Teachers Defy Fascism: Teach the Truth

Despite the relentless political attacks on antiracist education, traffic to the Zinn Education Project website continues to grow — a clear indication that educators and communities remain deeply committed to teaching the truth. In the first quarter of 2025, we saw increases across every major metric compared to the same period in 2024: total page views, total visitors, new visitors, PDF downloads, and registrations were all up. In a time when state legislatures are passing laws to ban truthful teaching, these numbers reflect a powerful countercurrent — one where teachers, students, and families seek out resources that center justice, people’s history, and critical thinking.

One of the most striking indicators of this commitment is the continued and growing interest in teaching the history and current reality of Palestine. The most downloaded lesson this quarter was Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power Activists. Other Palestine-focused lessons — including Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel — also ranked among the top 10. This surge is especially powerful given the dangerous climate for educators who teach honestly about Palestine. 

But it’s not only interest in Palestine that’s growing — the most downloaded lessons this quarter also include those on redlining, Reconstruction, the Black Panthers, COINTELPRO, and deportations. This cross-topic engagement suggests that educators are making powerful connections between systems of injustice, past and present. Remarkably, these lessons are reaching educators in all 50 states, including places with some of the most aggressive anti-truth legislation, such as Florida, Texas, and Iowa. These metrics aren’t just numbers — they are evidence of a movement of conscience, solidarity, and a refusal to be silenced.

The ten lessons below were the most frequently downloaded lessons from the Zinn Education Project website during the first three months of 2025.

	Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power Activists By Hannah Gann, Nick Palazzolo, Keziah Ridgeway, and Adam Sanchez This lesson highlights the complexity and diversity of thought as civil rights and Black power leaders and organizations developed their views on Palestine-Israel.
	U.S. Mexico War: “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God” By Bill Bigelow This interactive lesson introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U.S.-Mexico War. Roles available in Spanish.
	Reconstructing the South By Bill Bigelow This lesson engages students in thinking about what freedpeople needed in order to achieve — and sustain — real freedom after the Civil War.
	Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca In this lesson, students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
	The Color Line By Bill Bigelow This lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits.
	How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans.
	Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare 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.
	COINTELPRO: Teaching the FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
	‘What We Want, What We Believe’: Teaching with the Black Panthers’ 10-Point Program By Wayne Au 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.
	Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel By Bill Bigelow A mixer/mystery activity on Zionism, anti-Zionism, peasant resistance, the Great War, the British Mandate, and more.