Teaching Activity. By Rowan Shafer. Rethinking Schools.
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice. She asks, "How could I bring up an issue so big and abstract, so gloom and doom, with 3rd graders? How could I not?"
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Film. Directed by Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver. 1985. 86 minutes.
Documentary about people who learned to organize, and received peer support, at the Highlander Center.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Diane Wilson. 2006. 392 pages.
Shrimp-boat captain Diane Wilson takes on corporate greed and political corruption in a true story about environmental activism on the Texas Gulf Coast.
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Twenty-four enslaved Africans launched a rebellion in Manhattan, New York.
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During a Spring filled with pro-immigrant activism, on this day the largest number of people gathered in over 100 cities in the United States to protest new anti-immigrant legislation.
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The 1968 Fair Housing Act was signed into law after years of struggle and grassroots organizing.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Michael G. Long, foreword by Chris Hedges, afterword by Dolores Huerta. 2019. 610 pages.
Encounter the voices of activists sharing instructive stories through narrative and primary documents.
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The CDC published a medical study about five gay men, plagued by a mysterious autoimmune disease (AIDS), in June 1981.
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Inmates at United States Penitentiary (USP) Marion staged a hunger strike on the U.S. bicentennial in protest of inhumane treatment by the prison administration.
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While politicians debated the implications of taking down the Confederate flag after the white supremacist murder of nine African Americans at Emmanuel AME Church, Bree Newsome scaled the South Carolina state flag pole and took the flag down.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
Through role play, students explore how different social groups influenced New Deal legislation.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Jacqueline Houtman, Walter Naegle, and Michael G. Long. 2019. 168 pages.
A biography of antiwar and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.
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Film. By Lynne Cherry and Young Voices for the Planet. 2019. 6 minutes.
This short documentary features the activism of Jaysa Mellers, a young adolescent girl who rallied her community to challenge local air polluters.
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Article. By the Rethinking Schools Editorial Board. Rethinking Schools, Summer 2019.
The Green New Deal will only be brought to life by people who grasp the enormity of the crisis that humanity faces and the radical changes necessary to address it. This requires that we teach a climate justice curriculum.
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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.
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Digital collection. A repository for primary sources and collection of essays about the origins, activities, and influence of the 19th-century Colored Conventions Movement that advocated for Black civil and human rights.
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Massachusetts farmers arm themselves and rebel against taxation under the Articles of Confederation.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 1964.
In one of his earliest published works, Howard Zinn writes about his experiences teaching and organizing with the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Howard Zinn. 1968.
A cogent defense of civil disobedience.
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Teachers went on strike for seven months, against community control, after Black and Puerto Rican parents organized for better schools for their children in New York City.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl. Ten Speed Press. 2020. 176 pages.
Paired with dynamic paper-cut art, readers explore several centuries of U.S. politics, culture, art, activism, and liberation.
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Film. Directed by David Appleby, Allison Graham, and Steven Ross. 1993. 58 minutes.
Documentary film on the African American sanitation workers' 1968 fight for human dignity and a living wage in Memphis.
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A successful boycott of the Norfolk Tars by Black sports fans leads the team to desegregate both the players and stadium seating.
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Film. Directed by David France. Public Square Films. 2012. 109 minutes.
This documentary is about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease.
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Between April 5 and April 28, 1977, hundreds of disabled and handicapped activists organized, protested, and occupied government buildings around the country to pressure the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph Califano, to enact Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and publish regulations to guide its enforcement.
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