Black History Month Archives - Teaching for Change

Black History Month

Reverend Barber’s words below highlight why it is all the more important to study Black history in February and all year long. We need some moral fire to help us see clearly how this history shapes our present reality. I’ve heard too many people say over the past several months, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this …

Teaching about Martin Luther King Jr.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism… Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. —Dr. Martin Luther King …

Virginia McLaurin: Making History All Her Life

Many of you have seen the video of Ms. Virginia McLaurin dancing and talking with the Obamas at the White House. It was moving to see her dream of meeting the first Black president come true. Ms. McLaurin has lived and made so much of the history that we believe should be highlighted in schools …

Teaching Eyes on the Prize

Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1985 is an award-winning 14-hour television series produced by Blackside and narrated by Julian Bond. Through interviews and historical footage, the series covers major events of the civil rights movement from 1954-1985. Eyes on the Prize remains one of the preeminent resources for teaching the modern Civil Rights …

Who Killed Sammy Younge Jr.? SNCC, Vietnam, and the Fight for Racial Justice

History may have forgotten, but we must not, that before Dr. King gave his now much-remembered Riverside Church declaration, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had already uniquely and notoriously condemned the international hypocrisy of the United States in Vietnam, Africa, and the Caribbean in the face of the parallel Black liberation movement throughout …

Preserving and Teaching Black History

The Teaching for Change board and staff wish a happy December 30 birthday to Timothy L. Jenkins. Below is an interview and here are other articles and commentaries by Jenkins. “The river that forgets its origin dries up,” said Teaching for Change board member Timothy Lionel Jenkins in his interview on the Rock Newman show on October 7, …

Amelia Boynton Robinson and the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL)

Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson passed away on August 26, 2015 at the age of 104. She is best known for her iconic photo after being beaten in Selma on Bloody Sunday. While the photo offers evidence of her bravery and sacrifice, people should also know that her activism on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was preceded by …

The Confederate Flag: Symbol of Opposition to Civil Rights

The Confederate flag, best known as a symbol of white supremacy during the Civil War, was also a symbol of state resistance to human rights and democracy during the modern Civil Rights Movement. As Civil Rights Movement photographer Matt Herron explains, Southerners who believed in racial segregation displayed Confederate flags instead of the American flag. …

Changing the Narrative About Selma

Thanks to support from our donors and advisers, we’ve been able to provide vital background information and lessons for schools on the bottom up history of the voting rights struggle. Here is a brief overview. On this 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act, the mainstream media features images of President Lyndon Johnson making …

Selma in Kosciusko

“Women can do just as much as men can when it comes to leadership.” This is just one of the comments made by students in Jessica Dickens’ class in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Dickens, a teacher the Kosciusko School District and Mississippi Civil Rights movement and Labor History teacher fellow, recently introduced the lesson, Stepping into Selma: …