The Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association was founded with a dual mission to organize mutual aid for its members and to pass federal pension legislation that would compensate every formerly enslaved person.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Mia Bay. 2021. 400 pages.
From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, this book explores racial restrictions on transportation and resistance to the injustice.
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Black sharecroppers were evicted by white landowners simply for exercising their right to register to vote.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace. 2021. 144 pages.
Scipio Africanus Jones — a self-taught attorney who was born enslaved — leads a momentous series of court cases to save twelve Black men who'd been unjustly sentenced to death.
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Picture book. By Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Charly Palmer. 2022. 64 pages.
This critical civil rights book for middle-graders examines the little-known Tennessee's Fayette County Tent City Movement in the late 1950s and reveals what is possible when people unite and fight for the right to vote.
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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
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Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated by police and FBI agents in Chicago, Illinois.
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott is one of the most powerful examples of organizing and social change in U.S. history.
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Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany launched the abolitionist North Star newspaper.
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The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially ended the institution of slavery.
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Sgt. Walker was convicted of mutiny and killed, one of nineteen Union soldiers executed by the Union army for mutiny during the Civil War, fourteen of whom were Black.
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The 24th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified.
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Film. Directed by C. J. Hunt. 2021. 82 minutes.
A co-production of POV and ITVS, in association with the Center for Asian American Media. A student-friendly documentary on the fight over Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause narrative.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Hilary Green. 2016. 272 pages.
An in-depth look at postwar African American education and the gains of Reconstruction.
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke in Philadelphia at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, urging African Americans to continue organizing for justice.
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William Beverly Nash and several others asked the federal government to intervene to ensure equal medical treatment for all.
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The Union Army occupied the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, freeing approximately 10,000 people who had been enslaved, starting what became known as the Port Royal Experiment.
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The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of school desegregation in the case of Joseph Workman v. the Detroit Board of Education, almost 90 years before the United States’ landmark Brown v. Board of Education.
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Film. National Park Service. 2020. 23 minutes.
Documentary about the role of young people in the voting rights movement in Alabama in the 1960s.
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Drum and Spear was founded by SNCC organizers in Washington, D.C. The bookstore quickly became a central hub of knowledge to “disseminate information by and about Black people in the African Diaspora.”
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Tunis Campbell, who assisted in the Port Royal Experiment to assist freed people during Reconstruction, was an abolitionist, state senator, and justice of the peace.
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Shaw University was established as a co-ed campus with support from private donors and the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. It is the second oldest HBCU in the South.
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Benjamin Berry Manson and Sarah Ann Benton White, formerly enslaved in Tennessee, receive an official marriage certificate from the Freedmen’s Bureau.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jim Downs. 2015. 280 pages.
Historical analysis of the illness and suffering endured by African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Teaching Activity by Jim Downs
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Book — Non-fiction. By Tera W. Hunter. 2019. 416 pages.
A comprehensive history of African American marriages in the nineteenth century.
Teaching Activity by Tera W. Hunter
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