse in schools. AEJ helped link the struggles together, taking up the wider call for removing police from schools as the next iteration of the movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline.

Laying the Foundations for Police-Free Schools

AEJ was not alone in its call for police-free schools, as momentum had been building for a while. Beginning in the late 1990s, students of color had been criticizing the heavy police presence in schools, as well as metal detectors and searches, charging that their schools felt like jails. Even as community groups began to focus on exclusionary discipline as a driver of the school-to-prison pipeline, they had also become concerned with excessive and unwarranted police arrests of schoolchildren, and the topic was covered in the Advancement Project's 2003 report titled Derailed! The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track.

Among other early campaigns to address school policing, the Los Angeles-based Labor Community Strategy Center launched a campaign in 2007 to stop the practice of police ticketing students for truancy as they entered school late; student leaders in the group later got the LA School Police to return military grade equipment and a tank that they had received from the federal government in its 1033 program. In opposition to the call for more armed police in schools after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the Los Angeles-based Youth Justice Coalition initiated a national campaign called "You Can't Build Peace with a Piece" that included scores of youth groups across the country and was endorsed by the national Dignity in Schools Coalition (DSC). Also in 2012, responding to the murder of 20-year-old Raheim Brown by a school police officer outside a school dance, the Black Organizing Project (BOP) in Oakland became the first community organization to win a formal complaint system for police abuse in schools for students and families. Recognizing the limitations of this kind of reform, BOP built on its victory to launch a campaign, setting a goal for the complete removal of police from Oakland schools by 2020. Then, in 2013, Padres & Jóvenes Unidos (PJU) in Denver became the first community group in the nation to broker a written agreement between police and a school district to differentiate between disciplinary and criminal issues and limit the role of police in schools to criminal offenses.

Nevertheless, while many organizers in the school-to-prison pipeline movement long opposed a police presence in schools, many people in the communities their organizations served were so used to the presence of police in schools, and the justification that police were necessary for student safety, that it took time to convince them that police should not be stationed in school.

Nevertheless, while many organizers in the school-to-prison pipeline movement long opposed a police presence in schools, many people in the communities their organizations served were so used to the presence of police in schools, and the justification that police were necessary for student safety, that it took time to convince them that police should not be stationed in school. From the early days of organizing for the removal of police in Oakland, BOP organizers like Jackie Byers recognized that "some people within our own communities feel like they need police, that it's a necessary evil in our schools," according to the We Came to Learn report. "When we began to challenge that, we got a lot of pushback. Folks were asking for alternatives. They wanted us to guarantee 100 percent that we would keep all children safe without police."

Dignity in Schools launched its Counselors Not Cops campaign in 2016, providing its 120 member groups with a set of resources to support campaigns to remove police from schools. DSC featured the new campaign in its annual Week of Action that year, with local organizations adapting the demands to their context and needs. Some, for example, called for reductions in police or limitations to their role in schools as a step on the road to full removal.

By 2017 the movement for police-free schools was in full swing. Building upon its #AssaultAt campaigns, AEJ and the Advancement Project sponsored the first national meeting for police-free schools in 2017 with the Black Organizing Project, Coleman Advocates, the Strategy Center, Power U, and El Puente. In September of 2018, the partners issued the We Came to Learn report on school policing and an accompanying action kit for local organizations. This grouping formalized itself into the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools and, in December of 2019, adopted a resolution calling for the abolition of police, declaring themselves abolitionists:

Police-Free Schools means dismantling school policing infrastructure, culture, and practice; ending school militarization and surveillance; and building a new liberatory education system. We believe removing police from our schools is a seed for removing them from our communities. We are abolitionists, grounded in our respective freedom traditions together. #PoliceFreeSchools, like abolition, is a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

Although community organizations had a growing number of compelling stories of abuse at the hands of police, the movement was hampered in its early days by a lack of systematic data about the presence of police in schools and their interactions with students, including assaults and arrests. However, the U.S. Office for Civil Rights began requiring schools to report the relevant data for the 2015-16 school year. In 2019, the ACLU published its analysis of the 2015-16 data, revealing that nearly half of all public schools were patrolled by police. The report revealed that 1.7 million students attended schools with police but no counselors; 3 million attended schools with police but no nurses; 6 million attended schools with police but no school psychologists; and 10 million students attended schools with police but no social workers. The report found that schools with police were more likely to criminalize students, with 3.5 times as many student arrests as those without police. Overall, there were more than 230,000 school-based referrals to law enforcement and 61,000 school arrests that year. Students of color and those with special needs were disproportionately criminalized, with Black students three times as likely to be arrested as white students; in some states they were eight times as likely. Black girls were particularly criminalized with arrest rates four times that of white girls. Meanwhile Black and Latino boys with disabilities constituted 3 percent of students but made up fully 12 percent of school arrests. Other research showed that LGBTQ+ students were twice as likely to be arrested and detained for a nonviolent offense compared to their peers, while immigrant and undocumented students also suffered from enhanced surveillance and threats of deportation. The ACLU report concluded that most arrests were not for violent behavior but for minor misbehavior, while other research also suggested that arrests were for infractions like "disturbing school" or "disorderly conduct."

There was no evidence that the presence of police made schools safer. Despite the tremendous growth in school resource officers across the country, no systematic studies have shown they have increased safety. An increasing number of studies, however, have shown the harmful effects of police in school, making schools less inclusive and more prone to racialized disciplinary measures. Instead of police, movement organizers called for restorative justice and the presence of peacebuilders in schools, as groups increasingly piloted these approaches.

Meanwhile, the movement for police-free schools and justice reinvestment campaigns fueled each other. Justice reinvestment calls for diverting funds from policing and criminal justice into support services, education, and community programming for youth. The Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles, for example, campaigned to remove funds from law enforcement to instead fund youth services.

Although prior to 2020 no district had removed police from schools, the number of partial victories - reducing police presence in schools and limiting its role - continued to mount. In the fall of 2017, as a result of a community-based organizing campaign, Toronto district public schools removed police from the 45 high schools where they had been stationed. Toronto is a Canadian rather than U.S. case, but the victory nevertheless inspired the U.S. movement by showing that a large, urban school district can operate safely without police. AEJ organizers traveled to Toronto to learn from the successful campaign. According to Stith, "We felt if it can happen in Toronto, it can happen here!"

Mass Protests Tip the Balance

When the mass protests against police racism erupted after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the police-free schools movement built on the foundation it had laid over the previous years to quickly push school districts to remove or defund police in schools. In short order, youth and parent organizing groups that had fought for years to push back against police in schools in Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco, Portland, Milwaukee and several other cities, won historic victories as school districts ended their contracts with school police. Youth organizers in places like Los Angeles got the district to cut the school police budget significantly.

BOP scored a major victory when it got the Board of Education to adopt its George Floyd Resolution to entirely eliminate the Oakland Schools Police Department, the first in the country to do so. Although BOP's original 2012 declaration of the goal for the complete removal of police from schools by 2020 was seen as "pie in the sky," the group had persisted. In 2019 BOP published an extensive People's Plan for Police-Free Schools and had already been lobbying for its passage when the 2020 protests erupted. With passage of the resolution, BOP won the reallocation of funds previously used for sworn police officers to student support positions and launched an inclusive, community-driven process to adopt a revised student safety plan that enhances student safety, learning, and well-being rather than criminalizing young people. As BOP organizer Jessica Black said to KQED a day after the Floyd resolution passed, "We're proposing to have students learn social skills, to have students learn how to build relationships, to have teachers learn how to build relationships. We're proposing to change the entire school culture and climate."

For many observers, the police-free schools movement seemed to emerge out of nowhere. In fact, however, it had been carefully prepared over the years by youth and parent organizing groups in places like Oakland and nurtured by the national movement to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Organizing groups had been active in almost every city that first defunded or removed police from schools. Groups like BOP had proposals in hand, had built relationships with sympathetic officials, and had educated a base of young people and parents ready to mobilize quickly. Momentum built rapidly from the early victories and by the end of 2020, 138 school districts announced they would remove police from schools.

Soon after, though, a "whitelash" set in, with some parents, typically white parents but with some support in communities of color, and the media sensationalizing incidents of violence at schools to call for the return of police to schools and the strengthening of disciplinary measures. This countermovement connected to a larger right-wing backlash against the gains of the anti-racist movement, calling for an end to teaching about critical race theory in schools - or, in reality, teaching anything about the history and current reality of U.S. racism. The movement is now in a complex period, with organizers in some places defending their gains against these attacks while organizers in other places push forward, and groups like Black Lives Matter at School and others help to create a larger movement to challenge white supremacy in public education and work toward creating true safety, humane treatment, and liberatory education for students in public schools.

Reflecting on this history, Stith notes that when young people and parents of color first started naming the school-to-prison pipeline and calling for an end to zero tolerance, "we were called crazy. Nobody believed us. After years of organizing, ending zero tolerance and the pipeline became the official position of the U.S. government. Now, police-free schools are the next frontier."

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Building the Foundation for Police-Free Schools

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By Mark R. Warren Illustrator: Howard Barry On Oct. 25, 2015, student Niya Kenny filmed a white school police officer body slamming her classmate, a Black 16-year-old girl named Shakara, to the floor during math class at SpringValley High School in Columbia, South Carolina.

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Youth deserve safety, support, education, and resources. Not policing and handcuffs.

That's why Black Swan Academy and many organizations and community members across DC are fighting for police-free schools.

We need your help - will you join the #PoliceFreeSchoolsDC campaign to support youth today?

Many people have been conditioned to believe that police keep us safe even though they harm, detain, and kill so many people, including school students.

Police make the classroom unsafe for youth, especially Black youth, ushering them into the school-to-prison pipeline and exposing them to state violence.

We demand DC Council immediately remove policing from schools.

They should use those funds and more to increase access to resources that youth across DC have said will actually promote safety.

This includes things like safe housing, affirming classrooms to learn and dream in, and support with navigating challenges and conflict.

Let's fight for the supportive world that youth deserve.

Tell your friends, family, and neighbors to support #PoliceFreeSchoolsDC.

Thank you to all the incredible coalition partners of Police-Free Schools DC, including:

Advocates for Justice and Education

ESOC

Georgetown Juvenile Justice Clinic & Initiative

Fair Budget Coalition/ Harriet's Wildest Dreams

Children's Law Center

Akoma Project DC

Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center

National Women's Law Center

Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs

DC Girls' Coalition

United We Dream DMV

Children's Law Center

ACLU-DC

Sunrise DC

Envisioning Safety On Our Campuses Now DC/MD

Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, DC

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Police-Free Schools - Black Swan Academy

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That's why Black Swan Academy and many organizations and community members across DC are fighting for police-free schools. We need your help - will you join the #PoliceFreeSchoolsDC campaign to support youth today? Many people have been conditioned to believe that police keep us safe even though they harm, detain, and kill so many people, including school students.

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Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice

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"The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at Schoolis an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system."
-Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times Bestselling Author

"Black Lives Matter at School is a remarkable contribution to understanding that education can be a powerful pathway to justice and liberation. Here is inspiration for anyone who cherishes young people both inside and outside of schools." -Barbara Smith, Cofounder the Combahee River Collective

"We need this book right now. The shadow-loving fungus of white supremacy won't continue to send its spores to infect our children if we act now to bring the curative light of anti-racist knowledge, compassion, and justice into their lives. Built upon the Black Lives Matter at School organization's Week of Action, this volume provides the adults in our educational institutions with inspiration, organizing principles, strategies, and examples to take 'bold action against anti-Blackness.' The authors - visionary educations of what is possible - call on all of us to radically reshape learning environments to make them safe, supportive, and transformative for all students (and teachers). Please read ASAP!" - Lisa Delpit, Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University

"There is no easy way to talk about the complexities of race facing our school system in America-but we have to talk about it if we are ever going to achieve the schools our children deserve. The Black Lives Matter at School movement has been disrupting the complacency of those who, for too long, have been comfortable not having these conversations about the impact of racism in the schools. Black Lives Matter at School is a playbook for undoing institutional racism in the education system. - Michael Bennett, NFL defensive lineman, Superbowl champion, and author, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

"This book asserts that we are at a critical moment in time, where the racial uprisings underpin the absolute need to transform education and it's foundational practices. Black Lives Matter is a movement sweeping the globe and affirms that our babies lives matter. It's time for educators to be bold, standing up for our students and communities. Our students are looking to us to lead the fight against injustice and dismantle systemic racism as we aspire to realize the schools our students deserve." - Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, NEA Black Caucus Chair

"This book makes the strong case for why we need to elevate Black lives and people in our curriculum and pedagogy year-round. This book serves as a blueprint to achieve this honorable goal." - José Luis Vilson, author, This Is Not A Test, A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education

" Black Lives Matter at School centers the humanity of our children. It is a sharp rebuke of white supremacy-the very thing that interrupts the healthy development of Black youth. School communities must affirm Black lives. Educators have to dismantle systems of oppression-systems that we influence daily. We have to be radically different from the missionary educator depicted in popular culture. BLM at School is essential. Period." - Stacy Davis Gates, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union

"Toni Morrison reminds us: 'If you can't imagine it, you can't have it.' This book helps us to imagine Black Lives Mattering in schools. With accounts from teachers across the country doing the work, along with student interviews, poems, posters, and historical background, this is a primer for anti-racist educators to see the way forward in terms of reshaping school curriculum, diversifying teacher hiring, and transforming school discipline." - Jeanne Theoharis, author, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

"The new book, is part documentary, part guide to this movement for racial & educational justice on school campuses" " Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice... springs from a movement that started several years ago to resist racism and imbue anti-racism in school curriculums as well as educational practices and policies." - Washington Post

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"The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at Schoolis an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system."

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13 Guiding Principles — D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Launched by Teaching for Change, D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice is a network of educators who seek to strengthen and deepen social justice teaching.

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What My Science Students Learned from the Story of Henrietta Lacks

By Gretchen Kraig-Turner

Illustrator: Keith Henry Brown

Every year when I distribute The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot to my biotechnology class, I am greeted with "Turner, this isn't English class!" And every year I tell my students, "I promise you: This book is going to change the way you think about science. Give it a chance."

I make this promise to my students because I know the beginning of the story will pique their interest. Skloot brilliantly describes the beginnings of both Henrietta Lacks, the woman, and HeLa, the first immortal cell line, in a way that gains the interest of a wide swath of students. Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, is quoted on the first page: "When I go to the doctor for checkups I always say my mother was HeLa. They get all excited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my blood pressure medicines and anti-depression pills . . . but they don't never explain more than just sayin, Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs, and made that polio vaccine. . . . But I always thought it was strange, if our mother's cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors? I used to get so mad. . . . But I don't got it in me no more to fight. I just want to know who my mother was."

Students who take my class out of a pure interest in science get what they came for in the descriptions of lab science and discoveries about cells and cancer. And, students who take my class because a family member or teacher said they should be in the biotech program get drawn in by family stories, the tales of Henrietta being shuffled around amongst family members and her children growing up without a mother - all with the ease of reading a well-told, captivating story. And students who have not seen themselves in science history hear the voices and stories of Black women front and center - sometimes for the first time - from the very beginning of this book.

When students come back the second day after getting the book, they are excited, saying: "OK, this book is alright" and "I didn't think I'd like it this much" and "She's Black?" and "Wait, her cells are still alive?"

Rebecca Skloot was a high school student at an alternative school in Portland, Oregon, when she first heard a story about a Black woman whose cells have immeasurably changed our understanding of the very basics of biology. Skloot was taking a community college course when an instructor mentioned Henrietta Lacks during a lecture on cell division. He told the class that Henrietta's cells had led to great discoveries, that her cells continued to live decades after her death in labs around the world, that her cells were the first to do this, to be immortal, and he told the class she was Black. At that point, this was about all that the scientific community really knew of Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cancer cells, which grow and divide very quickly and remain a laboratory staple today, would be used to add volumes to our understanding of cells, genetics, and a host of other fundamental areas of science. Skloot remained curious about Ms. Lacks as a person, and went on to write a book that told the story of Henrietta, her family, and how the cells came into the hands of doctors, scientists, and Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951.

Skloot's book on Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating account of her previously hidden story. The writing expertly weaves the journey of the Lacks family's tireless work to uncover the story of Henrietta's cells with both scientific and African American history. The basic narrative is that Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from Baltimore, sought care for cervical cancer in a segregated hospital, and in the process of doing so, white doctors and scientists took her cancer cells with dubious consent, believing that the patients of the "colored ward" were essentially trading being research subjects for health care. The impacts of this incident specifically, and inequalities in health care more generally, affected Henrietta's children and grandchildren immensely. The importance of her cells to the scientific community cannot be overstated, and yet the Lacks family never saw any of the money generated from the innumerable discoveries from the cells. Henrietta's descendants struggled with poverty, including battles with getting proper health care, and were left in the dark - the consent forms then were rudimentary, at best - about what doctors and scientists both took and found. One can infer that had Henrietta been white with more resources, either her cells would never have been taken in the first place or her family would have received recognition for their mother's profound contribution to science.

The book combines the science behind why her cells are so important with personal narrative in a unique way. As a science teacher in the only majority African American high school in Oregon, I thought my students would find the story an engaging way to learn about cells (particularly cell growth and cancer), how research protocols have evolved over the last 100 years, and about the intersections of institutionalized racism and biomedical history. We typically spend about six weeks on the book, and the richness of the story, both in science content and my students' ability to relate to the Lacks family, make this relatively long unit worthwhile.
Reading the Book to Teach the Book
Before reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I had never considered using a book that more resembles a novel than an academic science text in my classes. I initially thought we could maybe read a section of the book before doing some more serious work on how cells grow. The story would be a small feature of a cell unit, not cells being a section of a book unit. But, after reading the book, I couldn't pick out just one section or one passage and contain the powerful story to a mere sidenote to a cell unit.

As a science teacher, I had no idea how to teach books - this wasn't ever addressed in our pedagogy courses, nor did I have examples from other science teachers of how to do this. I wanted the process to be familiar to my students, so I worked with English teachers at my school to learn how they taught books. I learned how to do dialogue journals and teach students to take notes with a final paper in mind. When I read the book, I thought about what I would do if I were asked to write a paper on the story, and I picked several themes: Medical Apartheid (a term coined by Harriet Washington to describe racial inequity in health care), Informed Consent, Lab Science, and Scientific Discoveries. Then I re-read the book, this time keeping a dialogue journal with quotes on one side and my comments on the other. I divided my notebook into five sections with the themes listed above and a fifth one titled "Family." I created discussion questions for each chapter and found supplemental readings about cell culturing, cancer growth, and rights to one's own tissues and genetic codes (in subsequent years, the amount of supplemental articles on Henrietta exploded and this became easier). I also kept an eye out for when I could do labs alongside the reading to bring to life what the scientists did in the book.

As the unit developed over the years, more research has come out about Henrietta's cells, including bioethical violations such as publishing the genetic code of HeLa (which was a violation of her family's rights to their own genetic codes). Continuing to monitor the New York Times science section (where Rebecca Skloot has published updates to the initial narrative, including "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel" in 2013) helps tremendously with making sure the supplemental readings I give my students are current.

Other supplemental materials stemmed from students wanting to know more about the examples of medical apartheid discussed in the book. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a long-term study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on untreated syphilis in Black men that went on decades after the cure was found, is referenced several times throughout the book, but the most chilling descriptions of how African American people were treated comes in a chapter called "Night Doctors." This chapter outlines much of why African American people have reasons to distrust the medical establishment and includes stories of enslaved people being used for "gruesome research," Black people being kidnapped off the streets to be used in medical studies and as cadavers, and more recent studies looking for genes that could predict criminal behavior by studying Black families. Dr. Harriet Washington's book Medical Apartheid is an excellent resource for students wishing to learn more, as is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Cell Culture
Cell culturing is central to the beginning of the book. Scientists tried for decades to grow human cells outside of the human body before finding Henrietta's immortal cells. While we obviously can't grow human cells in the classroom, the process of even much more basic cell culturing was new to my students. I designed a lab on yeast culturing, a eukaryotic cell often used in genetics experiments, that we did as we read about the first ventures of human cell culture. The lab was a simple exploration into how to maximize growth and minimize contamination. And the supplies to do such labs are actually relatively inexpensive. I used baker's yeast from the grocery store for my cell source, and ordered basic petri dishes and a yeast-peptone-dextrose (YPD) media. Students made a media with 25g of YPD and 10-15g of agar per liter of distilled water and poured this into the petri dishes, which then sat overnight to solidify. We mixed a small amount of the yeast with table sugar in warm water (just as you'd do when baking bread) and then poured that mixture onto the plates. We grew the yeast at both room temperature (25 C) and in an incubator at 37 C (human body temperature). When growth didn't occur or contamination from bacteria took over the yeast growth, I tell my students, "These issues are the same as what the scientists in the book faced. This is real science." We work to problem-solve the issues and compare growth at different temperatures. We also discuss how contamination occurs and why sterile environments are so important. I ask, "Why do you think contamination can occur if we keep the lid open too long?" or "How come yeast grows best at body temperature instead of room temperature?"
Teaching About Cancer
As we continued to read the book, I found that students needed to know more about cancer and what happens when the mechanisms of the cell cycle go awry. My students had a lot of questions: "Why can't the scientists use any of her cells? Why only the cancer ones?" I answer that "Only the cancer ones have the mutation that causes the cells to divide uncontrollably." Another student, Ny'osha, wanted to know "If Deborah (her daughter) gets cancer, will those cells be immortal too?" "Not necessarily," I responded. "This could depend on if her cancer was purely genetic or due to viruses." And Marti, somewhat indignantly, wanted to know "If her husband hadn't been messing around, would Henrietta have even gotten that cancer?" "Probably not!" I answered. "Let's talk about oncoviruses!"

The first year I taught this unit I did a review on mitosis and then directed my students to the National Institutes of Health's websites on cancer. Each student did a worksheet on mitosis and wrote a generalized summary of how cancer works. Henrietta's cancer was more robust than most cancers, the vast majority of which would not survive outside the human body. The disruptions to the cell cycle that her cancer caused are representative of many cancers and it's important for the students to understand how cancer cells generally differ from healthy cells. For the last few years of teaching this unit, I also use an article titled "UW researchers report on genome of aggressive cervical cancer that killed Henrietta Lacks" and show a PowerPoint on HPV and cervical cancer by Lydia Breen and Rebecca Veilleux from an MIT/HHMI Summer Teacher Institute.

My students write short responses to questions such as: What was the "perfect storm" that went wrong in Henrietta's cervical cells? What is a haplotype and what unique information does it give scientists? Why was publishing Henrietta's genome problematic for her family? Why must participants give materials (like cells) for research to occur? Explain the relationship between telomeres and cancer cells' immortality.
Bioethical Issues
The cell culturing and cancer portions take up about the first four of the six-week unit. I teach these as short units that cover basic reviews of cell function and division. As well as diving deeper into those subjects, we set aside time to have discussions around the bioethical questions raised in the book. Discussions take place as a whole class and in small reading groups that I establish when we first start the book. The reading groups meet weekly and discuss a set of questions (some of which are from Random House's Teacher Guide) for each section. I write out the questions and give them to the students before they read the corresponding chapter. In these groups, the students are able to relate the science they learned in class to the Lacks family story. The book details Henrietta's life, from being raised, along with her cousins, by her grandfather after losing her mother at age 4, to having five children with one of these cousins. Her life started on a tobacco farm in rural Virginia and ended in Baltimore.

While Henrietta is most famous for her immortal cells, my students relate to her on a human level. One student, Asianique Savage, opened her final essay with: "A woman with brown skin as smooth as the back of a chocolate bar, thick long hair as strong as rope, who made sure her nails were always done, painted with bright red nail polish, was brought into the world August 1, 1920." This sentence is not what one typically thinks of as "science writing," and yet it captures how my students see Henrietta.

Deborah Lacks, Henrietta's youngest daughter, is a central character in the book. Her anger at losing her mother and not fully understanding the science behind why her mom is so famous creates some tension throughout the book. In response to the question "What does Deborah mean when she says (p. 235), 'I do want to go see them cells, but I'm not ready yet'?" Keisha said that she sees "why Deborah is always so mad and she's stressed all the time. She doesn't have her mom, the doctors disrespect her and her family, and they're poor while all those people make money off of drug patents. She didn't even really know what a cell was, let alone why her mother's were still alive. It's complicated for her."

Through the story of the Lacks family, my students are also able to explore the deeper questions of how race intersects with medical history as a whole. Questions like: "Describe HL's medical history. Why do you think she cancelled appointments, stopped treatments, and refused tests?" "How were HL's tissues obtained? Did she consent? Does it matter?" and "Why did the doctors in the '50s use patients from public wards for research?" were designed to get students to think about how Henrietta, as a Black woman, could have been fearful of going to the hospital. Henrietta's distrust in medical institutions is still seen today in Black culture as described by Vann R. Newkirk II in a 2016 article in The Atlantic titled "A Generation of Bad Blood":

Research has long suggested that the ill effects of the Tuskegee Study extend beyond those men and their families to the greater whole of Black culture. Black patients consistently express less trust in their physicians and the medical system than white patients, are more likely to believe medical conspiracies, and are much less likely to have common, positive experiences in health-care settings. These have all been connected to misgivings among Black patients about Tuskegee and America's long history of real medical exploitation of Black people.

My students understand this at a personal level: "They would never take the cells from a white woman like that," claims Ty. "But look at what was accomplished with them. They shoulda asked her and gotten her permission though," adds Aliyah. Near the end of the book, I ask my students, "Do the scientists owe the Lacks family anything? Does the lack of consent impact your thoughts on reparations to the family?" Many of my students wrestled with this question as part of their final paper.
The Culminating Paper
Once we are about two-thirds through the book, I have the students start to work on their final papers. The students' composition books were divided into the same categories that are choices for their final papers: Medical Apartheid, Informed Consent, Lab Science, Scientific Discoveries, and a fifth category, Family, as this theme is so critical to the story that my students could not write any paper without including the story of the Lacks family. As they read the book they jotted down their notes in these five sections, and for most students, one of the categories eventually emerged as the one they are most interested in. This category was then the students' focus as they finished the book. We use class time for writing the five- to 10-page final paper, and I encourage students to utilize their reading groups - and me - to go through outlines and drafts.

Many students pick one of the first two themes: Informed Consent and Medical Apartheid. This speaks to how my students related and were interested in the parts of the book that spoke directly to racial biases in medical care and research.

The criteria for these themes are prescribed in my directions to the students. Each section has four to five content-based criteria. Many of my students are not used to writing papers that blend both academic and conversational voices, and I have noticed that without content-specific criteria, my students tend to leave the science out of the science papers!

I have found the students are much more comfortable deeply explaining the family issues and generalizing the science content. But the papers that are written using the content-based criteria sheets reflect the understanding of the undeniable contributions to science from using Henrietta Lacks' cells with the perspective and acknowledgement that the matriarch of an African American family is at the very center of these scientific advances and discussions.

Here is an excerpt from Desiree' DuBoise's paper:

The misuse of Henrietta Lacks' cells, as well as the mistreatment of her family, was unethical. A big reason for the lack of information given to the Lacks family about the use of Henrietta's cells was the fact that there was no precedent for how to go about using and profiting from cell research; it hadn't been done before. The fact that the cells came from a poor Black woman only heightened the unlikelihood of doctors and researchers taking time out to meet the needs of the family (Johns Hopkins). The name of the owner of the cells went unknown for decades. The HeLa cells were thought to belong to either Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane, or Helen Larson (Skloot, 1). Many have wondered why none of Henrietta's family recognized her picture in articles written or knew about the studies using her cells. The Lacks family was poor and Black and living in the South; most of them had no more than a middle school education, so they wouldn't have had access to articles and journals that were talking about the use of Henrietta's cells.

Giving the cells a name and a story validated my students in a way that is not often seen in our science classrooms. Black students are frequently pushed out of classrooms in a multitude of ways; we need to seek ways to bring Black students' voices into every subject, and particularly into STEM classes where Black students are underrepresented. Terri Watson, in an Education Week web series on "Black Girls and School Discipline," said, "I think Black girls are seen as either invisible or they're problematized." Henrietta Lacks and the story of her cells exemplifies both. As a Black woman, Henrietta was separated into the "colored ward" of the hospital where her cells were seen as payment for her health care, and her cells were identified as hers only after decades of invisibility. Dedicating significant time to learn the story of a Black woman to whom biomedical research owes a great deal was time well spent. What we learned was more than the sum of Henrietta's story and the science content of the book.

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A science teacher includes Black voices and Black history in her classroom by building curriculum around The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In doing so, she shows how nonfiction books should not be relegated to language arts but can be effective in a science classroom.

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men

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As a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, students in Beth Barkley's Human Rights and Social Action classes at Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) created a tribute to the young Black men who have lost their lives to police brutality. Inspired by Kim Spott's #LastWords lesson and the Good Men Project's #LastWords: A Tribute to Men Killed by Police, students started by reflecting on the last words of young Black men.

Students viewed a series of 12 quotes. For each quote, they wrote their initial thoughts, feelings, reactions, and questions/wonderings.

At first, students were not provided any context for the quotes, and initial quotes read, "Mom, I'm going to college" and "I love you too!" After a pivotal quote that read, "....," which students later found out was because Jonathan Ferrell was shot before he even had an opportunity to speak his last words, it became more obvious how the quotes were connected with explicit, innocent questions and statements like, "Officers, why do you have your guns out?" and "I don't have a gun. Stop shooting."

The second time students saw each quote, they were provided context and again reflected in their notebooks, many of them in disbelief, disgust, and outrage that someone could so wrongly and unjustly be killed just because of the color of their skin.

Following the reflection, each group was assigned one of the young black men to research and to learn more about, not as victims of police brutality and injustice, but as people, sons, brothers, fathers, students, etc. Ms. Barkley and her students discussed how many marginalized groups are silenced. Many are quietly forgotten or else only remembered as being shot and killed, as a statistic, which is why this project is so important. The discussion continued, "We cannot let blackness be a crime in our country. We must advocate for change." Ms. Barkley and her students decided to start with education.

They wanted to remember and honor the young Black men for their accomplishments, ambitions, dreams for the future, and for their love and kindness. In order to do this, after researching each individual, students created posters, highlighting who each young Black man was as a person. The posters also include pictures, many of them in graduation caps and gowns or smiling for their followers on social media and finally, their last words.

The posters are displayed in the hallway at Cardozo with the message, "Rest in Power."

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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As a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action , students in Beth Barkley's Human Rights and Social Action classes at Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) created a tribute to the young Black men who have lost their lives to police brutality.

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow

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On February 23, Mimi Eisen, co-author ofErasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, was in conversation with Michelle Coles, author of Black Was the Ink, to discuss the parallels between the Reconstruction Era and today. They further discussed what current school districts' standards reveal about the present-day failures to accurately teach Reconstruction.

Participants in this virtual event had time to collaborate, share resources, and reflect on their own Reconstruction teaching and learning experiences. Attendees received a copy of Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle or a picture or YA book connected to the 13 guiding principles for Black Lives Matter at School.

Participants shared:

I appreciated Michelle's passionate energy talking about the book and the resources that inspired her writing. It's so wonderful that she made historical events relatable and engaging for younger readers. I loved her approach of using fiction to "distill" information about the Reconstruction era and make clear connections to events that are happening today.

Reconstruction is truly the missing link in the U.S. History Curriculum and it has allowed people to truly not understand why we are still where we are today.

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Past Is Prologue: How Lessons from the Reconstruction Era Can Help Us Build a Better Tomorrow - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Mimi Eisen, co-author of Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction , was in conversation with Michelle Coles, author of Black Was the Ink , to discuss the parallels between the Reconstruction Era and today.

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

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Unearthing Genius & Joy with Gholdy Muhammad

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When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction - Zinn Education Project

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By Adam Sanchez Every day seems to bring new horrors as the U.S. president’s racist rhetoric and policies have provided an increasingly encouraging environment for attacks on Black people and other communities of color. The acquittal of yet another police officer accused of murdering a Black man in…

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BLM at School is committed to teaching truthful histories and amassing the powerful practices, creative tools, and key strategies by which past, present, and future generations can advance the struggle of Black liberation. This summer, we renewed our curriculum work to create a more process-oriented, dialogic, secure, and empowering space for curriculum and community-building. This all-volunteer effort to map, index, and ensure continued wide access to identity-affirming, justice-oriented educational materials across the lifespan is more necessary than ever.

DONATE TO SUPPORT OUR MOVEMENT TO RECLAIM OUR CLASSROOMS AS INCUBATORS FOR INCLUSIVITY, EQUITY, & JUSTICE.

We are grateful for all of the contributions from educators and organizers from around the country who worked collaboratively to curate a variety of classroom resources for every age group. These resources are all free of charge and meant to be shared and used. The goal of these lessons and activities is to challenge racism and oppression and providing students with the vocabulary and tools needed to take action. If you are interested in joining the team please click here and email Chris Rogers.

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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Medical Apartheid: Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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Medical Apartheid: Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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By Gretchen Kraig-Turner

When I think of Black Lives Matter, what comes to mind first is police brutality and the resulting lost lives of young men and women in recent times. But as a science teacher, I know that racism in the United States also has roots that extend deep into the history of medical research.

Medical apartheid, the systematic oppression and exclusion of African Americans in our healthcare systems, has existed since the time of slavery and continues today in medical offices and research universities. What care people receive, what diseases are studied, and who is included in research groups are still delineated by race.

The term medical apartheid is explained in Harriet Washington's 2007 work, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Washington documents how "diverse forms of racial discrimination have shaped both the relationship between white physicians and black patients and the attitude of the latter towards modern medicine in general."

Medical apartheid is a reality that many of my students and their families face. I teach in the only predominantly African American high school in Oregon. Being talked down to by doctors is a common experience, as is leaving the doctor's office without receiving adequate care. One of my students told us that her uncle's treatment for a heart condition was so substandard, her family sued the hospital for discrimination. Critically examining the history of medical research is a way to bring the experiences of my students and their families into the classroom, and a way to connect our study of bioethics to the often hidden history of African American men and women who fought for their dignity and rights against a medical system that treated them like lab rats.

So I begin my Research and Medicine course, a senior-level course in our Health Sciences and Biotechnology Program, with an exploration of bioethics, a theme that continues throughout all of the units. We focus on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (TSS), a chapter of scientific and medical history rarely discussed in high school. Particularly as a white educator, I am conscious that leading the school year with a unit on a deeply painful example of Black oppression needs to be done with care. is is the capstone course of the program, and I already know the students when the class starts. Without a level of trust and mutual respect already established, this unit would not be as successful. If I did not know my students well, I would wait until later in the year, after a safe space had been created. Another reason to wait is that the TSS leads to discussions about cell types (particularly types of bacteria) and epidemiology, which are typically covered later in the year.

Day one of the unit starts with me asking a simple question: "In what ways are you in control of your health and in what ways are you not in control?" I list a couple examples: "I'm in control of how often I exercise but I'm not in control of air pollution in my neighborhood." The students do a think-pair-share with the question, scribbling down answers and then sharing with their lab bench partner.

As we start to answer the question as a whole class, I write their answers on the whiteboard under the headers "In Control" and "Not in Control." Pretty quickly, someone disagrees about the appropriate header.

"One way I'm in control of my health is what food I eat," Robert says. I write "foods" under In Control.

Charene asks, "What if good food isn't available?"

Kia yells out, "Our school lunch is terrible but it's free. Is that a choice? I don't eat that junk!"

After more examples are generated, I ask: "Who does have a choice about what food they eat? Why do some people have different levels of access to doctors? How come some neighborhoods have better air quality? Why can't some people go running safely at night?"

Soon nothing in the In Control column is safe from my kids' scrutiny. We talk about each item through a social justice lens. For example, going to the doctor regularly is tied to insurance-which is tied to job and education level-and access to transportation. Exercising is linked to living in a safe neighborhood, child-care, money for gyms, air quality, and concern about what police see when a middle-aged white woman is running vs. a Black or Brown youth. The class inevitably concludes that health and healthcare are a complex mix of choice and circumstance, and that those with more social and economic power have a different level of choice.

Sade sums it up: "None of this is a choice for poor people, just for people who can buy whatever they choose, and who has that kind of money isn't always fair."
The Tuskegee Mixer
My students' insights on these intersections in our healthcare system lead into a mixer on the TSS. The TSS exemplifies how race, class, and healthcare have intersected in this country, all themes the students raised during our warm-up.

The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" (now formally known as the "U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee"), which began in 1932 in rural Alabama, spanned most of the 20th century. African American men with syphilis (the sexually transmitted disease or a different strain of the bacteria known as yaws) were observed, yet received no treatment. They were denied standard treatment-heavy metal treatments at first, and later penicillin-and forbidden to seek medical treatment elsewhere. The architects of the study went as far as barring the men from the World War II draft, where they would have been treated with penicillin. The study continued into the early 1970s, when a whistle-blower, fed up with trying to get the attention of his superiors, took the story to a journalist. After the article appeared, Congress held hearings that suspended the study and led to passage of the National Research Act, which includes a mandated code of ethics for research on human subjects.

"We're going to look at a time in medical history when informed consent didn't exist," I tell the students as I introduce the mixer. I give each student the role of a study subject, a doctor, a public health official, a widow, or a journalist. There are roles that show the damage inflicted, and also roles that show the resistance and whistleblowing that ultimately exposed and ended the study. For example:

Charles Pollard was a participant who later became an activist:

I am a Macon County farmer, and I started in the Tuskegee Study in the early 1930s. I recall the day in 1932 when some men came by and told me I would receive a free physical examination if I came by the one-room school near my house. So I went on over and they told me I had bad blood. . . . And that's what they've been telling me ever since.

I was at a stockyard in Montgomery, and a newspaper woman started talking to me about the study in Tuskegee. She asked me if I knew Nurse Rivers. That's how I discovered I was one of the men in the study. Once I found out how those doctors at Tuskegee used the African American men of Macon County in their study, I went to see Fred Gray. He was Rosa Parks' and Martin Luther King Jr.'s attorney. He took our case and sued the federal government for using us as guinea pigs without our consent.

Being in this study violated my rights. After I found out about the real purpose of the study, I told reporters, "All I knew was that [the doctors and nurses] just kept saying I had the bad blood-they never mentioned syphilis to me, not even once."

Other roles include Nurse Eunice Rivers and Dr. Eugene Dibble, both African Americans who worked as researchers in the study, supporting the study perhaps as a way to bring both money and prestige to Tuskegee. Roles of the white doctors who designed and orchestrated the study include upsetting quotes. For example, Dr. Thomas Murrell, an advisor to the study's leaders, said:

So the scourge sweeps among them. Those that are treated are only half cured, and the effort to assimilate into a complex civilization drives their diseased minds until the results are criminal records. Perhaps here, in conjunction with tuberculosis, will be the end of the Negro problem. Disease will accomplish what man cannot.

Once the students read, understand, and are prepared to play the person in their role sheet, I ask everyone to walk around the room, telling people who they are and learning about other participants in the drama.

Their initial curiosity quickly changes to disbelief for some and hardening anger for others. They fill out a question sheet as they meet the other characters, and then spend a few minutes reflecting on questions raised by the mixer, and what surprised, angered, or left them hopeful. "Why did they do this? What did they learn?"

"Why didn't they give the men penicillin?"

"How long did this last?"

Students start to make the connections between the study and the pre-World War II eugenics movement they studied previously. As David points out, "This is a lot like what the Nazi doctors did in Auschwitz."
Whistle-blowers
Then we transition into reading the article that brought national attention to the study. In 1966, Peter Buxtun, a U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) venereal disease investigator, tried to alert his superiors about the immorality and lack of scientific ethics of the study, but they would not listen. In 1968, William Carter Jenkins, an African American statistician at PHS, called for an end to the study in a small anti-racist newsletter he founded. Nothing changed. Finally, Buxtun went to the mainstream press, and Associated Press journalist Jean Heller broke the story in the Washington Evening Star. She begins:

Washington, July 25 [1972]-For 40 years the United States Public Health Service has conducted a study in which human beings with syphilis, who were induced to serve as guinea pigs, have gone without medical treatment for the disease and a few have died of its late effects, even though an effective therapy was eventually discovered.

Officials of the health service who initiated the experiment have long since retired. Current officials, who say they have serious doubts about the morality of the study, also say that it is too late to treat the syphilis in any surviving participants.

The students also read the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's description of syphilis, including the progression of the disease and recommended treatment, and a summary I created of other relevant information.

Then I assign some writing: Using these resources and what you learned from meeting everyone in the mixer, write a first-person testimony that could have been used at the congressional hearings that followed Heller's story. You can be the same person you portrayed in the mixer, or someone else. Explain why you think the study happened, your understanding of the disease itself, and if reparations are appropriate or not. Explain your reasons.

These are quick-writes, not final pieces, but aimed at getting students to understand the human lives behind the medical facts. Lejay writes from the perspective of a widow of one of the men in the study:

I am Ruth Fields and I became a widow during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. My husband passed away from the effects of syphilis. . . . In the early 1920s, syphilis was a major health issue and concern. In 1932, a study was conducted of 399 men with syphilis and 201 without, the men were given occasional assessments, and were told they were being treated. In 1936, local physicians were asked to help with the study, but not treat the men, and to follow the men until death. Penicillin became a treatment option for syphilis but the men in the study couldn't receive it. . . .

I endured so much hurt, pain, and loss because of this study, and I just want everyone who was involved to be punished for their actions, because they hurt and killed and destroyed so many lives.

Shirene writes from the point of view of one of the men in the study:

I am Roy Douglas. Poor, uneducated African American men like myself experienced an outbreak of syphilis. We were sent to hospitals for having "bad blood." Doctors didn't know how the STD worked, the side effects, or the symptoms. To get the information that they needed, they used us as test dummies. Over 400 of us were denied help, medicine, and the proper treatment for years. Some men suffered from mild symptoms like rashes, then spots appeared on the surface of their skin. With time, their nerves, brains, and more shut down. . . . In 1945, penicillin was finally accepted as a treatment for syphilis.

After more than 30 years of researching, the study finally ended in 1972. I personally feel like the study was a small version of a genocide. . . . It was unnecessary and wrong to use poor, Black men as guinea pigs for experiments. Out of the whole dehumanizing study, the only positive outcome was the cure. ere should have been more rules or procedures set up to maintain the health of the sick men. No one deserves to die when there is some type of medicine to cure them. I believe that every person that lent a hand in the study should have gone to prison.

Where Do We Go from Here?
There is so much of the TSS that is hard to swallow. The sheer length-more than 40 years-is astounding for any longitudinal study, let alone one that watched men die from a brutal infection that attacks the nervous system. The fact that researchers went to great lengths to keep the men from finding out that there was a simple cure shows the purpose was not to find treatment. That the study continued throughout and after the Civil Rights Movement is perplexing and contrary to a narrative of racial equity so often spun in history books. But my students' anger is often more personal.

The students are not paranoid. The United States has a history of funding unethical studies on vulnerable populations. We read articles about similar cases in which U.S. doctors and scientists took advantage of vulnerable populations-from sterilizing female prisoners in California to infecting prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis.

It's at this point that I ask students to write up their own code for bioethical human research: If you were in charge of how and what research could be conducted, what limitations would you place? How would you define informed consent? How would you guarantee informed consent? Is anyone off limits? If not, how do you guarantee that they are not being taken advantage of by unscrupulous researchers?

After writing their own codes, I distribute copies of the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report. The students then write a reflection on how their codes differ and what might be missing from each of the lists: How is your code similar to the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report? How is it different? What did you mention that should be added to those codes?

With their bioethical codes hung in the hallway leading to my classroom and armed with the knowledge that science isn't always ethical, I give students their first major assignment of the year: a research paper on a bioethics topic of their choice.

Before we began this course with a study of the TSS, I read papers about artificially extending life or genetically modified creatures that sounded more like science fiction than real issues affecting my students and their families. But now that we begin with an exploration of bioethics rooted in the history of the TSS, the papers have become more interesting and personal. I still give the students a list of bioethics topics from the CDC website, but through conversations in class and students opening up about their own experiences, the topics have increased in relevance and student engagement. Now students write about why mortality rates of cancers are different for people of different races. They explore how U.S. scientists have engineered studies taking place in Latin America. One young woman wrote a history of gynecology in the United States, from unanesthetized surgeries of women who were enslaved through much more recent forced sterilizations of women of color. Another student wrote about medical experiments by Japanese doctors in Chinese prisoner of war camps during World War II. They now write about subjects that tomorrow's doctors and researchers need to understand in order to combat the idea that the health and healthcare of some do not matter as much as that of others.
RESOURCES Tuskegee Syphilis Study Mixer Materials [PDF]
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2016. Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs): Syphilis. cdc.gov/std/syphilis.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2016. U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee: The Tuskegee Timeline. cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm.

Tuskegee University. 2016. About the USPHS Syphilis Study.

tuskegee.edu/about_us/centers_of_excellence/bioethics_center/about_the_usphs_ syphilis_study.aspx.

Washington, Harriet. 2006. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. First Anchor Books.

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Medical Apartheid: Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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Students in a bioethics class are horrified to learn about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, during which African American men were denied treatment for syphilis. They draw connections to other medical injustices and write their own codes of ethics for medical research.

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Because we are in the middle of a unit on poetry, we worked with PEN/Faulkner's Writers in Schools program to bring two local poets to the classroom. We received personal copies of by Teri Ellen Cross Davis. in advance of her visit. In order to prepare, we read a number of poems that explore the themes of family history and finding moments of joy. While visiting the classroom, Ms. Cross Davis read from her book and engaged students in a writing prompt that focused on these moments of joy as resistance. Students are using this prompt to add to their culminating poetry portfolio that is due at the end of the unity. As we continued to read from Haint after the visit, students are more engaged in their close reading because they have met the author in person.

Wednesday

As we studied poems by Teri Ellen Cross Davis and Alan King (our Thursday visitor) throughout the week, students also participated in a modified version a lesson called #LastWords.

In this lesson, students created images for a series of phrases which are the last words of people of color killed by police officers. After creating the images, students chose one of the victims to research. After the brief research, students wrote poems for their portfolio that begin and end with the last words of the person they chose. Students learned and shared their knowledge about Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, and others as they crafted and polished their poems.

Thursday

Alan King's visit took on a slightly different flavor than Ms. Cross Davis' visit earlier in the week. Mr. King's book Point Blank enabled us to examine stereotypes and the experiences in his life that led him to write poetry. By highlighting these experiences, students felt validated to write about their own experience as well. By meeting and interacting with writers of color, students began to feel more comfortable with seeing their own selves as writers. Each visit culminated with pictures with the authors and books signed to the students.

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A Week of Poetry for Black Lives - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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While we try to make decisions that elevate our students of color all year long, the focus on Black Lives Matter Week of Action at School presents a unique opportunity to concentrate our efforts in order to create the best "soil" to help our students grow.

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Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

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Elementary and Middle | High School | Adult | Teachers

Below are recommended books for students and teachers on the Reconstruction era in the United States.

The Zinn Education Project Teach Reconstruction Campaign offers lessons for middle and high school, a student campaign to make Reconstruction history visible in their communities, and an annotated list of recommended teaching guides, student-friendly books, primary document collections, and films.

Most of the books on these lists are linked for more information or purchase to Bookshop (an indie bookstore platform) and / or Powells.com (an independent, unionized bookstore). A small percentage from book sales through these links goes to Teaching for Change.

Titles with reviews on this site are noted with an asterisk (*).

See more recommended titles on these lists: Civil Rights Teaching, Black History, Slavery, Resistance, and Reparations

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Elementary and Middle | High School | Adult | Teachers Below are recommended books for students and teachers on the Reconstruction era in the United States.

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By March 13, the last day of in-person classes in Washington, D.C., I had moved all desks in my classroom six feet apart and encouraged students to remain calm, use hand sanitizer, have empathy for other teachers and students, but to take precautions.

It was clear to my students, who live in every region of the city and are overwhelmingly students of color, other teachers, and the entire staff at Hardy Middle School that the coronavirus, coupled with a lack of response or preparation, would change our lives for the unforeseeable future. . .

I originally planned to complete a culminating group discussion on the Indian Removal Act, using the Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play at the Zinn Education Project. But I also knew my students were being inundated with more articles, graphs, and research on the pandemic. Xenophobia was also on the rise as people across the country used racist language to describe the coronavirus. I wanted to do whatever my students wanted to do.

So I asked them.

I had students take a survey during the first week of April on whether we should talk in more detail about the Indian Removal Act or hold a tribunal on the coronavirus. Fifty-four out of the 60 students in class that day said let's have a tribunal on who's to blame for the crisis in the United States.

I chose to write a tribunal, rather than a mixer lesson or research-based activity, as the students had already mentioned that the tribunal on Columbus found in the Rethinking Schools book Rethinking Columbus was one of their favorite lessons of the school year. In addition, by March, I knew that my students' generation was being blamed for something they were not responsible for - their own death and oppression. So I wanted to write a lesson to help them formulate their own language to fight back.

Students commented that information about the coronavirus was everywhere, and they felt overwhelmed. But were they overwhelmed with the same information? Was the information accurate? Was the information racist? I wanted to consider the fact that my students come from 13 different elementary schools and live in every ward in the District of Columbia. I could not just tell the story with different news items. I wanted to create a lesson to empower them to tell their story to me and to others. What did they know? What had they read? And how was it affecting their understanding of this crisis? What was wrong in society and how should we change it?

And that was the most important part of this lesson: students writing a 10-point program - inspired by the Black Panthers' 10-point program, adopted in 1966 - on how to prevent crises like this in the future.

I asked students how it compared to other trial lessons (Columbus, Reconstruction, etc). This one does require more media literacy and research than the others, but in the words of one student: "It was easier because I have been thinking about who is to blame for months."

- Tracey Barrett (@traceyebarrett) March 25, 2021

TEACHERS: We'd love your feedback after using this lesson. Submit your reflections, student comments, modifications, questions, and more. In appreciation for your story, we will send you a free copy of the Rethinking Schools book, Teaching for Black Lives.

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Who's to Blame? A People's Tribunal on the Coronavirus Pandemic - Zinn Education Project

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Teaching Activity. By Caneisha Mills. This people's tribunal begins with the premise that a heinous crime is being committed as tens of millions of people's lives are in danger due to COVID-19. But who was responsible for this crime? Students weigh the evidence.

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Resistance 101: Activists for Social Justice

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Resistance 101: Activists for Social Justice

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One student went into detail about the story of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and how his death highlighted the fight for voting rights.

Pepper then led his students through a discussion of terms such as strike, boycott, and community grassroots organizing. Students defined the differences between the terms and came up with examples of each.

Students each received a bio of an activist for social justice. They were instructed to read their bios, underline key terms, and (in role) ask each other the following questions:

How would you identify yourself
What issues do you care about?
What strategies did you use to protest/resist

In the debrief of the lesson, students listed people they wanted to learn more about, including: Bob Moses, Linda Sarsour, Paul Robeson, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Winona LaDuke, and Bayard Rustin.

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Resistance 101: Activists for Social Justice - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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One student went into detail about the story of Jimmie Lee Jackson, and how his death highlighted the fight for voting rights. Pepper then led his students through a discussion of terms such as strike, boycott, and community grassroots organizing. Students defined the differences between the terms and came up with examples of each.

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Safety does not exist when Black and Brown young people are forced to interact with a system of policing that views them as a threat and not as students. For many Black and Brown youth, the presence of police in their schools disrupts their learning environments. There is a culture clash that exists between law enforcement and the learning environment: police enforce criminal laws, while schools are supposed to nurture students. This report addresses the stark reality that police in schools is an issue of American racial disparity that requires deep structural change. We will explore the question of why police are in schools at all and conclude that police are incongruent with the educational environment we envision for our children.

First, this report examines the advent of policing practices in America's public schools and their historical roots in suppressing Black and Latino student movement and the criminalization of Black childhood. We discuss the documented harms of school policing, including the disparate impact that policing has on students of color, students with disabilities, and students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LQBTQIA).

The report centers the voices of young people from around the country who describe the everyday indignities that they experience at the hands of school police. It also, for the first time, catalogues known assaults of young people by school police officers. The report shines a spotlight on three particular cases where young people were assaulted by school police and how their communities responded. These case studies - in Oakland, CA, in Philadelphia, PA, and in Spring Valley, SC, serve as models in the fight to end school policing. The report chronicles how Black and Brown youth have used organizing and advocacy to advance a vision of school safety that is not reliant on policing.

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We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools

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Safety does not exist when Black and Brown young people are forced to interact with a system of policing that views them as a threat and not as students. For many Black and Brown youth, the presence of police in their schools disrupts their learning environments.

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Lead Poisoning: Bringing Social Justice to Chemistry 

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Lead Poisoning: Bringing Social Justice to Chemistry 

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Bringing social justice to chemistry

By Karen Zaccor

Illustrator: Kelly Hayes

Chicago Light Brigade demonstrators protesting lead contamination outside Gale Elementary, June 2014.
Photo by Kelly Hayes

I've been reading Rethinking Schools for years, wondering "How do these teachers get such great engagement, such profound thinking from their students?" Like many science teachers, I struggle to incorporate social justice topics in my science classes, especially in chemistry. I can't send students off to college unfamiliar with basics like the periodic table, but none of them comes to class excited about metals vs nonmetals or the significance of valence electrons.

And then the catastrophe of lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, hit the media. The stories exposed how in early 2014 Flint's governor-appointed city manager, in a cost-saving move, decided that the primarily African American city, already reeling from high poverty and unemployment rates, would get its water from the highly corrosive Flint River rather than continuing to use Lake Huron. The health problems this created were compounded by the decision to save an additional $100 a day by not adding anti-corrosive agents. City, state, and national officials brushed off residents' complaints for months while the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality falsified data to minimize the lead problem. By the time a newly elected mayor declared a state of emergency, the percent of children under 6 with elevated blood lead levels (BLLs) had doubled; in the most affected neighborhoods, almost 16 percent of young children had been poisoned. The devastating effects of these decisions and the racism behind them were laid bare for all to see.

Because the Flint crisis is shining a light on lead poisoning nationally, it seemed a perfect topic for my chemistry class. Lead poisoning is also a problem in Chicago, where I teach. So I thought it would resonate with my students, many of whom were already interested in social justice issues.

My main objective for the unit was to get my students to see how a science-based issue in their own city was affecting them personally. I wanted them to realize that learning about it could empower them to take action.

Lead in Water, Lead in Paint

We kicked off the second semester and the new unit with a brainstorm about what students had heard about Flint. The crisis was news to many students, but a few had heard about the lead in the water. Some reflected, as Justin did, that "Flint happened because they don't care about Black people."

"Flint is a scandal that's making news right now," I said, "but we also have a lead poisoning scandal right here in Chicago." I passed out a recent article by Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne. I wanted to set a context for how my students viewed Chicago policies and actions regarding lead. I agreed with students like Justin who believed that the cost-saving measures taken in Flint occurred out of a profound lack of concern for the health and well-being of the mostly African American, mostly poor, population. I wanted my students to ponder whether a similar lack of concern for its poor residents of color lies beneath Chicago's failure to invest in solutions to this most solvable of public health problems.

"Why do I call lead poisoning in Chicago a scandal? As you read and record the ideas that are important to you and your reaction to them, I want you to keep that question in mind. Think about who this is happening to and why." Students began to read quietly, creating a dialogue journal with important information recorded on the left side and their reactions in the form of insights, questions, and connections on the right.

Hawthorne highlights a family living in public housing. All nine children in the family were eventually found to have lead poisoning. Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) practice was to conduct only a visual inspection (rather than testing surfaces for lead) and they proclaimed the home safe before the family moved in. When the mother sought to move to lead-free housing, she was threatened with loss of her Section 8 (federally subsidized housing) voucher. CHA was also operating under HUD guidelines that were 25 years out of date, using a blood lead standard of 20 μg/dL of lead (200 parts per billion) vs. the current CDC standard of 5 μg/dL (50 ppb).

This article and many others we read focused on the problem of lead-based paint. The Flint crisis has exposed the problem of lead in the water due to widespread use of lead pipes. Although most communities use anti-corrosives, they are not foolproof, and stories about lead in water are now appearing all over the country. But experts say that, except in the case of babies drinking formula made with lead-contaminated water, water is the source of about 20 percent of the lead in children's blood. And that means identifying and remediating the source of the other 80 percent. In cities like Chicago with many buildings built before 1978, the main source of lead poisoning is most likely the paint in children's homes.

Poisoning rates can be quite high. In Chicago, the percent of children with elevated BLLs is double the national average. In the poorest neighborhoods, more than 20 percent of the children tested have elevated BLLs.

"Who is in charge of the CHA program? Because they are the real problem," Afia wrote in her reading log, responding to reporting that CHA regulations allow landlords to request indefinite extensions to fix lead paint hazards as they continue to collect taxpayer-financed rent checks. Janesha was angry that the family's rent subsidy was threatened when the mother tried to protect her children from lead. "Why did they treat her like she was nothing when she told them about the lead?"

"They should take action no matter how much lead is found in the blood," observed Krysstal. Current science acknowledges that no level of lead can be considered safe. Perhaps most poignant was Ciera's comment: "I used to live in a house with lead paint when I was in 5th grade." Several other students with younger siblings expressed concerns about the potential for lead in their apartments.

The Science of Lead Poisoning

To understand how lead harms children, we focused in on the biochemistry of lead poisoning. Lead is a poison when ingested in any quantity. As an ion, it mimics calcium and iron in the body. It can replace iron in hemoglobin in someone with an iron-poor diet, increasing the likelihood of anemia. Lead can penetrate the blood-brain barrier and replace calcium in key pathways that are part of the development of neural networks, memory function, and the control of executive function. This is of particular concern in children under 6, whose brains are still developing; brain damage caused is permanent. The students worked in groups to create posters or body models showing the different ways lead can affect a child's growth and development.

We read studies showing that several points of IQ can be lost, even at low levels of lead exposure. An analysis of standardized test scores of Chicago 3rd graders showed a significant increase in failure rates in math and reading for children with low BLLs. The study attributed as much as 25 percent of test failures to lead poisoning. My students have grown up in a school system where standardized test results can result in students being held back a grade. Monique connected the dots for us: "Even a small amount of lead might cause a student to fail the test. They fall behind and don't graduate high school. Then employment becomes difficult."

Indeed, a lifetime of challenges awaits the child with lead poisoning. Since the damage that occurs can be subtle, many families never realize that their children have been poisoned and are losing their full potential.

The Geography of Lead Poisoning

Many students felt a strong connection to this issue, but I wanted to deepen the impact. So I created a "Lead Where We Live" assignment based on an interactive website put up by the Chicago Tribune. I found the census tracts with the highest levels of lead poisoning in the city and constructed the assignment to highlight that information, as well as leaving space for students to record citywide averages and averages for their home census tract. The website tracks changes in the incidence of lead poisoning in Chicago between 1995 and 2013. One thing I wanted students to understand was that in the early 1990s, lead poisoning was equally likely to affect any community in the city from the richest to the poorest. By 2013, it was far more likely to affect the poorest communities.

"I want you to explore this site," I told my students. "Look for patterns. How does the pattern of lead poisoning change for the city as a whole from 1995 to 2013? Where is there a drop in the number of cases? Is it the same everywhere? What could explain differences? How does the pattern for your own census tract compare with the pattern for the whole city?"

After gathering data, the students graphed what they found and then answered some analysis questions. I was working to balance reading with other activities that offered a change of pace and developed students' skills at summarizing information or representing data. I also wanted to press them to think about how data can be used-or misused. On one hand, the huge decline in lead poisoning from the mid-1990s is a wonderful thing. On the other hand, that decline can obscure the fact that, in some communities, more than one child in five has a high BLL; that adds up to about 10,000 children per year in the city. Since only about half of the children between 6 months and 6 years old were tested in 2013, the actual number could be much higher.

My students were angry that more is not being done in communities hit hardest by lead poisoning. In their reflections on the data, they were adamant that every child's future should be considered important. They couldn't believe that so few people knew enough about the possible dangers of lead. Over and over, they reported that neither they nor their parents remember them being tested for lead as young children-and their younger siblings are not being tested either.

Each article and activity reinforced the students' realization that lead poisoning is an entirely preventable problem. "They invest in the wrong things," said Keshanna angrily. She had just read that Chicago spends more each year on software licensing than it does to eliminate lead poisoning. "The government doesn't care to help because [we're] lower class and African American," she said.

Over and over, my students linked the lack of funding to a lack of concern for their communities. In a city that closed 50 schools "to save money" but somehow has money for bike paths and a new sports stadium, in a city wracked by police killings of youth of color, it's hard to reach any other conclusion.

What Can Families Do?

Most people's initial response to a health problem is to resort to medicine, but there is no pill or potion to cure lead poisoning. At very high BLLs, chelation therapy, in which a chemical agent binds to lead to remove it from the blood, is often used. But it comes with its own risks and side effects and does not resolve brain damage that has already occurred. The best protection is to prevent exposure to lead in the first place, but the huge drop in funding for lead poisoning, from the national level to the city, means that Chicago's lead inspection program is reactive rather than proactive. Inspection comes after a child has been poisoned and the damage is already done.

"Back in the early 1990s, the BLL that would trigger an inspection was 20µg/dL," I explained. "Now the standard is 5-but we learned that HUD and CHA are still using a standard of 20. The city has only 11 inspectors. Do they come quickly when a child is found poisoned or is there a backlog? How long does the landlord get to fix the problem? We don't know the answers to these questions, but what we've read suggests months, even years, can pass.

"We know that our families are not being informed about lead poisoning and its dangers. We know lead is everywhere, thanks to years of lead-based paint and leaded gasoline. The city has to take responsibility and get rid of every bit of lead paint that could hurt a child.

"But, in the meantime, is there anything families can do themselves?"

We set out to develop a lead poisoning prevention protocol for families. There are certain cleanup methods that make it less likely that children will ingest lead even if it is present in their building. In addition, there are nutrients parents should make sure their children are eating: iron and calcium-essential minerals that compete with lead for absorption-and vitamin C, which makes it easier to digest those minerals. We did a simulation in the lab to demonstrate how consuming more calcium and iron reduces how much lead the body takes up.

Then we went to the library. Working in small groups, students researched foods that are lead-healthy. Other students came up with a list of cleanup guidelines:

Wipe down windowsills and doorframes with a damp rag daily to minimize dust from open windows and doors.

Damp mop floors instead of vacuuming, which can spread lead dust.

Wash toys frequently.

Shoes that can track in dirt from lead-contaminated soil should be left outside.

If a family member works at a job involving lead-based products, leave their work clothes outside the house.

Wash children's hands frequently and definitely before eating.

What Should We Fight For?

These were things families could do, but what about system-wide solutions? My students agreed that inspecting properties before families move in was the single best strategy. It fit perfectly into our discussion when Sheila Sutton from the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) came to speak to the class. She told us that MTO was pushing an ordinance called Chicago Healthy Homes Inspection Program that would require proactive inspection for lead and other common issues prevalent in low-income housing. She invited us to consider ways their work might fit into whatever we decided to do.

Indeed, the time had come to decide what we were going to do for a culminating project. I did not want to lose out on an ideal opportunity for activism. At the same time, I was wary of confusing my own desire for action with my students' needs and interests. So I started a brainstorming session based on these questions:

What do you feel most interested in/motivated to work on?

What did we learn that is worth sharing?

What do you think it is possible for us to have an impact on?

I recorded their ideas. Several students had ideas for information that should go out to the community:

"We could share information on the effects of lead."

"What about how to protect your children?"

Others focused on system-wide changes we should push the city to make. Eventually we agreed on the most important information for a community awareness campaign and five demands to make of city officials:

1. Do city-wide outreach about the dangers of lead poisoning and how to prevent it, especially to families in Section 8 and other low-cost housing.

2. Make sure all health providers know and follow the recommended schedule for testing infants and children for lead poisoning.

3. Adopt and fund the Chicago Healthy Homes Inspection Program ordinance. Ensure that HUD and CHA adequately inspect their buildings, using current CDC standards for lead.

4. Inspect elementary schools and daycare centers for lead-based paint and adequately fund lead abatement.

5. Make sure the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) food program includes the daily requirement of nutrients that protect against lead poisoning.

I went home excited about the great ideas the students had generated. I used their suggestions to design a flexible final assignment. The next day, I let students choose the format for the project they would create. They chose to work on an informational brochure, a power-point presentation, a radio public service announcement (PSA), a TV PSA, and a press packet.

Ideally, students would have gotten a few class periods of work time and then a day to present. They would have had clear guidelines for their work and I would have had time to meet with each group to clarify any confusion. But, as all too often happens, my plans were interrupted by field trips, professional development, and standardized testing. When the time came to present, I realized I should have been more alert to the students who were struggling with what their product should look like and how they could get there.

In the end, we had a good brochure, an excellent TV PSA, and some interesting new nuggets of information. One example came from research into our demand to inspect Chicago schools for lead. "CPS's own documents say we should assume any school built before 1978 has lead-based paint," wrote Ayiana. She read articles about a CPS school in which lead paint was found in 2009 but not cleaned up until 2014. "If this school had lead this recently," she argued, "other CPS schools must have lead, too."

In fact, Chicago is now testing for lead in the water at all CPS schools. CPS head Forrest Claypool has vowed to do "whatever it takes" to eliminate the lead in the water, but no one has mentioned the need to inspect schools for lead paint nor vowed to clean that up, although it may be an even more serious problem.

Looking to the Future

Eventually, two groups of students were able to share our findings with real audiences. The power-point group presented at our school's annual Social Justice Expo and got lots of positive feedback. Another group of students presented our demands and the evidence behind them to our local alderman, who was very receptive.

However, once the unit was over it was a challenge to find the time or student motivation to take our demands to another level. We haven't been able to get an audience with other aldermen and attempts to reach a wider audience fizzled as students headed toward the end of the school year.

Looking back, I see a lot of things I would do differently in the future. In particular, I would put the students more in charge of seeking information, rather than doing so much of the work myself. Instead of relying so heavily on articles, I would also ask students to survey classmates, teachers, and families; interview people whose families were affected by lead poisoning; and reach out to local experts. I would also structure the project so students had an opportunity to report out initial findings at an earlier stage. I have observed in the past that, once students realize that others see the information they have to offer as valuable, they become more interested in the work. I think that would have created a stronger commitment to pursue some kind of action.

I'm encouraged, though, as I read students' final reflections and see how many students discussed the lead issues we were studying with others:

I learned something I never heard of before and I was able to make others aware of it.

I spoke to my neighbor and explained lead, how we are exposed, and how we can change it.

I had my sister take my nephews to get tested for lead poisoning.

In the end, the biggest takeaway may be that the students realized that chemistry is important in their everyday lives and can inform struggles for justice in their communities.

RESOURCES

Epton, Abraham, Alex Bordens, and Geoff Hing. May 1, 2015. "Chicago Lead Poisoning Rates Vary by Location, Time." apps.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/chicago-lead-poisoning/index.html.

Hawthorne, Michael. May 1, 2015. "Lead Paint Poisons Poor Chicago Kids as City Spends Millions Less on Cleanup." Chicago Tribune. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoningchicago-met-20150501-story.html#page=1.

Hawthorne, Michael. Dec. 31, 2015. "Federal Housing Policy Leaves Poor Kids at Risk of Lead Poisoning." Chicago Tribune. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-cha-lead-paint-hazards-met-20151231story.html.

Kowalski, Kathiann. July 24, 2015. "To Protect Kids, Get the Lead Out." Science News for Students. student.societyforscience.org/article/protect-kids-get-lead-out.

Mergel, Maria. Oct. 20, 2010. "Health Effects of Lead." Toxipedia. toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Health+Effects+of+Lead.

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By Karen Zaccor Illustrator: Kelly Hayes I've been reading Rethinking Schools for years, wondering "How do these teachers get such great engagement, such profound thinking from their students?" Like many science teachers, I struggle to incorporate social justice topics in my science classes, especially in chemistry.

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A Webinar Presentation:
Tuesday, August 13th | 3:30pm EST

On January 15th, 2019, four Black and Latina 12-year-old girls were strip-searched in Binghamton, New York because they seemed "hyper and giddy." In 2018, Faith Fennidy, an 11-year old Black girl, was sent home, in tears, from her Louisiana Catholic school because administrators said her braids did not comply with school policy. In 2015, 16-year-old Shakara was dragged out of her seat by a police officer because of an argument with a teacher.

These events are not outliers. They reflect the reality that Black girls are six times more likely to be suspended than their White peers; and that Black and Brown girls and TGNC youth are formally disciplined for things like talking back, getting up to throw away trash, not listening to the teacher, or not obeying dress code policies. And yet in spite of harsh and zero-tolerance discipline policies, explicit and implicit bias in the classroom, a lack of culturally relevant and affirming curriculum, inadequate trauma-informed practices and supports, and the hyper-policing of their bodies and expression, organizations like our partner Girls for Gender Equity demonstrate how Black and Brown girls and TGNC youth are advancing insightful and powerful visions for safe, holistic, welcoming, and affirming schools for all students.

As we prepare for a new school year, please join CJSF and our partners and friends for a conversation that will highlight resources and solutions to achieve the schools all students deserve--spaces of love, healing, justice, and joy. If you're an educator, funder, advocate or organizer, this conversation is for you.

Learning Objectives:

1. Develop a deeper understanding of how and why Black and Brown girls are disproportionately punished and affected by institutional violence in schools and how this threatens their mental, physical, and emotional safety

2. Learn about how YOU can center the intersections of Black and Brown girlhood in your work to combat the harmful ways that Black and Brown girls are impacted by hardening practices in schools

3. Engage in critical dialogue with organizers, educators, funders, researchers, and students about how we can work collaboratively and collectively to ensure schools are safe and supportive environments for all students, namely Black and Brown girls

4. Leave with tangible tools and resources, including Girls for Gender Equity's School Girls Deserve report and Start from the Ground Up, Grantmakers for Girls of Color research and toolkit

​

Panelists:

Denisha Jones, Ph.D., J.D., Director of ECE Organizing for Defending the Early Years, Director of Art of Teaching at Sarah Lawrence College

Logan Meza, Youth Community Organizer, S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective

Aishatu Yusuf, Senior Education Policy Fellow, National Black Women's Justice Initiative

Moderator:

Presenter:

​

Please register now and stay connected for updates on confirmed panelists.

Archived Webinar Presentation:

August 22, 2018

As schools across the country dive into the 2018-19 academic year, the Communities for Just Schools Fund and the Southern Education Foundation hope to help channel #RedforEd and #MarchForOurLives energy towards active solidarity with Black, brown, and queer youth long on the frontlines demanding (and modeling) liberatory, relationship-centered, police- and ICE-free schools.

What: Back to #JustSchools: How Educators Can Show Up for Youth of Color & Queer Youth in the New School Year (Webinar and toolkit)

When: August 22 at 4:30 pm EST

Where: Online Via Registration Only

This webinar (and follow-up toolkit) will:

1. introduce youth- and teacher-led organizations advancing restorative practices, social-emotional learning, and culturally competent curriculum and pedagogy to improve school climate;

2. offer educators concrete tools to take into the classroom to advance racial justice and model the nurturing, affirmative world we all deserve to live in; and,

3. invite educators and education justice allies to follow the developments of CJSF's Education Anew Institute for more resources and training opportunities to advance #justschools.

Featured presenters include:

What is the Education Anew Institute?

The Education Anew Institute is an online hub and engagement strategy aimed at connecting more classroom educators--and also district leaders, philanthropists, researchers, advocates, organizers, and policymakers--around the country to the practices, policy solutions, and implementation strategies that youth, parent, and teacher organizers know create safe, healthy, and equitable learning environments.

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WEBINAR | Education Anew | Communities fo Just Schools Fund

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As schools across the country dive into the 2018-19 academic year, the Communities for Just Schools Fund and the Southern Education Foundation hope to help channel #RedforEd and #MarchForOurLives energy towards active solidarity with Black, brown, and queer youth long on the frontlines.

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Navigatin' the Syllabus...

​What's Good?!...

Geechee Experience ain't new to this! They been outchea educating the people about Gullah Geechee Language and the Geechee experience. Follow them on YOUTUBE ​ALERT: YouTube and Instagram.

PODCAST ALERT: Check out Anansa Benbow's new podcast, The Black Language Podcast. It's straight FIYAH! Also, see her TedX talk, Grammar Skool, below.

Our mission for the #BlackLanguageSyllabus is to celebrate the beauty of Blackness and Black Language, fight for Black Linguistic Justice, and provide critical intellectual resources that promote the collective study of Black Language. The #BlackLanguageSyllabus builds on the digital origins of other Black radical digital education resources and digital hashtag syllabus projects, such as #LemonadeSyllabus,
​#SayHerNameSyllabus, #BlackFeminismSyllabus, and the Abolitionist Teaching Network, that are open access and created outside of traditional academe to reshape how knowledge is produced, affirmed, and accessed.

We recognize that anti-Blackness and anti-Black linguistic racism are ubiquitous, and with the current war on critical race theory and antiracist education, we ain't got time to be waiting on schools and society to celebrate or educate us about our language, so we created the #BlackLanguageSyllabus as a space for political discussions and praxis of Black Language as guided by the work of teacher-researcher-activists in classrooms and communities who stand against institutions that seek to annihilate Black Language + Black Life.

Like other #hashtag syllabi, the #BlackLanguageSyllabus is for Black Language speakers who are looking to re-educate themselves about our mother tongue, academics and educators looking to reimagine their classroom curricula and pedagogies, and for anyone who is interested in learning about Black Language + Black liberation.
[NOTE: If you cannot move past denigrating Black Language, in any way or form, then please know that this site was not created for you.]

​ The 2o21Black History Month Edition Is Here ​

Black Linguistic Justice...

​Hit Us Up...

​Follow Us...

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We celebrate the beauty of Blackness and Black Language, fight for Black Linguistic Justice, and provide critical intellectual resources that promote the collective study of Black Language.

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The D.C. Area Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools gave a powerful start to Black History Month in classrooms across the Washington, D.C. area. Pre-K - 12th grade teachers in more than 100 schools taught lessons about structural racism, intersectional Black identities, and Black history.

D.C. was one of many cities across the country that participated in the national Black Lives Matter Week of Action in our Schools from February 5-10, 2018. The three key demands issued by the Black Lives Matter at School national movement were:

end zero tolerance and implement restorative justice,

hire more Black teachers in our schools, and

Black history/ethnic studies mandated K-12.

In the D.C. area, Teaching for Change and Center for Inspired Teaching, with many other groups, collaborated with teachers to bring these issues and content to more than 100 schools.

Here is some of what we learned from the D.C. Area Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools.

1.) A Movement brings radical change to the classroom.

In many schools, the week of action opened a dialogue that led to deeper understanding of the Movement for Black Lives and the thirteen principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Applying the lens of the Black Lives Matter Movement sharpened the focus of Black History Month in a way we have never seen before. Going beyond the typical Black History Month "I have a dream" lessons on the Civil Rights Movement, students learned about Bayard Rustin, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Power, and Dr. Martin Luther King's stand on the war and labor. One second grader remarked, "Black Lives Matter is like the Civil Rights Movement."

2.) The Black Lives Matter Movement helps students connect with history in a new way.

Talking about the Black Lives Matter Movement allowed students to reflect on the long history of the Movement for Black Lives. For example, a sixth grade Arlington teacher began her lesson on the U.S. Constitution with a discussion of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The class then read Mumbet's Declaration of Independence, the true story of an enslaved woman in Massachusetts who sued for her own freedom. After the read aloud, students read the preamble to the Constitution and discussed who wasn't included in the "we the people" phrase. Bringing it to today, they brainstormed how they could use the Constitution to fight for justice on issues in their own lives such as sexual harassment, deportation, the Muslim ban, health care, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

3.) Black Lives Matter is relevant to all grade levels.

The principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement were applied in developmentally appropriate ways from early childhood through high school. At one D.C. school, the community created a Black Lives Matter mural. The youngest learners contributed what is beautiful and black. Elementary students added a panel of what it takes to be alive, and middle school students expressed why the Black Lives Matter movement is important. One eighth grader reacted, "It means a whole lot that our school is honoring Black lives because I like to fight for justice."

4.) Black Lives Matter is relevant to every subject area.

Educators used the 13 principles of the Movement to teach about a wide range of subjects during the week of action. Several educators used a lesson incorporating police violence victims' #LastWords to write poetry, Spanish classes were exposed to the often untold Black history of Latin America, music classes held lessons on D.C. go-go music, social studies classes participated in " Resistance 101: A Lesson on Social Justice Activists and Strategies," " Black Muslims in the United States: An Introduction," and much more.

5.) The week of action opens communication between young people and adults.

Throughout the week, public events in the evenings provided opportunities for adults in the community to come together with and learn from young people. At an interschool seminar, young people and adults had honest and powerful conversations on student-selected topics including gentrification, mental illness and race, the war on drugs, and more. At a powerful open mic poetry event, people of all ages (the youngest was five years old) shared their " Love Poems for Black Women" with an enthusiastic audience. The young authors of a book about a teen who was killed by the police gave a presentation at a public library.

6.) Grassroots, educator-led planning, preparation, and learning are key.

The success of the week reflected months of planning by teachers in the D.C. area. The planning meetings, which began in the fall of 2017, were convened by Teaching for Change's D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice and Center for Inspired Teaching. During the meetings, educators established local demands, selected and developed lessons, planned events, and built community. The lessons were shared at two curriculum fairs. In advance of the week of action, teachers read recommended background reading to prepare and attended a talk on the history of racist ideas by Dr. Ibram Kendi.

7.) Teachers need strong allies to support this work.

Teachers cannot do this alone. First and foremost, the local Black Lives Matter chapters need to be on board. In D.C., we had the support of Black Lives Matter DMV and the BYP100 DC Chapter. In addition, we had co-sponsorship of the Washington Teachers' Union, the DCPS Secondary Literacy office, and endorsements by many other groups.

Over the last several years, we have seen the power of the Black Lives Matter Movement to raise awareness and discourse nationally about race and racism in the United States. Now we've seen the power these conversations can have in the classroom. The lessons and dialogues that took place during the week of action provided the momentum and inspiration to continue throughout the year.
See more photos and read more stories from the D.C. Area Black Lives Matter in Schools Week of Action.

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Seven Things We Learned From the D.C. Area Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools

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The D.C. Area Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools gave a powerful start to Black History Month in classrooms across the Washington, D.C. area. Pre-K - 12th grade teachers in more than 100 schools taught lessons about structural racism, intersectional Black identities, and Black history. D.C.

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By Dominique Hazzard

Illustrator: Micah Bazant

Micah Bazant

I am a queer Black woman. By this I mean that my sexuality exists outside the margins, between the approved boundaries, beyond the limits of most imaginations. A queer thing is a thing that existing words cannot yet adequately describe, a thing that our language and our boxes have not yet evolved to capture. So, what does queering something mean? To me it means turning the thing on its head: questioning its assumed narratives, reworking its categories, and upending its status quo.

Let's queer Black history.
Lifting Up the Stories of Black LGBTQ People
Queering Black history means lifting up the stories of Black LGBTQ people. It means resolving that not one more student learns about the "I Have a Dream" speech without learning about Bayard Rustin, the man who led the planning of the March on Washington - at least not on our watch. It means really learning about him: knowing his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, reading Time on Two Crosses right next to The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., having discussions in our classrooms and on our social media about "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" while also discussing why Bayard Rustin too was arrested, how he was relegated to the background by his peers, and what we must do to prevent that from ever again happening in the Black freedom movement.

Queering Black history means canonizing Marsha P. Johnson as a matriarch of Black America. Putting her face on those calendars and poster collages right next to Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Coretta Scott King, and Michelle Obama. It means studying her ACT UP campaigns in high school classrooms. It means mourning her too-early death just as we mourn the deaths of cisgender men like Malcolm and Medgar. It means examining why it took 20 years for the NYPD to investigate that death as a murder, and having conversations about the role of the Black freedom movement in bringing about trans liberation today.
Complicating the Stories of the Historical Figures We Know
Queering Black history goes wider and deeper than the inclusion and re-centering of queer folks. Remember that "queering" also means reworking. We must rework and complicate the stories we tell about the Black figures we are familiar with.

Rosa Parks, for example, was not only told to get to the back of the bus. She was also told by Montgomery NAACP president E. D. Nixon, with whom she served as chapter secretary, that women should stay in the kitchen. As we study her resistance against both attacks on her Black womanhood (and her organizing against sexual violence), a queering of Black history requires us to ask why we leave out that piece of the story, and how we can ensure that our contemporary movements are safe spaces for people living at the intersections.

Billie Holiday was a prolific jazz singer. She was also addicted to heroin, and the first major target of the federal government's war on drugs. Harry Anslinger, virulent racist and first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, intentionally turned a blind eye to the addictions of prominent white entertainers while obsessing over Holiday and his dream of bringing the full force of the federal government down upon her head. She died shackled to a hospital bed, denied appropriate treatment by the federal government, with police officers at her door. Billie Holiday has an important place not only in the history of Black music, but also in the history of Black people, the police state, and resistance.
Seeking Out New Stories
But if we are to queer Black history then we must dig deeper, do more than adding nuance to the narratives of those we already know and love. We also have to study and celebrate the Black people who have been erased, hidden from our collective memories. We have to move beyond the shiny Negroes - the astronauts, entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers, and organizers who have been deemed respectable enough to be worthy of our memory. We have to look between the cracks and find our incarcerated heroes, our undocumented leaders, our luminary sex workers, the people who systems of oppression most desperately want us to forget. And we have to teach those stories to each other.

We have to do the work of intentionally remembering people like Carol Crooks. I learned her name while doing research for this essay. She doesn't have a Wikipedia page. But she is worth remembering. Crooks was a woman who became an organizer while incarcerated at Bedford Hills, a maximum security prison in New York.

In February of 1974, Crooks had a severe migraine and asked to be taken to see the prison nurse. When her guard denied her request, she tried to push past her and get to the nurse anyway. In response to this incident, Crooks was beaten, stripped naked, and placed into a solitary confinement cell for three days. Crooks later filed a lawsuit challenging the practice of sentencing inmates to solitary confinement with no trial or formal charges. She won her case, and the warden was found guilty of unconstitutional treatment of a prisoner.

That August, Crooks was returned to solitary with no formal charges. The next morning, a group of women went to the warden and demanded Crooks' release, alleging that the solitary confinement of Crooks was retaliatory. The women were ignored and told to go to bed three hours earlier than usual. They refused to comply. The guards began to assault the women in response to the insubordination. The women seized the guards' weapons and fought back. They took over the prison in what is now known as the August Rebellion, until state troopers subdued them about four hours later.

Carol Crooks is part of a queered Black history.
Disrupting the Centralized, Charismatic Leader Narrative
Next we must question the very ideal of Black history through the lens of the individual. We must ask ourselves: Why does the history we choose to remember so often come in the form of charismatic and solitary pioneers, centralized leadership, and the folks out front?

Queering Black history means remembering everyday people, the struggles they faced, and the work they did. It means recognizing ordinary Black people who were told their lives didn't matter, but who still contained a fierce will to live, and love, and fight for freedom. It means valuing all different types of Black leadership - the folks who were behind the scenes, who were quiet, who were less than charming, who didn't win but set the stage for those who later would, who rose to the occasion because they had to and then went back to their regularly scheduled lives. It means celebrating collectives, and group efforts, and conglomerations of movers, shakers, and neighbors whose names we won't ever know.

I want us to upend the status quo by including the Contract Buyers League in our Civil Rights Movement narrative. The Contract Buyers League was a group of more than 500 people living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s who had bought their homes through predatory loans after being shut out of the mainstream home loan market by racist laws. They banded together, filed suit against the speculators who were cheating them, and demanded their money back. They lost. But the Contract Buyers League is part of a queered Black history.

I want us to queer Black history by teaching about the residents of the Arthur Capper public housing community in Washington, D.C. These residents saw businesses, and particularly grocery stores, disinvest from their Southeast community in the 1970s. They decided to take matters into their own hands. As the mythology of entitled Black welfare queens and lazy project thugs was gaining steam across the country, the residents worked together to start a community-owned small business. They built the Martin Luther King Jr. Co-Op Food Store and harnessed the power of cooperative economics to nourish a Black community trying to survive in a hostile white world. We don't know the names of everyone who accomplished this feat, but the residents of the now-demolished Arthur Capper public housing project are part of a queered Black history.
Acknowledging Our Dirt, Holding Our Pain
A queered Black history cannot be sanitized. Filing down Black history's sharp edges would make sense if the only point of studying it was to make ourselves feel good. Sweeping the flaws of our Black icons under the rug would be reasonable if the goal of Black history was to convince a white society that Black people are good and smart, that we can be honorable too, that our lives matter. But I don't believe that either of these goals are what Black history is about.

I believe that we learn Black history because doing so will help us to get free. And in order to accomplish this goal, to be able to learn from the fullness of our past, we have to approach it with a queer lens. We have to bring to Black history a quality that the Black queer community embodies at its best - the unconditional acceptance of people's full and real selves.

Our history is what it is. Sometimes we didn't overcome. Sometimes our faves were misogynists. Sometimes our idols were reckless and led movements into the ground. Sometimes effective and powerful Black leaders were on crack. Sometimes our stories are not glistening tales of hope and triumph and movin' on up, but stories of mistakes made. Sometimes they are stories of pain and loss, death, and things being taken from us. But they are stories that have something to teach us nonetheless.

Let's queer Black history. Let's re-imagine it as an opportunity to celebrate Black heroes, leaders, and everyday people. Let's use it to remember and mourn the Black lives that white supremacy has ripped from our arms. Let's use it as a chance to learn from the lives of Black people at all different intersections, Black people whose sweat and tears, laughter and joy, victories and mistakes have brought us to where we are today. Let's make learning Black history about getting free.

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By Dominique Hazzard Illustrator: Micah Bazant I am a queer Black woman. By this I mean that my sexuality exists outside the margins, between the approved boundaries, beyond the limits of most imaginations. A queer thing is a thing that existing words cannot yet adequately describe, a thing that our language and our boxes have not yet evolved to capture.

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Articles for a Jigsaw Activity in 8th and 10th Grade

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Articles for a Jigsaw Activity in 8th and 10th Grade

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After the curriculum fair, I decided to adapt the lesson about Tamir Rice to fit my 8th and 10th grade courses at H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program (APS).

I found articles relating to the media portrayal of black victims of racial violence versus white perpetrators of mass shooting as well as articles about "missing white women syndrome." I distributed the articles based on student reading levels and other knowledge of each child and they took notes on their different articles. I distributed to the students:

Then, in a jigsaw activity, students met in groups of 4-5 and each student shared information on a different article. Students then reflected on their learning about media representation of various issues.

Students were very engaged in the activity and had many relevant questions related to the content. Many expressed dismay when they learned about photos chosen in coverage of violent crimes and headlines describing assailants and victims of different races. Many students were interested, surprised, and pleased to learn how much the Black Lives Matter movement places emphasis on other aspects of identity and intersectionalism such as LGBTQ+ identities, dis/abilities, and religion.

My students come from a largely middle class demographic and found so much of this content enlightening, challenging, and thought provoking. Even students who were initially resistant found issues of agreement. Overall, this experience facilitated hard and good conversations about familiar yet difficult topics.

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Articles for a Jigsaw Activity in 8th and 10th Grade - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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After the curriculum fair, I decided to adapt the lesson about Tamir Rice to fit my 8th and 10th grade courses at H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program (APS). I found articles relating to the media portrayal of black victims of racial violence versus white perpetrators of mass shooting as well as articles about "missing white women syndrome."

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Women Make History — Civil Rights Teaching

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CivilRightsTeaching.org, a project of Teaching for Change, provides lessons, handouts, news, and resources for teaching about the role of everyday people in the Civil Rights Movement. On the site, you can find handouts and more informati…

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Anacostia HS Drum Line Learns about Go-Go

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Anacostia HS Drum Line Learns about Go-Go

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On Thursday, February 6, 2020, celebrated go-go musician Sweet Cherie Mitchell, keyboardist and singer for the all-female Bela Dona Band, joined the music class at Anacostia HS (DCPS) as part of a Teach the Beat visit to bring go-go music to D.C. classrooms. Teaching for Change coordinated the visit with Anacostia HS as part of the 2020 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

Members of the school's drumline received special pass to participate in the visit and showed off their talents, moving between the classic sound of marching band drumlines, go-go pocket beats, and the bounce beats that are popular among younger go-go performers and listeners and made for "beat your feet" style dancing.

A highlight of the visit was when Sweet Cherie led the room in Junkyard Band's go-go classic, "Sardines." A student joined in as one of the vocal leaders of the song and began dancing, while one of the drummers joined her in the circle and midway through the song added a bounce beat to the rhythm. After the visit, students had a deeper appreciation for some of the go-go classics and the music behind them.

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Anacostia HS Drumline Learns About Go-Go - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Go-go musician Sweet Cherie, keyboardist and singer for the all-female Bela Dona Band, joined the music class at Anacostia HS as part of the 2020 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. A highlight of the visit was when Sweet Cherie led the room in Junkyard Band's go-go classic, "Sardines."

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Really helped me as my school broke through the "typical" Black History Month lessons that have been taught over and over.

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Civil Rights Movement: High School and Adults

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Civil Rights Movement: High School and Adults

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When I was in middle school, I was bused to the other side of town for my education. Portland Public Schools wanted to integrate middle schools in Southeast Portland. This meant that a handful of black students-most of us from Northeast Portland who had attended elementary school together-boarded a yellow school bus before sunrise to ride across town. We sat at the back of the bus laughing at the boys stinging on each other with yo momma jokes. My best friend and I shared the headphones to her Walkman so that we both could sing along to Bell Biv DeVoe and Mariah Carey. For the 30-minute ride we were ourselves and there was no shame in the way we talked or related to each other. No one made a big deal about seeing my hair in braids one day and straightened the next. We bragged about how well our mommas cooked and shared our leftovers with each other at lunchtime, even though one day a white girl loudly whispered to her friend that "black food smells bad."

We had pride and there was a care we took with each other. Though there were normal middle school cliques and dramas, there was also a strength and loyalty among us. On that bus, we were family. I felt like I belonged.

But when I got to school, I felt invisible. Which is ironic because I was a plump dark-skinned girl with hair that would kink and curl at one drop of rain.

I stood out.

So how is it that I felt no one saw me?

Being seen-truly seen-is to feel that all parts of who I am are recognized not as compartmentalized pieces of myself, but blended truths of my identity. So when my white friends told me they didn't see me as a black girl that meant they didn't see me. When white teachers seemed shocked to hear me speak black vernacular in the hallway with my friends when I "spoke so well in class," what they didn't understand is that code-switching came natural to me-I talked both ways and I wasn't trying to fit in with my friends or impress my teachers. I was being myself.

One day, on our way to a field trip to see the Oregon Symphony, a teacher tried to assure me that if I "gave the music a try" I might really find that I liked it. I told her that I loved classical music. That I loved jazz, too. Her smile told me that she thought this was a good thing. When she said, "Well, that's good because that rap stuff is not music," I told her that I loved hip-hop and R&B and gospel and country, too. My family was a musical family. We had a collection of records that included Tennessee Ernie Ford, Mahalia Jackson, Marvin Gaye, and the Jackson 5. My sister played in a jazz ensemble that traveled to Europe. My grandfather played the piano at church.

She didn't seem to value the variety of music I enjoyed. There was clearly one that was better than the others and I took this to mean that the black parts of me were better off hidden. There was a shame that came with owning up to the parts of me that fit the stereotypes and assumptions of what people expected black children to be like.

In middle school I learned that some adults saw me as an "exception to the rule." To be called confident for an overweight, dark-skinned black girl was to say that overweight, dark-skinned black girls had low self-esteem. If I was smart for a black girl that meant the rule was black children weren't normally smart.

It was one thing to feel different, to be different. It was another thing to be judged on those differences. To realize that people had expectations of me because of what I looked like or the neighborhood I was from.

I often excused racist or insensitive remarks and actions, and instead blamed myself or thought that maybe I was taking it the wrong way.

But there was no excusing away what my 7th-grade science teacher said the day she passed out the tests we had taken a few days before. She walked to the front of the room and yelled, "I am so disappointed in all of you!" She paced the floor, walking between our desks. "None of you passed the test. You will be taking it again. Right. Now."

I looked down at my paper. Saw the capital A scribbled in red ink across the top of the page.

"I will give you a chance to look through your notes and then you will retake the test."

I looked back at my paper. "But I have an A," I said. First to myself and then out loud when I raised my hand and asked, "Do I have to retake the test?"

"Oh, that's right," my teacher said. "You got an A." She turned her back to me and addressed the rest of the class. "And this is why I am so disappointed in all of you. You let Renée Watson come all the way over here from Northeast Portland and get a better grade than you in science!"

I have often replayed that day in my mind. I have thought of new endings where I stand up for myself and walk out of class refusing to be humiliated. I have wondered what would have happened if she asked me to be a tutor for the other students in class. What if she taught me-and the rest of the class-about black scientists and their revolutionary discoveries? What if she had allowed space in her narrative for black children from Northeast Portland to be capable of meeting high expectations, of achieving academic success?

What if she really saw me?

As an educator, I try to see my students. I encourage them to embrace all parts of their culture-where they come from, what they eat, the music they enjoy, the joyous and disastrous parts of their neighborhoods and families. I strive to learn their individual and collective histories. I share my stories with them, and we grow and heal together. We laugh at ourselves for sometimes being the stereotype. We proudly proclaim that we are more than the stereotype. We mourn and rejoice over our ancestors-their struggles and victories, their shortcomings and strengths. We commit to sharing our true selves. We commit to seeing each other.

black like me

and suddenly everyone would see

how black i am.

black like collard greens & salted meat simmering on a stove.
black like hot water cornbread & iron skillets, like juke joints & fish frys
black like soul train lines & the electric slide at weddings and birthdays
black like vaseline on ashy knees, like beads decorating braids
black like cotton fields & soul-cried spirituals.

my skin is black

like red kool-aid, red soda, the red blood
of the lynched and assassinated and the african man
those skinheads killed with a baseball bat when i was in the fifth grade.

i am as black as he was.
my science teacher knows this. she sees
my black and is blind to my brilliance.
can't believe i passed the test with an a
when all the white kids failed.

and when she says to the white students,
"you ought to be ashamed of yourselves . . ."
what she really wants to say is, "i can't believe this black girl is as smart as you."

all the white kids look at me
and this is when we learn that the color of our shells
come with expectations.

i stop being good
at science and math.

my english teacher gives me books and journals
and i read and write the world
as it is, as i want it to be.
i read past my black blues, discover that i am black
like benjamin banneker and george washington carver
black like margaret walker and fannie lou hamer

i am not just slave and despair.
i am struggle and triumph. i learn
to live my life in the searching, in the quest:

can i be black and brilliant?
can i be jazz and gospel, hip hop and classical?
can i be christian and accepting?
can i be big and beautiful?

can i be black like me?
can anyone see me?

-Renée Watson

Renée Watson ( reneewatson.net) is an author, performer, and educator. Her children's books have received several honors, including an NAACP Image Award nomination. She teaches poetry at DreamYard in New York City.

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When I was in middle school, I was bused to the other side of town for my education. Portland Public Schools wanted to integrate middle schools in Southeast Portland. This meant that a handful of black students-most of us from Northeast Portland who had attended elementary school together-boarded a yellow school bus before sunrise to ride across town.

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After exploring their connection to the Black Lives Matter movement in previous activities, my 11th and 12th grade students at Thurgood Marshall Academy worked through the #LastWords lesson.

They started by making observations, inferences, and recorded their feelings for several of Shirin-Banou Barghi's images before learning more about each person memorialized by the series.

After analyzing " 41 Bullets Off-Broadway," a poem by Willie Perdomo, students were given space to create their own poetry, song, rap, and/or art to express their connection to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Overall, this work provided an opportunity for students to see how art, words, music and poetry can be powerful components of social justice movements and to see themselves as activists.

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High School Students Explore #LastWords - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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After exploring their connection to the Black Lives Matter movement in previous activities, my 11th and 12th grade students at Thurgood Marshall Academy worked through the #LastWords lesson. They started by making observations, inferences, and recorded their feelings for several of Shirin-Banou Barghi's images before learning more about each person memorialized by the series.

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One of the key challenges in teaching students about the world is finding strategies that show - rather than just tell about - social dynamics.

Students learn best when they are fully present, involved, facing dilemmas, sorting through choices, imagining alternatives. And this is also an equity issue. No doubt, some students may thrive in a lecture and text-dense curriculum, but many will not. A show-don't-tell curriculum rich with role plays can engage all students by bringing social dynamics to life in the classroom. As Kevin Sparks, a middle school teacher in Oakland, California, wrote to us about his classroom experience: Role plays "give every student an opportunity to participate in some way. Even the students who are normally shy about speaking in front of classmates are at least engaged in the dialogue and writing notes furiously."

Rethinking Schools publications and the Zinn Education Project feature lessons that reveal key aspects of U.S. history - lessons that we hope elicit intense student engagement. Some of these activities are role plays - trials that urge students to reflect on ethical questions about responsibility for injustice, like " Deportations on Trial," about the mass expulsion of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, or " Hunger on Trial," about the cause of the Great Famine in Ireland; single-group role plays that pose critical strategic questions for those seeking a more just society, like " Teaching SNCC" or " Reconstructing the South;" mixer role plays that surface diverse perspectives on key organizations or events, like the Black Panther Party or the struggle for voting rights; multiple-group role plays that help students recognize the social foundations of conflicts around the Dakota Access Pipeline, or the shaping of the New Deal or role plays allow students to discover commonalities and build solidarity, like the La Vía Campesina role play about food sovereignty.

This article offers some cautions and guidance about teaching role plays, especially in these politically contentious times. We also describe concerns and suggestions teachers have shared with us over the last several years. What is offered here is not final, but an invitation to join us in the ongoing dialogue about the design and implementation of role plays.

Role plays can be exhilarating, nurturing both insight and activism. San Francisco language arts teacher Jennifer Stangland describes her experiences using a mixer role play on housing segregation:

As soon as students received and began reading their roles for the lesson "How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century," I saw eyes begin to widen. Frantic highlighting and slight gasps of shock, along with giggles of disbelief, began to echo through the classroom. This is when you know students are about to learn something, and learn something that matters. Minutes later, the entire class was on their feet, moving to find someone they could share their "story" with.

At the end of the day, the entire class seemed to leave the room with a newfound sentiment of "now this makes sense." Now it makes sense as to why the results of the blatant segregation from decades and decades ago still exist. Now it makes sense as to why I live where I live, and you live where you live. Now it makes sense as to why the money resides in certain homes, but not others. And the question that now exists in students' minds is not "why," but rather "how" - "How do we change things? How do we learn more? And how do we make a difference?"

Cristina Tosto, a U.S. history teacher in Gulfport, Mississippi, describes her experience with our role play on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in which students attempt to take on the persona of a SNCC activist:

I wish people could see how the kids were really strategizing and getting into their roles as SNCC members. It was so encouraging to me as a teacher to see my students understand the grassroots organizing of the Civil Rights Movement. However, it was even more rewarding to watch them engage with the material in a social, emotional, and critical way. They are not only learning history, they are learning skills that can be applied to real-life scenarios.

Laura Farrelly, a social studies teacher from Eugene, Oregon, described how students' excitement from a role play can transform into activism:

My students were completely engaged in The People vs. Columbus trial we held about the massacre of the Taíno people. . . . They were so outraged that Columbus Day is a federal holiday that I suggested we send letters to the editors of local newspapers and our city council. They were so excited. Most of the students chose to send letters. When a student's letter was published the next day advocating for our city to celebrate Indigenous People's Day, the students who had not yet sent letters immediately began to write their own. It was a powerful lesson in civics, especially since my students are disenfranchised and feel like they don't have power to effect change politically.

However, like any classroom strategy, role plays can be misused and poorly designed, as a number of recent stories illustrate. An educator in Bronxville, New York, asked Black students to put on imaginary shackles while white students "bid" on them; a school in Tennessee invited students to dress as Nazis and give the Nazi salute in the hallways. In the Winter 2022 issue of Rethinking Schools (p. 34), Azizah Curry describes a "role play" in which students "became performers in a dangerous mockery of history." It was an activity allegedly about Rosa Parks and her defiance that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but whose aims were so ill-formed that stereotype and hurt were guaranteed. These are awful activities, failing by every pedagogical and curricular measure, and we join those who have decried them.

So what do we mean - and not mean - when we say "role play"? The term "role play" can connote both that it is a performance, as in a play, as well as that it is playful, fun. These turn out to be unfortunate associations, especially when they are connected with classroom lessons that may deal with genocide, enslavement, deportations, or other violent and disturbing content. Although it is true that we ask students to take on a "role" - that is, the perspective and interests of someone from another time or social location - it is an intellectual endeavor, not a performative one. Sometimes our role plays are confused with historical reenactments. The Zinn Education Project does not feature any activity that attempts to "recreate traumatic experiences," in the words of Hasan Kwame Jeffries, professor at Ohio State University. Nonetheless, because we find ourselves so often having to explain what we mean and don't mean by "role play," we invite readers to join us in considering how to more accurately name these activities.

The Zinn Education Project strives to make sure that all the curriculum we share, including role plays, meets an ambitious set of goals. It should:

Explain complex social phenomena like white supremacy, settler colonialism, social class divisions and wealth inequality, or environmental exploitation.

Focus on events, groups, and individuals too often erased, minimized, or oversimplified in corporate curricula, especially movements and individuals who have acted for justice.

Increase students' capacity to act for justice by:
a) Growing their imaginative capabilities, the cornerstone of empathy and solidarity.
b) Exploring how systems affect people's choices, analysis necessary to solve seemingly intractable problems.
c) Allowing time and space for participatory, problem-solving pedagogy.
d) Thwarting cynicism and resignation by emphasizing activism and resistance, and the recognition that at all points in history, there are choices; nothing is inevitable.

Concerns About Role Plays

Nonetheless, over the last several years, concerns have been surfaced by teachers in our network and some of our own team members about some of the role play strategies described in Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project. In some instances, teachers have raised objections about the pedagogy of role play itself.

One area of concern is asking students to step into the role of an oppressor - figures like Columbus, an enslaver, or J. Edgar Hoover. Some teachers have told us that by asking students to take on the personas of oppressors, they fear that students may come dangerously close to building identification with them. And this is especially true in an era when Donald Trump sought to make white supremacy respectable, which, not surprisingly, has leaked into classrooms across the country. Others have said that voicing oppressive views can itself be harmful, both for the speakers and listeners. The corollary to the discomfort around oppressor roles is concern about "victim" roles - asking students to imagine the experiences, past and present, of those who have been removed from their land, enslaved, and exploited. Some have asked if such a classroom activity may trigger a trauma response in their students, particularly students of color. Teachers who have reached out with these concerns have also expressed uneasiness about the underlying premise of many of these activities: that students can and should imagine into and write and talk from the perspective of people different from them. We have heard particular discomfort about the idea of asking white students or students of privilege to speak from the standpoint of a person of color or other oppressed people in a role play.

It is not our intent here to dismiss or to argue with these important concerns. We find ourselves in a period when we too are wrestling with what it means to teach effectively for social justice and we are revising the structure of a number of the role plays we offer. Here, we hope to distill some of the reasons to consider using and adapting role plays, but to offer some cautions too.

No Neutral Classrooms

Role plays about structural racism, genocide, or exploitation and oppression are not something to ever do "cold" with students during the first week of school, nor something to leave with a substitute teacher while we are away from class. A role play is not a one-off or stand-alone "enrichment" activity. Before tackling a role play about serious content, we want our classroom to have already established norms and a burgeoning sense of community. Students' respectful, historically grounded role-taking must happen in a classroom where students are used to talking and thinking explicitly about race and justice. Some teachers have told us that they don't do role plays early in the year, but only after laying significant groundwork - discussion of historical oppression and social identities. Students need to understand that any role play is embedded in a broader curricular project to explain the origins and persistence of social inequality in the United States, and to equip students to see themselves as potential change makers.

Some teachers express pride about their "neutrality" in class. Through the years, we have heard variations of the comment: "At the end of the year, I don't want my students to know my politics." But for role plays to be successful, it is important that students understand that we are in fact not neutral; when we teach a role play that includes people in history who exploited and oppressed others, we are not engaging in a "both sides" curriculum. Our teaching joins an effort to critique social inequality and to explore alternatives. We take sides in favor of those who work for greater equality, who challenge oppression based on race, social class, nationality, language, gender, religion, disability.

Any time a role play includes social groups whose livelihoods, wealth, or privilege depend on various forms of exploitation, students will portray characters who articulate justifications for these abuses. However, for students to arrive at insights about the nature of oppression, it is essential that they recognize that they are not being asked to find legitimacy in exploitative ideas, but to recognize the circumstances that give rise to them. One of the "habits of mind" of any social studies class is for students to reflect on the relationship between social conditions and consciousness. We might say at the beginning of a role play, for example, "Some of you will express ideas that you don't believe and find repugnant. We are not doing this role play to suggest that ideas expressed here by different social groups are of equal worth, but to try to understand what motivated people to think and act the way they did."

For example, in the role play on the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, students representing the French government will justify the colonization of Vietnam. If we thought that students would end up believing that colonial ideas and anti-colonial ideas were equally valid, we would not teach the role play; however, the role play's definitive takeaway is that at the end of World War II, the United States sided not with "freedom and democracy," but with racism and colonialism, by supporting the French reconquest of Vietnam. In these kinds of roles, we hope students come to see that it doesn't take being "evil," "bad," or even exceptionally bigoted to buy into colonialism or the class incentives of labor exploitation. When oppression is structural, it merely requires following the logic of a system. If we lead students to believe that only "bad" people (or countries) are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or destructive to the environment, it becomes easy to make oppression something other people do, not something of which we are all capable, and for which we all have a role in recognizing, disrupting, and resisting. These are takeaways we encourage teachers to raise with their students as part of a thorough follow-up discussion.

We have heard from some teachers who, suspecting that their students might not navigate a role play thoughtfully and with care, chose to pursue another pedagogical path altogether; others have adapted role plays - removing a role or changing the tense from first person to third person - to feel less potentially harmful. We encourage this kind of careful consideration of the particular context in which each of us teaches. The social composition of our classes should always frame our pedagogical choices. There are no cookie-cutter curricula and we are eager to hear how - and why - educators tailor our materials for their own classrooms.

The Power of Imaginative Role-Taking

Many of our role plays focus on hidden histories of resistance - with all the roles representing people who have fought for voting rights or climate justice, for example. Our role plays sometimes include both perpetrators and victims of injustice, and the activists and everyday people who resisted - and resist - oppressive systems and policies. It is critical that educators do all they can to minimize the possibility of turning what should be an elucidating intellectual endeavor into harmful caricature or performance.

Prior to participating in a role play, we caution students that this activity will not involve wearing costumes, speaking in accents, or adopting stereotypical mannerisms. The goal is not to attempt to "act" like a character as one would in a play, but to understand and try to surface the character's thinking and motivations, as a kind of social and historical investigation. We might say to students: "You carry real people's stories in class today - people who may have suffered or been harmed. Please approach them with the dignity they deserve."

When leading these activities, we never force students to adopt a specific role; if a student says they don't feel comfortable in one role, we simply let them choose another. And we make it clear to students at the outset that if assigned the role of an oppressed group (an enslaved person, a deportee, an incarcerated Japanese American), they will not be asked to act out a traumatic experience. Rather, they will be asked to imagine and give voice to oppressed people's resistance, agency, and understanding of the systems and forces that defined their predicament. Role plays - like persona poems, interior monologues, or really any form of literature - are invitations to students to try to imagine others' points of view. Understanding across difference, studying and imagining the world as others experience it, is the foundation of solidarity. If we cannot imagine into someone else's experience, it becomes much harder to work toward a just future for us all.

That said, we have heard from teachers who choose not to ask their students to speak in the voice of someone from another social group. Some adapt activities so that students speak in third person; rather than take on the persona themselves, students predict how that individual might have stood on a particular issue. As with all social justice work these days, teachers are trying to revise and invent pedagogical models that best address the challenges we face and the needs of all of our students.

Some educators have asked if it is appropriate to ask white students to put themselves in the position of someone of a different race. By speaking in another's voice, might white students wrongly believe that they fully grasp "what it feels like" to be in the position of an oppressed group? Are white students capable of representing the ideas and perspectives of other races without resorting to hurtful and inaccurate caricature and stereotyping? Teachers need to answer this question for their own situation. Yes, it is impossible for white kids in particular to accurately imagine themselves as an enslaved person or a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. But not to ask them to try is to reify "race" in a problematic way. It paradoxically acquiesces to the racist ideas social justice educators seek to undermine: that race is essential and fixed. We are not asking students to "be" African American or to "be" Native. We are asking them to undertake an intellectual challenge and a moral imperative: to attempt to imagine into the historically specific circumstances of a group of people at a moment in time. One purpose of social justice education is to show students that these categories of difference were created through oppressive relations, and can therefore be dismantled through different, more just relations. Acting as though race is some unbridgeable divide that can never be crossed does not help with that project.

After the Role Play

Adequate reflection and processing of the experience of the role play is not incidental, but fundamental. We always seek to provide plenty of time and space for students to step out of their roles and reflect on their experience. What did they notice? What new understandings were gained? What new questions emerged? This step is perhaps most critical for students who take on roles of figures with whom they may disagree or whose positions they abhor. Students need a chance to distance themselves from the circumstances of a role play, to speak in their own voice, and against the very arguments their character expressed in the activity. The post-role play debrief is also a time where students get a chance to hear each other's "real" opinions and build powerful collective analyses of some of our world's most intractable problems - racism, inequality, environmental destruction.

Other Curricular Dangers

As we have suggested, role plays can be joyful and enlightening, and they can be dangerous. Done poorly, they can be hurtful. They can reinforce stereotypes. They need to be approached with caution. But let us emphasize this: The traditional, non-role play, non-participatory curriculum that ignores injustice is also dangerous. To pick just one small example, a typical textbook like Holt McDougal's The Americans offers seemingly innocuous activities like a chart on the so-called Compromise of 1850: "Suggest that students use both the text and the chart to recommend an S (South) or N (North) for each term to show which side benefited from it." This is a nonsensical and offensive assignment that erases the humanity and agency of Black people, who "benefited" from none of these compromises between white elites, all of which aimed to prolong slavery. This kind of teaching is both dangerous and boring - just one small instance of alienation that leads many students to disengage from school. As Linda Christensen points out in a Rethinking Schools article about the dangers of a push-out curriculum: "The school-to-prison pipeline doesn't just begin with cops in the hallways and zero tolerance discipline policies. It begins when we fail to create a curriculum and a pedagogy that connects with students, that takes them seriously as intellectuals, that lets students know we care about them, that gives them the chance to channel their pain and defiance in productive ways."

Of course, this is not to suggest that to abandon role plays requires us to abandon critical teaching. All of us can think of powerful learning experiences we've had that did not involve taking on a role. We are emphasizing that a participatory, show-don't-tell curriculum is a pedagogical strategy worth keeping and refining.

Share Your Stories

Today, social movements are rightly demanding that we examine every nook and cranny of our world to make sure that people are fully represented, that no one's life is treated as disposable. We need a similar reckoning in our curriculum. Way back in 1994, Rethinking Schools articulated the outlines of a social justice curriculum in the book Rethinking Our Classrooms. Editors insisted that our teaching should be grounded in the lives of our students; critical, multicultural, anti-racist, pro-justice; participatory, experiential; hopeful, joyful, kind, visionary; activist; academically rigorous; culturally sensitive.

These strike us as valuable principles to guide our teaching today. Role plays, done well, can embody all these elements.

But the conversation is ongoing. We depend on your feedback. More than 150,000 educators have signed up at the Zinn Education Project, coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, to access our materials, and thousands of teachers, in very different settings, have used our lessons. Please share your teaching stories: How have you adapted our lessons? When have you encountered difficulties? When have they gone well?

Rethinking Schools was born in 1986. Teaching for Change was established in 1982, first as the Network of Educators' Committees on Central America. This work is ongoing. Thank you for being part of our community - a movement of social justice educators, remaking our classrooms, remaking society.

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Rethinking Schools as "I Saw Eyes Begin to Widen" Joys, Pitfalls, and Dilemmas in Using Role Play in the Classroom. It is an updated from an earlier post at this site from September, 2019.

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How to - and How Not to - Teach Role Plays - Zinn Education Project

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Considerations regarding the planning and use of role plays for teaching people's history.

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Reflecting on Government Response to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19: A Distance Learning Assignment 

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Reflecting on Government Response to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19: A Distance Learning Assignment 

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U.S. history high school teacher Jessica Rucker at E.L. Haynes PCS shares a lesson she has used with her students during the pandemic for their asynchronous learning. The lesson is designed to help students look at other times when racism and classism have impacted U.S. government responses to disaster relief.

Rucker engages students in a deep analysis of the United States government's response to the human devastation (massive flooding, days without adequate food, running water, or proper sanitation) of Hurricane Katrina. As a paired text, Rucker incorporates music lyrics, hip-hop, and the history of resistance for modern day connections.

Read the step-by-step lesson on the critical analysis of times in crisis, let us know if you use or adapt this lesson, and share your story.

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Reflecting on Government Response to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19: A Distance Learning Assignment - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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U.S. history high school teacher Jessica Rucker at E.L. Haynes PCS shares a lesson she has used with her students during the pandemic for their asynchronous learning. The lesson is designed to help students look at other times when racism and classism have impacted U.S. government responses to disaster relief.

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SNCC focused on voter registration and on mounting a systemic challenge to the white supremacy that governed the country's entrenched political, economic and social structures.

Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "SNICK"), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today. For the first time, young people decisively entered the ranks of civil rights movement leadership. They committed themselves to full-time organizing from the bottom-up, and with this approach empowered older efforts at change and facilitated the emergence of powerful new grassroots voices...

Continue reading The Story of SNCC "

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SNCC focused on voter registration and on mounting a systemic challenge to the white supremacy that governed the country's entrenched political, economic and social structures. Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "SNICK"), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today.

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An Introduction to the 13 Guiding Principles and the Legacy of Bayard Rustin

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An Introduction to the 13 Guiding Principles and the Legacy of Bayard Rustin

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As part of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools, U.S. government teacher Ben Williams from Capital City Public Charter School taught a lesson titled "Getting to Know Bayard Rustin: A key leader and organizer of the Civil Rights Movement."

Williams started out the class by analyzing the 13 core principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement and he asked students what they knew about Bayard Rustin. To introduce the lesson, students had to answer the questions, "Why do you think some individuals get excluded from major historical events and why others get remembered?" And "who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963?"

Students filled out a know - wonder- learn worksheet while watching the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. After certain clips in the film, students would share something new they learned. Several students were really intrigued by Rustin's role in guiding Martin Luther King Jr.'s political and social philosophy on non-violence and what it meant to lead a non-violent movement.

Students were shocked that they didn't learn about Rustin, especially his role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Further, students commented on him being out and black at a time when both of those identities were violently discriminated against. A student stated, "Bayard Rustin should be a central figure in learning about the Civil Rights Movement because of his dedication to nonviolence."

Throughout the discussion, students talked about the Black Panther Party, nonviolence and the legacy of that philosophy in the movement for Black lives today. Williams's lesson fostered a conversation that led students to think deeper about the legacy Rustin left in connection with the Black Lives Matter Movement and LGBTIQA acceptance and leadership within the movement. The next lesson for the class will be the story of Althea Garrison, the first black trans person to hold office in the U.S.

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An Introduction to the 13 Guiding Principles and the Legacy of Bayard Rustin - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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As part of the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools, U.S. government teacher Ben Williams from Capital City Public Charter School taught a lesson titled "Getting to Know Bayard Rustin: A key leader and organizer of the Civil Rights Movement."

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible-and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people-must be prepared to "go for broke." Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I'm the child's parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it-at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees "liberty and justice for all." He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only-his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

All this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him. And it isn't long-in fact it begins when he is in school-before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives-even if it is a housing project-is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies-in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born-where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich-or at least it looks rich. It is clean-because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are-and indeed they do. And it's a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what it means. You know-you know instinctively-that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you?

Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Go to the back door." Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, "Where's your package?" Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside-all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives-I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than "Yes Sir" and "No, Ma'am." They will tell you it's raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you-really hate you because in their eyes (and they're right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy-and I was a street boy, so I know-looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else's benefit-not for his. And there's no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong-and many of us are-he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that's the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city-every ghetto in this country-is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn't dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn't, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this "animal," once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: "We've liberated them from the land-and delivered them to the bosses." When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930s failed to make a dent in Negroes' relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, "What does the Negro want?" I've heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a "nigger" even though you called me one. But if I was a "nigger" in your eyes, there was something about you-there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I'm a "nigger," and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let's go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people-the porter and the maid-who, as I said, don't look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well-trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn't matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn't act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children-some of them near forty-who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody-not even out of malice, just because they didn't know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren't cruel; they just didn't know you were alive. They didn't know you had any feelings.

What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the word "Communism," astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced-intolerably menaced-by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, "I can't do anything about it. It's the government." The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country's life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence-the moral and political evidence-one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them-I would try to make them know-that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man's respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture-as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies-is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is-and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger-and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, "He is a Communist." This is a way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way-and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

Delivered on October 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child-His Self-Image ", published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 - Dec. 1, 1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Born in Harlem, Baldwin was a "witness to the truth" about racism and homophobia through his novels, plays, essays, and poetry including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni's Room (1956), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Another Country (1962), The Fire Next Time (1963), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). Baldwin was active as a writer, speaker, and ally of the southern Civil Rights Movement. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Freedom Day in Selma in 1963, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.

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A Talk to Teachers - Zinn Education Project

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country.

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We Affirm That All Black Lives Matter: High School Students Host Lunchtime Activities

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We Affirm That All Black Lives Matter: High School Students Host Lunchtime Activities

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On February 6, students at Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) hosted lunchtime events for Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

The activities included collecting signatures in support of the four National Black Lives Matter demands: end zero-tolerance, mandate Black and ethnic studies, hire more Black teachers, and fund counselors, not cops. The Cardozo Student government committee led the petition drive, collecting and sending them to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education and DCPS central office.

At another table, students were invited to respond to prompts that read:

Black Lives Matter to me because...

I am a Black revolutionary because...

My Black American journey...

Black history is all of our history because...

Cardozo EC U.S. history teacher Kevin Fox (who is also a DC Area Educators for Social Justice teacher advisor), supported the organizing efforts of the high school students while connecting his lessons and curriculum to the vision of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

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We Affirm That All Black Lives Matter: High School Students Host Lunchtime Activities - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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On February 6, students at Francis L. Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) hosted lunchtime events for Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. The activities included collecting signatures in support of the four National Black Lives Matter demands: end zero-tolerance, mandate Black and ethnic studies, hire more Black teachers, and fund counselors, not cops.

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National Black Lives Matter in School Week of Action Starter Kit

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DC history in and out of the classroom

At the DC History Center, we know the importance of humanities education. Our resources, based on the primary and secondary sources found at the DC History Center, help educators enhance social studies instruction in their classrooms.
DESIGNED-FOR-EDUCATORS RESOURCES
Websites featuring lesson plans to support DC history topics found in the DC Public Schools curriculum, grades 3-12; featured resources such as materials to support Black Lives Matter at School; a timeline that tracks DC's history from the time when members of the Nacostine tribe occupied the land until 2019; and standalone downloadable activities relating to DC history topics.

WASHINGTON HISTORY IN THE CLASSROOM
Washington History magazine is the only scholarly publication devoted to DC history. This selection of articles are great for high school and college students who are doing research on local topics, and provide helpful context for the adults guiding them.

DISTANCE LEARNING RESOURCESThe DC History Center is a member of the DC Arts & Humanities Education Collaborative. See their compilation of online and printable arts and humanities learning resources for students, teachers, and families.

Questions? Contact Education Manager Domonique Spear

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At the DC History Center, we know the importance of humanities education.

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Making Connections: The Indian Independence Movement, Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement

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Making Connections: The Indian Independence Movement, Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement

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On Tuesday, students were able to make connections between our world history content and Black Lives Matter movement today.

We are currently studying the Indian Independence Movement and Partition. This allowed us to relate the Civil Rights Movement's peaceful methods to Gandhi's Salt March and history. From there students were able to evaluate the principles of the Black Lives Matter movement and compare those to the writings of Gandhi.

On Wednesday, students continued reading about the Indian Independence Movement and then compared and contrasted the methods used in India to the myriad of Civil Rights Movement leaders we have had in the United States. Students read the Resistance 101 biographies and then went around the room interviewing each other to learn about people who have made a change in our history. After that they related it back to the content they have been learning about with India.

These lessons helped the students see the connections between what happens in other countries and what happens right here in Washington, D.C.

I really enjoyed making these connections and was inspired to do it thanks to BLM at Schools Week of Action. In the past I would have had the students make informal connections, but this really inspired me to fully incorporate it in to our units and spend half the period on each topic.

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Making Connections: The Indian Independence Movement, Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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On Tuesday, students were able to make connections between our world history content and Black Lives Matter movement today. We are currently studying the Indian Independence Movement and Partition. This allowed us to relate the Civil Rights Movement's peaceful methods to Gandhi's Salt March and hist

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The Zinn Education Project's COINTELPRO lesson plan made for a remarkable class session. I used the lesson as a capstone to a Civil Rights/Black Power unit.

While the underlying background sometimes astounded students, it was being able to see the historical narrative grounded in primary source documentation - to see a story that might seem beyond belief for some of them - that really inspired them to pay closer attention to their work.

They dug into and debated every paragraph of every document! It was an energy boost, new fuel for their thinking and communicating, for the remainder of the semester.

High Social Studies Teacher, California

This site is an essential tool when trying to untangle the complex history of race in America.

No matter what, the lessons that seem to shock my students the most center on the Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO. Even though I'm providing the materials to students, they still come up to me aghast and say, "Did you know about this?" The demonization still present when speaking about the Black Panther Party in this country is astounding. Even students who grew up in predominately black communities have only learned about the black freedom movement as one of violence and hatred. When they learn of the murder of Fred Hampton, there is nearly palpable anger.

The last time I taught with these materials, I had a student who almost never did his work. He was trying to graduate and had to do one final project and chose this time period. When he realized no one had taught him this history in his 12 years of school, he was astounded. He put in more effort on that project than any of the 60 other students with similar projects. The idea that he had been manipulated and taught to hate people who were trying to help their own community resonated as a reflection of what is happening with the Black Lives Matter movement and the classification of that group as a hate group.

As a teacher of African American history, my class generally centers on how the shaping of narratives changes the way that history is interpreted. Students come to my class used to talking about slavery and black struggle, but also having a limited understanding of the overall scope of the African American experience. They presume history goes like this: Slavery was bad, then it ended, things got a little better but not enough, so MLK came along and everything was good, until some people turned their back on his peaceful mission and ruined it for everyone. This is the traditional narrative that I get when I ask students to write out what they know about black history.

Once we start to delve into the stories, the students start to see how much manipulation is built into the U.S. education system.

High Social Studies Teacher, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I was incredibly impressed with the materials presented during a workshop on the Civil Rights Movement and a COINTELPRO lesson by the Zinn Education Project during the NCSS conference in 2018. Since then, I have used facets of that specific lesson, such as the sources on the Black Panthers, in class to spark discussions with my students.

I was so happy I discovered both the Zinn Education Project and this lesson, in particular. It provides a different lens that I had not previously given to my class, regarding the Black Panthers. The lesson as a whole allows for links to current events and issues in today's society as well.

High School Social Studies Department Chair, Grayslake, Illinois

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COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI's War on the Black Freedom Movement

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The Zinn Education Project's COINTELPRO lesson plan made for a remarkable class session. I used the lesson as a capstone to a Civil Rights/Black Power unit. While the underlying background sometimes astounded students, it was being able to see the historical narrative grounded in primary source documentation - to see a story that might seem beyond belief for some of them - that really inspired them to pay closer attention to their work.

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Learning about Afro-Latinos during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

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Learning about Afro-Latinos during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

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Spanish 1 class

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Learning about Afro-Latinos During the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action — D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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In Spanish 1 at Thurgood Marshall Academy, students learned about several Afrolatinos during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

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In this lesson, students learn about the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and consider her work as part of a tradition of occasional poetry.

Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.
Updated: Jan. 25 Featured Articles: Several Times pieces about Note: This is a special edition of our Lesson of the Day. We have invited Carol Jago - longtime English teacher, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at U.C.L.A., and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English - to suggest ideas for teaching about occasional poetry and "The Hill We Climb." Ms. Jago is the author of many books, the most recent of which is "The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis." Amanda Gorman with more information, and an opportunity for students.
In this lesson, students will learn about Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history; how she came to write " The Hill We Climb "; and how it fits into the tradition of occasional poetry. They will also learn about Ms. Gorman's belief that poetry is political, and that reading and writing are instruments of social change. Finally, they will be invited to create their own occasional poems.

I. An Introduction to the Poet
Do you know who Amanda Gorman is? After Jan. 20, many more people will know her name since, at 22, she is now the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history. Committed to connecting literacy to the project of democracy, she considers reading and writing to be instruments of social change.

Encouraged by her mother, an English teacher, Ms. Gorman began writing poems as a child, finding her voice as she assembled words on the page. Where other young poets turn inward, she draws inspiration from events in the news.

In an interview with Adeel Hassan, she talks about what she felt as a child:

"I grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the Black 'hood met Black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands. Traversing between these worlds, either to go to a private school in Malibu, or then come back home to my family's two-bedroom apartment, gave me an appreciation for different cultures and realities, but also made me feel like an outsider. I'm sure my single mother, Joan Wicks, might describe me as a precocious child, but looking back in elementary school I often self-described myself as a plain 'weird' child. I spent most of elementary school convinced that I was an alien. Literally."

It has been a remarkable journey for Ms. Gorman to have traveled from feeling like an alien to becoming first the Youth Poet of Los Angeles, then, three years later, the first National Youth Poet Laureate and now the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history.

Watch her 2018 TEDEd talk, embedded above, to learn a little more about her. You will see that, in the tradition of a griot speaking truth to power, Ms. Gorman often turns to her literary mantra, "I am the daughter of Black writers, who are descended from Freedom Fighters, who broke the chains who changed the world. They call me."

What does she say in this talk that stands out for you? Why?

Have you ever encountered poetry that, like the examples she gives, has something interesting to say about politics and democracy? What examples come to mind?

How might you answer her key questions: "Whose shoulders do you stand on? What do you stand for?"

II. What Is Occasional Poetry? Understanding the Tradition of "The Hill We Climb"

Video

Richard Blanco, the 2013 inaugural poet, read "One Today" after President Obama renewed his oath of office on Monday.

As its name suggests, occasional poetry documents and reflects upon particular occasions, events both public and private, grand and less grand, from Tennyson's " The Charge of the Light Brigade" to Frank O'Hara's " The Day Lady Died " on the death of Billie Holiday. Often occasional poems are commissioned and intended for a public reading.

Through the ages, kings and queens have summoned poets to celebrate their triumphs. Since John F. Kennedy, most incoming Democratic presidents have invited poets to mark their accession to the highest office in the land. While presidents have typically taken a hands-off approach to the poem's composition, President Kennedy asked Robert Frost specifically to read "The Gift Outright" at his inauguration and suggested a revision to the last line. At the president's request, Frost changed "Such as she was, such as she would become" to "Such as she was, such as she will become."

In 2013, President Barack Obama asked Richard Blanco to be his inaugural poet. Mr. Blanco's occasional poem, "One Today," describes a country under "one sun" and "one light," where people toil on "one ground, our ground." Reminiscent of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," the poem celebrates the common work of uncommon individuals.

Fortunately, writing occasional poems is nothing new for Ms. Gorman. She composed " In This Place (An American Lyric)" and performed it at the Library of Congress for Tracy K. Smith's installation as U.S. Poet Laureate. After watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify at the confirmation hearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she wrote "We Rise." She described that experience and read the poem in a PBS interview with Alicia Menendez.

Ms. Gorman was contacted by the Biden inaugural committee in late December. She was given no specific instructions on what to write but was urged to focus on unity and hope. The Times reports:

[Ms. Gorman] joins a small group of poets who have been recruited to help mark a presidential inauguration, among them Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco.

But none of her predecessors faced the challenge that Gorman did. She set out to write a poem that would inspire hope and foster a sense of collective purpose, at a moment when Americans are reeling from a deadly pandemic, political violence and partisan division.

The article also describes how she had written most of the inaugural poem before the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol, but stayed awake late into the night to finish, "adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day."

Before you dive into the poem itself in the next section, put yourself in Ms. Gorman's shoes. If you were asked to write a poem by the Biden inaugural committee, what are some things you might want it to communicate? Why?

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transcript

The Poet Amanda Gorman Says America Can Be the 'Light' It Needs

Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet, recited her poem "The Hill We Climb" at President Biden's inauguration.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world. When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade the loss? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We've braved the belly of the beast. We've learned that quiet isn't always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is, isn't always justice. And yet the dawn is hours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time, where a skinny black girl, descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine. But that doesn't mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man. And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none, and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired. we tried, that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid. If we're to live up to our own time, then victory won't lie in the blade. But in all the bridges we've made. That is the promise promise to glade, the hill we climb. If only we dare it. Because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into, and how we repair it. We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith, we trust. For while we have our eyes on the future, our history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour. But within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves. So while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole. Benevolent but bold, fierce and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain. If we merge mercy with might, and might with rights, then love becomes our legacy and change our children's birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left with. Every breath, my bronze-pounded chest. We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limned hills of the West. We will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country. Our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there was always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it.

Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet, recited her poem "The Hill We Climb" at President Biden's inauguration. Credit Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Update: Here is a transcript of the poem from CNN.
1. Watch the video of Ms. Gorman reading "The Hill We Climb." Then read the poem, underlining its most important words. Explain why you think these particular images are essential to the poem's meaning.

2. Ms. Gorman has an extraordinary ear for subtle rhymes. Watch or reread aloud "The Hill We Climb" and listen for them. Which stood out for you?

3. Throughout the poem we find references to events from the news. Identify these lines. What do these references invite readers to reflect on about America and Americans?

4. How does Amanda Gorman marry sound to sense, her language to her message, in these lines?

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust.

5. In the title of her poem Gorman employs the metaphor of a hill. Beyond a feature on a landscape, what does this image suggest to you? What else might a hill represent? Where else does this image appear in the poem?

6. How would you characterize the tone of this poem? What is the "light" Gorman makes reference to here?

There is always light.

Only if we are brave enough to see it.

There is always light.

Only if we are brave enough to be it.

7. Identify lines in the poem that reflect the occasion for which "The Hill We Climb" was written. How do the lines you have chosen suggest issues surrounding the inauguration of a president in 2021?

8. Read the poem once more selecting a line or phrase that struck you as luminous or beguiling. Write about what the line caused you to think. Turn to a partner or small group, read the poem aloud once more, and discuss the selected lines.

9. In the Times article about how Ms. Gorman came to write this poem, we learned that some of the lines were inspired by the events of Jan. 6. Which do you think those were? Why? Once you've made your guess, look back at this article to see if you were right. Do you think she managed to do what she told The Times she planned to do by both confronting dark realities and offering "a breath for joy"?

10. Dwight Garner, a Times book critic, writes about Ms. Gorman, "If her performance made you vaguely feel that you'd had a blood transfusion, it was perhaps because you could sense the beginning of a remade connection in America between cultural and political life. A sleeping limb was tingling back into action." Read the rest of his piece to the end, where he compares Ms. Gorman's work to that of Robert Frost, who read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Do you agree? What does Mr. Garner capture about this 2021 poet and poem that puts into words something you, too, have felt?

Write Your Own Occasional Poem:
Consider writing your own occasional poem inspired by a news event that moves, angers, saddens or inspires you.

For example, right now, many poets are writing about the losses Covid-19 has wrought. Julia Alvarez's "How Will This Pandemic Affect Poetry?," which you can read in this piece, is a remarkable example, and a collection edited by Alice Quinn, " Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic," contains many more. In the video above, you can hear Ms. Gorman's poem "The Miracle of Morning," which explores these losses while also crafting a praise song for human endurance.

Video

Amanda Gorman

Create an Animated Poem:
In 2018, The Times's Race/Related newsletter asked Ms. Gorman for original poetry for Black History Month. It then animated her words. You can see one poem above, and another here.

You might use these as inspiration to make short videos of a poem of your own choosing - one someone else wrote, or one you wrote yourself.

Write a Readers' Theater Script:
Ms. Gorman's inaugural poem can easily be performed as Reader's Theater. Divide the poem for individual voices, then choose some lines to be read in chorus for emphasis. Perform the poem for your class - whether you're currently in school virtually or in-person.
Consider the Role of Inaugural Poetry:
A 2008 article, " The Intersection of Poetry and Politics," written just before Mr. Obama became president, quotes Christian Wiman, then editor of Poetry Magazine:

In a way, the poem itself is not the point. I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture's language and its political life."

Do you agree? Is there "an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture's language and its political life"? What examples can you find to support your opinion?
Pair "The Hill We Climb" With "Inaugural" by Jericho Brown

Listen to This Article

Audio Recording by Audm

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown also wrote a poem on the occasion of Joe Biden's inauguration. Listen to him reading "Inaugural." What do you understand by these line "I don't want/To be hopeful if it means I've got to be/Naïve"?

How do you think these lines relate to the later passage that reads, "To the air because we are dumb enough/To decide on something as difficult/As love"?

What do "Inaugural" and "The Hill We Climb" share - in terms of message, wording, tone, structure or anything else? What lines show that?
Join a "Slow Chat" About This Poem on Twitter on Friday, Jan. 29:
Melissa Smith, an English teacher and the founder of #TeachLivingPoets, is organizing and moderating a "slow chat" on Twitter so that students everywhere can "learn together and discuss this history-making poem." All the details are here.

Amanda Gorman on the Charles River near Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Related Article Credit... Tony Luong for The New York Times

About Lesson of the Day
* Find all our Lessons of the Day in this column.
* Teachers, watch our on-demand webinar to learn how to use this feature in your classroom.

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Lesson of the Day: Amanda Gorman and 'The Hill We Climb' (Published 2021)

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In this lesson, students learn about the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and consider her work as part of a tradition of occasional poetry. Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021. Updated: Jan.

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During the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, in particular, community self-determination was central to many peoples' struggles. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense sought social justice for African Americans and other oppressed communities through a combination of revolutionary theory, education, and community programs.

Their party platform, better known as the 10-Point Program, arose from the Black Panthers' assessment of the social and economic conditions in their community. It became part of the party's philosophical backbone and served as a model for many other community groups such as the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, and the Red Guard.

I taught about the Panthers in the context of a high school African Studies class in Seattle that focused on African history and the experience of the Diaspora. Of the 30 working- and middle-class students, most of them 10th graders, 25 were African American, four were white, and one was Chicana. When I teach about the Black Power Movement, I try to connect the movement to today's issues. One way is by having students review the Black Panther Party's 10-Point Program and develop their own personal versions of the program. This lesson, of course, has to take place within the context of a larger unit on the Panthers and African American history in general.

This lesson was originally published in the Fall 2001 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine.

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'What We Want, What We Believe': Teaching with the Black Panthers' 10-Point Program - Zinn Education Project

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Teaching Activity. By Wayne Au. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages. How students can use the Black Panther Party's 10-Point Program to assess issues in their own communities and to develop 10-Point Programs of their own. Available in Spanish.

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How Does Race Affect a Student’s Math Education?

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A new paper examines the ways “whiteness” reproduces racial advantages and disadvantages.

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On Monday April 1, 1967 "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head. Police from the county sheriff's department were there, but no ambulance had been called. . . . [The] sheriff's office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at the scene at 4:50 a.m. on a tip from an unidentified caller about a burglary in progress. They claimed that when they arrived,Denzil Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and refused to stop when ordered to halt. Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him. . . . "For the Dowells, the official explanation did not add up, and community members helped the family investigate. . . . There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill's Liquors, the store that Dowell had allegedly been robbing. Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down. But Dowell had a bad hip, a limp, and the family claimed that he could not run, let alone jump fences. . . . A doctor who worked on the case told the family that judging from the way the bullets had entered Dowell's body, Dowell had been shot with his hands raised. . . . Mrs. Dowell publicly announced, 'I believe the police murdered my son.' . . . A white jury took little time deciding that the killing of unarmed Dowell was 'justifiable homicide' because the police officers on the scene had suspected that he was in the act of committing a felony. Outraged, the Black community demanded justice."
-Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire:
The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

Helping North Richmond's Black community demand justice for the killing of Denzil Dowell was one of the first major organizing campaigns of the Black Panther Party. The first issue of The Black Panther newspaper, which at its height around 1970 had a circulation of 140,000 copies per week, asked "Why Was Denzil Dowell Killed?" Anyone reading the story of Dowell today can't help but draw parallels to the unarmed Black men and women regularly murdered by police. The disparity between the police's story and the Dowell family's, the police harassment Dowell endured before his murder, the jury letting Dowell's killer off without punishment, even the reports that Dowell had his hands raised while he was gunned down, eerily echo the police killings today that have led to the explosion of the movement for Black lives.

Yet when we learn about the early years of the Panthers, the organizing they did in Richmond - conducting their own investigation into Dowell's death, confronting police who harassed Dowell's family, helping mothers in the community organize against abuse at the local school, organizing armed street rallies in which hundreds filled out applications to join the party - is almost always absent.

The history of the Black Panther Party (BPP) holds vital lessons for today's movement to confront racism and police violence - yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Panthers. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, they fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, healthcare, education, and much more. And as the Panthers grew, so did the issues they organized around.

Black Panthers and Community Health

Jesse Hagopian and Adam Sanchez are interviewed in With Free Medical Clinics and Patient Advocacy, the Black Panthers Created a Legacy in Community Health That Still Exists Amid COVID-19 and the short video below via Time magazine.

This lesson was originally published in the Rethinking Schools publication Teaching for Black Lives.

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What We Don't Learn About the Black Panther Party - but Should

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On Monday April 1, 1967 "George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California . . . heard 10 gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 a.m., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head. Police from the county sheriff's department were there, but no ambulance had been called.

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In February of 2019, a positive behavior support coach who was employed by the district in Madison, Wis., allegedly physically assaulted and ripped the hair out of the head of an 11-year-old Black girl. In the same school district, several teachers and substitutes have been fired or resigned earlier this academic year after reports they used racial slurs in the classroom. In the neighboring school district of Middleton, Wis., a school bus driver was fired after the district confirmed he had slapped a Black child. All these incidents in Wisconsin happened within months of each other.

In Binghamton, N.Y., four 12-year-old Black girls reported they were strip-searched at their school for acting too hyper and giddy in January. School officials likely assumed the girls were on drugs because their Black joy was unrecognizable. Of course, no drugs were found and the district denies strip searching the girls. However, the district does admit that asking students to remove some of their clothing is in compliance with a "sobriety check". The girls' parents dispute the district's claims, and a civil lawsuit from the parents and a third-party investigation are still ongoing.

Last Halloween, 14 staff members at Middleton Heights Elementary, 30 miles west of Boise, Idaho, were involved in dressing up as Mexicans and the border wall for Halloween. The district's superintendent issued a public apology and placed the teachers on paid administrative leave.

"An Essay for Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real"

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"White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy"

"Dear White Teachers: You Can't Love Your Black Students If You Don't Know Them"

"'Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black"

Sadly, incidents like these fill my social-media timeline on a weekly basis. With regularity, school districts' spokespersons portray these incidents as isolated events, the work of a few overzealous, culturally insensitive but "good" teachers. These responses never acknowledge how racism is systemic, institutionalized, and structural, or how racism breeds and is maintained by violence.

Physical and psychological attacks on Black and Brown children's bodies and culture are more than just racist acts by misguided school educators; they are the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children. This type of violence toward children of color is less visceral and seemingly less tragic than physical acts of murder at the hands of White mobs and White self-appointed vigilantes, the shooting of unarmed people of color by police officers in their own homes and communities, or the senseless violence in some Black communities, which are all conditions of racism.

What I am talking about is a slow death, a death of the spirit, a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.

Legal scholar Patricia Williams coined the term "spirit murdering" to argue that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs people of color of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance-all things children need to enter school and learn.

The spirit murdering of Black and Brown children leaves a trail of unanswered questions: How do children learn after being physically assaulted or racially insulted by a person who is supposed to protect them, love them, and teach them? How does a Black or Brown child live, learn, and grow when her spirit is under attack at school, and her body is in danger inside the classroom? How does a parent grapple with this reality? How are children's imagination and humanity stunted by the notion that they are never safe in their schools because of the color of their skin or the God they pray to? Where does the soul go to heal when school is a place of trauma?

School officials continue to misdiagnose the spirit murdering happening in their schools every day, even in a time when folks are screaming in the streets that Black Lives Matter, demanding immigration rights, calling to end police brutality, standing up to Islamophobia and transphobia, and demanding racial justice. When schools mirror our society's hate, educational justice becomes out of our reach.
Related Video In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this Commentary, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here's what she had to say:

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How Schools Are 'Spirit Murdering' Black and Brown Students (Opinion)

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In February of 2019, a positive behavior support coach who was employed by the district in Madison, Wis., allegedly physically assaulted and ripped the hair out of the head of an 11-year-old Black girl. In the same school district, several teachers and substitutes have been fired or resigned earlier this academic year after reports they used racial slurs in the classroom.

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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.

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Reconstructing Race: A Teacher Introduces His Students to the Slippery Concept of Race - Zinn Education Project

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Teaching Activity. By Nathanial W. Smith. Rethinking Schools. A teacher describes a series of lessons he teaches to help his students understand race as a social construct.

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Congo, Coltan, and Cell Phones: A People’s History

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In this lesson, students learn about the colonial history of Congo, debate responsibility for crimes against humanity, and investigate the connection, past and present, between the exploitation of natural resources and violence.

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Dr. Kmt Shockley and Kofi LeNiles provided an engaging and interactive African centered history workshop for ninth grade students at Friendship Technology Preparatory Academy. At the core of their workshop was the history and culture of a maroon community called Palenque San Basilio (Palenque). Palenque is located in Colombia, South America and is the focus of their upcoming documentary entitled " For Humanity: Culture, Community and Maroonage."

Students were a bit skeptical when Dr. Shockley asked probing questions to gather information about their background knowledge of Black history. However, the mood of the classroom transformed and students became enthralled in the discussion when Dr. Shockley started talking about the original name of Egypt -"Kmt" meaning "Land of the Blacks."

Dr. Shockley talked about the enslavement of African people, their determination to free themselves and the development of maroon communities (free societies formed by Blacks who escaped enslavement) throughout the Americas. Through oral storytelling, as Kofi played the drums, students learned about an African King named Benkos Bioho who was forced into slavery and brought to Colombia where he escaped and founded Palenque.

After the drumming and oral history activities, Dr. Shockley engaged the students in an African (Black) history activity. Dr. Shockley provided students with a mini-lecture about a variety of thriving African civilizations that existed before Benkos Bioho and the enslavement of Africans. Following which students engaged in a gallery walk with quotes from the African diaspora that seem to defy time and evoke emotions.

Students were instructed to stand next to the quote they connected with most and talk to their peers who selected the same quote. Next, students shared their responses with the entire class. One student said, "We talked a lot about how a lot of our history (that is Black history) has not been taught and each day we can learn more about it."

Students were shown the first four minutes of the documentary entitled "For Humanity, Culture, Community and Maroonage" and given time for a brief Q&A with Dr. Shockley and Kofi about why they made the film.

As the class ended, it was evident that students wanted to learn more about Black history and maroon communities. One student asked when the film would be completed so that the class could view it in full.

Dr. Shockley and Kofi hope to bring their workshop and film to more classrooms and they are working on a live production of the film. For more information about the documentary, the workshop, and the production please visit their facebook, twitter, or Instagram or email them at: tipofthespeardocumentaries@gmail.com.

See more stories.

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Tip of the Spear: Maroon Communities in South America - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Producers, Dr. Kmt Shockley and Kofi LeNiles, provided an engaging and interactive African centered history workshop for ninth grade students at Friendship Technology Preparatory Academy. At the core of their workshop was the history and culture of a maroon community called Palenque, San Basilio (Pa

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"Artist Titus Kaphar makes paintings and sculptures that wrestle with the struggles of the past while speaking to the diversity and advances of the present. In an unforgettable live workshop, Kaphar takes a brush full of white paint to a replica of a 17th-century Frans Hals painting, obscuring parts of the composition and bringing its hidden story into view. There's a narrative coded in art like this, Kaphar says. What happens when we shift our focus and confront unspoken truths?"

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Outline for the BLM Week of Action in a High School ELA Class

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Outline for the BLM Week of Action in a High School ELA Class

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In breakout rooms, students learned about leaders from the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter Movement.

Our library/media specialist, in collaboration with the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, also invited students to an author visit with Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam to discuss their new book, Punching the Air.

Wednesday

(Asynchronous Learning)

Thursday

Students presented their leaders to the class. Then we did a writing assignment, where students could either reflect on one of the 13 Guiding Principles and select a song that they think embodies that principle, or students could write a letter to one of the Civil Rights/Black Lives Matter leaders. (They wrote the letters in present tense, although in some cases the leaders, such as John Lewis, are deceased.)

Friday

Students shared their writing with the class and we played a Kahoot with questions about the leaders. Finally, we discussed the Week of Action National Demands and how we can organize and take action to demand justice for Black and Brown students and families in our community throughout our year of purpose.

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Outline for the BLM Week of Action in a High School ELA Class - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Students in grades 9/10 English Language Arts classes in the International Academy (newly arrived immigrant students) and a grade 11/12 elective course at Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) collaborated throughout the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. This followed a unit on the Civil Rights

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Students Explore Black Lives Matter through Dialogue and Reflection

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Students Explore Black Lives Matter through Dialogue and Reflection

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Through the Peardeck slides, Chiron shared a series of images and prompted students to share their thoughts in response to the photos. "In exactly five words, write down what the images make you feel." Some of the images included pictures of BLM protests from across the United States, while one photograph showed Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the anthem of an NFL football game. Student responses filled the chatbox:

Black lives are important and strong.

It makes me feel good about my Black people.

Powerful, encouraging, passionate, freedom, and proud.

These images make me feel a range of emotions.

We are not getting the justice we deserve.

Students noted that it was challenging to only name five words they would use to describe the images because they felt there was so much they wanted to add. Chiron gave students the space to write or share more than five words and affirmed that each word they offered was powerful and important. Chiron explained to students that they were starting a new unit on the Black Lives Matter movement and that they would explore the movement through images, poetry, and art. The unit would include time for them to reflect, identify their thoughts and feelings, and create artwork that expressed their ideas and viewpoints.

Next, students read the description of Black Lives Matter from the website in their online journals. Then they answered these two questions:

What are three words that stand out to you in this text?

If you had to tell a 1st grader about BLM and could only use one sentence, what would you tell them?

For the first question, students wrote their responses in the chatbox:

Powerful, humanity, sisters, collective, liberators, liberation, mission, resilient, power, mothers, systematically.

Many of the words overlapped, which emphasized how many students felt that words like powerful and liberation resonated with them. After answering these questions, the class then read through the 13 Guiding Principles of BLM to reflect on their answers to some additional questions: Which principle most resonates with you? Why is that principle from Question #1 significant to individuals, the country, and/or the world? Which principle do you find the least important?

Chiron broke the class into breakout rooms for smaller group discussions on which of the guiding principles resonated most with each individual. In my group, students shared that globalism, Black women, and collective values meant the most to them after reading all of the principles. Students agreed that globalism and collective value were important for solidarity and highlighted the strength of communities working together. They also noted that we need to protect and honor Black women. One student also offered that restorative justice was a principle that spoke to them because they felt like restorative justice provided a base, or a foundation, for the rest of the principles to be enacted. In our conversation, the group centered us on the beauty of community when we lean on and support one another.

When we returned from our breakout rooms to the full class, Chiron grounded us in the difference between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter,

Black Lives Matter simply points out that Black people's lives are undervalued in the United States and that they are more likely to experience violence at the hands of the police.

To reinforce Chiron's point, he shared a Twitter video that explained the analogy that if one person's house was on fire, we wouldn't sprinkle water on everyone's house. Particularly, Chiron noted that Black people experience police violence, anti-Blackness, and injustice; therefore saying their lives matter reinforces their humanity in a society that actively perpetuates white supremacy.

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Students Explore Black Lives Matter through Dialogue and Reflection - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Students in Sam Chiron's Introduction to Law class at Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS discussed images and text related to the questions: What is Black Lives Matter? What are the 13 Guiding Principles? The lesson was an introduction to a month-long unit on the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men

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As a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, students in Beth Barkley's Human Rights and Social Action classes at Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) created a tribute to the young Black men who have lost their lives to police brutality. Inspired by Kim Spott's #LastWords lesson and the Good Men Project's #LastWords: A Tribute to Men Killed by Police, students started by reflecting on the last words of young Black men.

Students viewed a series of 12 quotes. For each quote, they wrote their initial thoughts, feelings, reactions, and questions/wonderings.

At first, students were not provided any context for the quotes, and initial quotes read, "Mom, I'm going to college" and "I love you too!" After a pivotal quote that read, "....," which students later found out was because Jonathan Ferrell was shot before he even had an opportunity to speak his last words, it became more obvious how the quotes were connected with explicit, innocent questions and statements like, "Officers, why do you have your guns out?" and "I don't have a gun. Stop shooting."

The second time students saw each quote, they were provided context and again reflected in their notebooks, many of them in disbelief, disgust, and outrage that someone could so wrongly and unjustly be killed just because of the color of their skin.

Following the reflection, each group was assigned one of the young black men to research and to learn more about, not as victims of police brutality and injustice, but as people, sons, brothers, fathers, students, etc. Ms. Barkley and her students discussed how many marginalized groups are silenced. Many are quietly forgotten or else only remembered as being shot and killed, as a statistic, which is why this project is so important. The discussion continued, "We cannot let blackness be a crime in our country. We must advocate for change." Ms. Barkley and her students decided to start with education.

They wanted to remember and honor the young Black men for their accomplishments, ambitions, dreams for the future, and for their love and kindness. In order to do this, after researching each individual, students created posters, highlighting who each young Black man was as a person. The posters also include pictures, many of them in graduation caps and gowns or smiling for their followers on social media and finally, their last words.

The posters are displayed in the hallway at Cardozo with the message, "Rest in Power."

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Rest in Power: Tributes to the Lives of Young Black Men - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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As a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action , students in Beth Barkley's Human Rights and Social Action classes at Cardozo Education Campus (DCPS) created a tribute to the young Black men who have lost their lives to police brutality.

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible-and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people-must be prepared to "go for broke." Or to put it another way, you must understand that in the attempt to correct so many generations of bad faith and cruelty, when it is operating not only in the classroom but in society, you will meet the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most determined resistance. There is no point in pretending that this won't happen.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I'm the child's parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it-at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

Now, if what I have tried to sketch has any validity, it becomes thoroughly clear, at least to me, that any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American educational system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the stars and stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war. He pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees "liberty and justice for all." He is part of a country in which anyone can become president, and so forth. But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured. He is assumed by the republic that he, his father, his mother, and his ancestors were happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darkies who loved Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, that the value he has as a black man is proven by one thing only-his devotion to white people. If you think I am exaggerating, examine the myths which proliferate in this country about Negroes.

All this enters the child's consciousness much sooner than we as adults would like to think it does. As adults, we are easily fooled because we are so anxious to be fooled. But children are very different. Children, not yet aware that it is dangerous to look too deeply at anything, look at everything, look at each other, and draw their own conclusions. They don't have the vocabulary to express what they see, and we, their elders, know how to intimidate them very easily and very soon. But a black child, looking at the world around him, though he cannot know quite what to make of it, is aware that there is a reason why his mother works so hard, why his father is always on edge. He is aware that there is some reason why, if he sits down in the front of the bus, his father or mother slaps him and drags him to the back of the bus. He is aware that there is some terrible weight on his parents' shoulders which menaces him. And it isn't long-in fact it begins when he is in school-before he discovers the shape of his oppression.

Let us say that the child is seven years old and I am his father, and I decide to take him to the zoo, or to Madison Square Garden, or to the U.N. Building, or to any of the tremendous monuments we find all over New York. We get into a bus and we go from where I live on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue downtown through the park and we get in New York City, which is not Harlem. Now, where the boy lives-even if it is a housing project-is in an undesirable neighborhood. If he lives in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies-in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto. And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born-where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich-or at least it looks rich. It is clean-because they collect garbage downtown. There are doormen. People walk about as though they owned where they are-and indeed they do. And it's a great shock. It's very hard to relate yourself to this. You don't know what it means. You know-you know instinctively-that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told. And who is it for and who is paying for it? And why isn't it for you?

Later on when you become a grocery boy or messenger and you try to enter one of those buildings a man says, "Go to the back door." Still later, if you happen by some odd chance to have a friend in one of those buildings, the man says, "Where's your package?" Now this by no means is the core of the matter. What I'm trying to get at is that by the time the Negro child has had, effectively, almost all the doors of opportunity slammed in his face, and there are very few things he can do about it. He can more or less accept it with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside-all the more dangerous because it is never expressed. It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives-I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than "Yes Sir" and "No, Ma'am." They will tell you it's raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you-really hate you because in their eyes (and they're right) you stand between them and life. I want to come back to that in a moment. It is the most sinister of the facts, I think, which we now face.

There is something else the Negro child can do, to. Every street boy-and I was a street boy, so I know-looking at the society which has produced him, looking at the standards of that society which are not honored by anybody, looking at your churches and the government and the politicians, understand that this structure is operated for someone else's benefit-not for his. And there's no reason in it for him. If he is really cunning, really ruthless, really strong-and many of us are-he becomes a kind of criminal. He becomes a kind of criminal because that's the only way he can live. Harlem and every ghetto in this city-every ghetto in this country-is full of people who live outside the law. They wouldn't dream of calling a policeman. They wouldn't, for a moment, listen to any of those professions of which we are so proud on the Fourth of July. They have turned away from this country forever and totally. They live by their wits and really long to see the day when the entire structure comes down.

The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were, indeed, animals and deserved to be treated like animals. Therefor it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history. The reason is that this "animal," once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place. What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.

The Reconstruction, as I read the evidence, was a bargain between the North and South to this effect: "We've liberated them from the land-and delivered them to the bosses." When we left Mississippi to come North we did not come to freedom. We came to the bottom of the labor market, and we are still there. Even the Depression of the 1930s failed to make a dent in Negroes' relationship to white workers in the labor unions. Even today, so brainwashed is this republic that people seriously ask in what they suppose to be good faith, "What does the Negro want?" I've heard a great many asinine questions in my life, but that is perhaps the most asinine and perhaps the most insulting. But the point here is that people who ask that question, thinking that they ask it in good faith, are really the victims of this conspiracy to make Negroes believe they are less than human.

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere. I was not a "nigger" even though you called me one. But if I was a "nigger" in your eyes, there was something about you-there was something you needed. I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons that had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! So where we are now is that a whole country of people believe I'm a "nigger," and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis.

It is not really a "Negro revolution" that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you'd be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody's history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

Now let's go back a minute. I talked earlier about those silent people-the porter and the maid-who, as I said, don't look up at the sky if you ask them if it is raining, but look into your face. My ancestors and I were very well-trained. We understood very early that this was not a Christian nation. It didn't matter what you said or how often you went to church. My father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother knew that Christians didn't act this way. It was a simple as that. And if that was so there was no point in dealing with white people in terms of their own moral professions, for they were not going to honor them. What one did was to turn away, smiling all the time, and tell white people what they wanted to hear. But people always accuse you of reckless talk when you say this.

All this means that there are in this country tremendous reservoirs of bitterness which have never been able to find an outlet, but may find an outlet soon. It means that well-meaning white liberals place themselves in great danger when they try to deal with Negroes as though they were missionaries. It means, in brief, that a great price is demanded to liberate all those silent people so that they can breathe for the first time and tell you what they think of you. And a price is demanded to liberate all those white children-some of them near forty-who have never grown up, and who never will grow up, because they have no sense of their identity.

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That's all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That's how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life. When I was living in Europe, for example, one of the worst revelations to me was the way Americans walked around Europe buying this and buying that and insulting everybody-not even out of malice, just because they didn't know any better. Well, that is the way they have always treated me. They weren't cruel; they just didn't know you were alive. They didn't know you had any feelings.

What I am trying to suggest here is that in the doing of all this for 100 years or more, it is the American white man who has long since lost his grip on reality. In some peculiar way, having created this myth about Negroes, and the myth about his own history, he created myths about the world so that, for example, he was astounded that some people could prefer Castro, astounded that there are people in the world who don't go into hiding when they hear the word "Communism," astounded that Communism is one of the realities of the twentieth century which we will not overcome by pretending that it does not exist. The political level in this country now, on the part of people who should know better, is abysmal.

The Bible says somewhere that where there is no vision the people perish. I don't think anyone can doubt that in this country today we are menaced-intolerably menaced-by a lack of vision.

It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, "I can't do anything about it. It's the government." The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country's life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar and endangered the life of a Governor Wallace. It happened here and there was no public uproar.

I began by saying that one of the paradoxes of education was that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence-the moral and political evidence-one is compelled to say that this is a backward society. Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them-I would try to make them know-that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are worth a man's respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to him that the popular culture-as represented, for example, on television and in comic books and in movies-is based on fantasies created by very ill people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is-and that he can do something about that, too. I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger-and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. I would try to show him that one has not learned anything about Castro when one says, "He is a Communist." This is a way of his not learning something about Castro, something about Cuba, something, in time, about the world. I would suggest to him that his is living, at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way-and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

Delivered on October 16, 1963, as "The Negro Child-His Self-Image ", published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

James Baldwin (Aug. 2, 1924 - Dec. 1, 1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Born in Harlem, Baldwin was a "witness to the truth" about racism and homophobia through his novels, plays, essays, and poetry including Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni's Room (1956), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Another Country (1962), The Fire Next Time (1963), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985). Baldwin was active as a writer, speaker, and ally of the southern Civil Rights Movement. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Freedom Day in Selma in 1963, and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March.

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A Talk to Teachers - Zinn Education Project

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Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country.

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My co-teacher and I used the book "Punching the Air" as an anchor text for this co-curricular class focused on justice.  Student chose a verse rom the book and created a piece of art the represented their interpretation of the words.  We then moved on to studying activism and students did an in-depth research project on an activist for justice then created a children's book that was shared with a local elementary school.  This was done as we taught remotely and with multiple grants for books and art supplies.

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Appreciated the Malcom X clip showing him speaking to the UN asking for Blacks in America to be given Human Rights and supports like their fellow Black brothers and sisters in Angola and South Africa of that time since U.S. Blacks were being denied their civil rights

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How the Word Is Passed: Discussion Questions, Writing Prompts, and Teaching Ideas

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How the Word Is Passed: Discussion Questions, Writing Prompts, and Teaching Ideas

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How the Word Is Passed: Discussion Questions, Writing Prompts, and Teaching Ideas - Zinn Education Project

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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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Exposure: Black@Hayfield Photojournalism Project Captures Uniqueness and Universality of Black Experience at Hayfield Secondary School

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Exposure: Black@Hayfield Photojournalism Project Captures Uniqueness and Universality of Black Experience at Hayfield Secondary School

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom

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Tenth graders in Christy Gill's English class at HB Woodlawn Secondary Program (APSVA), learned about the 13 guiding principles as a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

As a warm up, students were tasked to answer the following questions,

What do you know about the Black Lives Matter Movement?

Why do you think the Black Lives Matter movement began?

What do you think are the core principles and values of the Black Lives Matter movement? What is a social movement?

Some of the students' answers included,

I think it began because African-Americans were/are being treated unfairly. A lot of assumptions were being made and acted upon.

The core principles are that Black lives will be treated just like everyone else.

A social movement is a movement made by people trying to fix something in this world that needs changing.

Gill explained that the Black Lives Matter movement started after the death of Trayvon Martin. Students discussed the death of Michael Brown and how unjust it was that both Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed because of the color of their skin.

Gill engaged students in the Introduction to the Principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement lesson. In small groups, they discussed two to three of the principles. Each group wrote what the principles they were assigned meant to them in their own words and why their particular principles were part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Each group shared their answers with the classroom as a whole.

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13 Guiding Principles in a Tenth Grade Classroom - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Tenth graders in Christy Gill's English class at HB Woodlawn Secondary Program (APSVA), learned about the 13 guiding principles as a part of the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. As a warm up, students were tasked to answer the following questions, What do you know about the Black Lives Matter Movement?

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Secondary Lesson, Diversity & Globalism (PearDeck)

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Secondary Lesson, Diversity & Globalism (PearDeck)

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Tuesday Secondary Lesson, Diversity & Globalism (PearDeck)

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Black Power: A British Story of Resistance

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Black Power: A British Story of Resistance

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Black Power: A British Story of Resistance - BBC

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© Neil Kenlock, Fair use image

Inspired by the Black Power movement in the U.S., the Nigerian playwright, Obi Egbuna, founded the British Black Panthers (BBP) in 1968 in London's Notting Hill. In Britain, people of Caribbean, African, or South Asian descent, who were mainly immigrants from former British colonies, were considered to be "black." The tripling of Britain's black population from 300,000 to 1 million from 1961 to 1964 led to increased racial and class tensions, especially in London's Afro-Caribbean community. These tensions led to more police repression and the creation of the BBP.

While the BBP was not an official chapter of the Black Panthers, it was the first Panther organization outside the United States, adopting the Panther's symbols of military jackets, berets, and raised fists. Under Egbuna, BBP fought against police brutality. London police attempted to destroy the new party by arresting Ebguna and two other Panthers on bogus charges of threatening police. Ebguna was found guilty, and while he was in prison, Althea Jones, a Trinidad-born Ph.D. student at the University of London, became the leader of BBP by 1970.

Althea Jones along with her partner and later husband, Eddie Lecointe, South Asian Farrukh Dhondy, and Neil Kenlock changed the focus of BBP. The Party began grass-roots organizing of local black communities in England around each community's issues of racial discrimination in jobs, housing, education, and medical and legal services. The BBP moved their headquarters to Brixton, a poorer black community in London. Under Jones's leadership the Panthers became a highly effective community organization that also collaborated on white working class issues and fought British imperialism. Like the Black Panther Party in the U.S., they stressed working-class solidarity in addition to fighting racial discrimination and oppression.

As part of their community work the BBP engaged in legal advocacy for blacks in 10 British cities as well as in London. The high point of their advocacy work was their defense of the Mangrove restaurant that was the central meeting place for Notting Hill's Caribbean community. The police regularly harassed and raided the Mangrove without ever finding any drugs. The BBP helped organize a demonstration against the police that led to the arrest and charging of nine black leaders with inciting a riot. These nine included the owner of the Mangrove, Althea Jones-Lecointe, and Darcus Howe. The Mangrove Nine trial was Britain's most influential black power trial. Jones-Lecointe and Howe represented themselves at the trial and demanded an all-black jury as a jury of their peers. The jury acquitted all nine defendants, and for the first time, a judge publicly acknowledged that there was "evidence of racial hatred" within the London police.

Other BBP achievements included creation of a Youth League and the Freedom News newspaper, and organizing a march of 10,000 people protesting the Immigration Bill of 1971 that reduced black immigration. In 1973 the BBP split into two factions, and ended soon after. The BBP had many offshoots, including British Black Women's Group, Squatter's Rights Movement, and the Race Today magazine. The long-neglected BBP has been highlighted in 2017 in a photography exhibit at the Tate Museum, a proposed film on the Mangrove Nine, and airing of Guerrilla, a new drama series loosely based on the BBP.

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British Black Panther Party (1968-1973) *

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Inspired by the Black Power movement in the U.S., the Nigerian playwright, Obi Egbuna, founded the British Black Panthers (BBP) in 1968 in London's Notting Hill. In Britain, people of Caribbean, African, or South Asian descent, who were mainly immigrants from former British colonies, were considered to be "black."

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Practical Skills for Teaching Inclusive History: CARGO Classroom

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Practical Skills for Teaching Inclusive History: CARGO Classroom

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Explore ways to improve the representation of people of African and African diaspora heritage drawing on 5,000 years of history

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Teaching Inclusive History: CARGO Classroom - Online Course - FutureLearn

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Explore ways to improve the representation of people of African and African diaspora heritage in education, drawing on 5,000 years of history.