Be the change

In this poem, the speaker sees a man carrying his son across the street and is struck by the tenderness the man displays for the child. The speaker realizes that humanity must cloak itself in this same caring nature.

You can see, hear, feel, and taste the injustice, frustration, and naiveté experienced at this ladies' get together.

This poem's speaker describes being bullied and feeling depressed and skipping school to avoid the harassment. Spiraling downhill emotionally, the speaker ultimately comes to accept and appreciate his/her unique identities.

Until Daniel Beaty was 3 years old, his father would "knock knock" on his door every morning. This performance explores the shaping of personal identity in an incarcerated parent's absence.

This excerpt explains that families are defined by love, caring and sharing, not the number or gender of its members.

The distrust between the Jewish community and African-American community in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1990s reached an all-time high when a runaway car struck two children.

i will be chosen is an anthem for all middle schoolers who knows what it feels like to be left out. Now, they’ll know what it feels like to be included and to win, in more ways than one.

“I wasn't like other kids.”

“I just needed a little bit of help...”

Pat Bagley says he created this cartoon "for all those who are cruelly made to feel out of place in this world."

This text explores the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, two self-made men whose lives intersected near the end of America's Civil War.

Felipe Morales' telling account of an encounter with a blind woman on the streets of Washington, D.C. was recorded for This I Believe. The NPR project features brief personal essays in which people from diverse backgrounds discuss how their values affect their daily lives.

On April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the lower court decision in Mendez v. Westminster, which required the school to integrate and set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.

In this excerpt from his book, Walking with the Wind, John Lewis describes his involvement in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., in the spring of 1960.

In his 1941 State of the Union Address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined four fundamental human freedoms—the freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—for the United States and the rest of the world.

Abraham Lincoln delivered this famous speech at the dedication of the National Cemetary in Gettysburg, the burial site of Union Soldiers who were killed in the Civil War.

When dreams and opportunities are pushed out of reach, only so many avenues offer recourse.

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

This 1974 print depicts Bloody Sunday, when a group of nonviolent protestors marching for voting rights in 1965 faced police violence at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

This photograph from the Associated Press shows Martin Luther King Jr. in a crowd of people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.

With the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln freed all enslaved people in “rebellious” states, forbid the military from repressing their freedom and sanctioned their military service for Union forces. This decree made emancipation a clear objective of the American Civil War.