Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this mixer lesson, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression to analyze why disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign, determining what kind of threat they posed in the view of the U.S. government.

On Jan. 13, 2025, educator Jesse Hagopian will discuss Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, and the campaign to fight back against bans on books and education. This session is part of the Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online people’s history series.

Teaching Guide. Edited by Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au. 2018. Rethinking Schools. 368 pages.
Essays, teaching activities, role plays, poems, and artwork, designed to illuminate the movement for Black students’ lives, the school-to-prison-pipeline, Black history, gentrification, intersectional Black identities, and more.

Five Black men were arrested for staging a peaceful sit-in at the Alexandria “public” library that denied access to African Americans, making this the anniversary of one of the earliest instances of this form of non-violent protest that became popular in the mid-20th century.

In an act of civil disobedience against the whites-only Greenville County Public Library, eight young Black people entered the library, began reading, and were subsequently arrested. They became known as the Greenville Eight, and the library finally desegregated months later after many legal battles.

Fed up with books being banned by the school administration, students at Island Trees High School in Long Island, New York sued the school board for this unconstitutional censorship in a case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court.