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Literature
Patty and Abigail
Patty, a young enslaved girl, shares some insight about life on a South Carolina plantation.
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A Personal Mission: Sammy Younge Jr.
Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.
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Literature
New Girl in School
This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.
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Literature
Elegy for Peter Norman
In this poem, the speaker recounts his or her shifting view of the white man stoically standing between Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their medal ceremony in Mexico City for the 1968 Olympics.
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Experiment in Fairness
Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.
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This Land is Ours
“The Ponca’s challenge of the U.S. government marked a turning point on the long path of Indian resistance. Increasingly, after Standing Bear v. Cook, the fight for Native rights would shift from the battlefields to the courtrooms of the growing nation.”
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Multimedia
Teaching Tolerance Interview With John Lewis
In the graphic novel March, Congressman John Lewis documents his experiences as a young civil rights activist. Hear him describe his first arrest employing a nonviolent resistance strategy, as captured in the book.
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President Obama's Address on the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday
Obama's 2015 speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge honors the anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," when hundreds of voting-rights activists were brutally attacked by state troopers as they began a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. President Obama reminds us of the spirit and struggle associated with the marchers in Selma, or any group of people meeting injustice.
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Gay and Lesbian Parents
In this nonfiction piece, Julianna Fields tells the story of Bailey and his two fathers. After protecting Bailey from onlookers' scorn when he was a child, the family decided to participate in a project showcasing the diversity found in local families.
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The First Americans
The Grand Council Fire of American Indians wrote this letter in response to the Chicago mayor's 1927 campaign against the use of British textbooks in public schools. The letter condemns the misrepresentation of Native American history in schools.