Racism & Racial Identity Archives

Reconstruction: Repression and Resistance

In a people's history online class, Professor Kidada Williams and Tiffany Mitchell Patterson discussed African American survivors of racist violence in the context of Reconstruction, drawing parallels to the contemporary moment.

May 23, 1914: Indian Migrants on the Komagata Maru Denied Entry Into Canada

Nearly 400 South Asian immigrants — many of whom were Sikh — steamed into Vancouver’s harbor on the Japanese ship Komagata Maru in search of a new home, but were blocked from docking and disembarking due to racist immigration policies.

The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Patterson. Introduction by P. Gabrielle Foreman. 2021.
This volume of essays is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement, the nineteenth century’s longest campaign for Black civil rights.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre

Picture book. By Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper. 2021. 32 pages.
This children's book centers the history of the thriving Black community of Greenwood before the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

Teaching After Georgia Victory and Attempted Coup

How to contextualize and frame the two major political events of Jan. 6, 2021: An historic grassroots organizing victory in Georgia and an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

Book — Non-fiction. By Alondra Nelson. 2013.
Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Alondra Nelson documents the Party’s focus on health care.

Feb. 2 and 5, 1951: Virginia Executes the Martinsville Seven

In 1951, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed seven Black men despite a national campaign in their defense.

The First Rainbow Coalition

Film. Directed and produced by Ray Santisteban. Nantes Media LLC. 2019. 56 minutes.
In this documentary, Chicago's Black Panther Party forms alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing.

The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools

Book — Non-fiction. By Vanessa Siddle Walker. 2018.
This history tells the little-known story of how Black educators in the South laid the groundwork for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and weathered its aftermath.

Racial Equity Tools (Website)

Website. RET offers research, tips, curricula, and ideas for people who want to increase their own understanding and to help those working for racial justice at every level.

March 13, 2020: Breonna Taylor Killed by Louisville Police

Louisville police officers opened fire in the home of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, shooting and killing her.

To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War

Book — Non-fiction. By Tera W. Hunter. 1998.
An examination of post-Civil War lives of African American women, focusing on their labor organizing, leisure, hope, and struggle.

May 13, 1985: Philadelphia Police Bomb MOVE

The Philadelphia Police Department dropped a C-4 bomb on the home of the MOVE organization, killing eleven people (including five children) and wiping out half a city block.

Echoes of Enslavement

Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state — discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting — in this lesson based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People

Book — Non-Fiction. By Kekla Magoon. 2021.
An account of militant revolutionaries and human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.

Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage

Book — Non-fiction. By William Loren Katz. 2012. 272 pages.
History book for ages 10 to adult that traces relations between Blacks and American Indians since the time of the conquest.

Teaching Activity by William Loren Katz

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights

Book — Non-fiction. By Steve Sheinkin. 2014. 208 pages.
The story of 50 African American sailors charged with mutiny during World War II for challenging working conditions after a deadly munitions explosion.

Black Reconstruction in America

Book — Non-fiction. By W. E. B. Du Bois. Edited by Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates. 2021. 1097 pages.
Originally published in 1935, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction was the first book to challenge the prevailing racist historical narrative of the era and in sharp, incisive prose, tell the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the perspective of African Americans.

Christopher Columbus: No Monuments for Murderers

By Bill Bigelow

A New York Times article said the symbolism of Christopher Columbus is "murky.” But there is nothing murky about Columbus’ legacy of slavery and terrorism in the Americas. The record is clear and overwhelming. The fact that the New York Times could report this with such confidence — adding that “most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 [Columbus] sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World” — means that educators and activists still have much work to do.

When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction

By Adam Sanchez

Every day seems to bring new horrors as the U.S. president’s racist rhetoric and policies have provided an increasingly encouraging environment for attacks on Black people and other communities of color. The acquittal of yet another police officer accused of murdering a Black man in St. Louis, the raging battle across the country over whether symbols of slavery should be removed from public spaces, and the formation of a “Commission on Election Integrity” to further suppress voting by people of color are just a few of the recent reminders that racism is as American as apple pie. In moments like these, it’s worth remembering a time in U.S. history when Black lives mattered.

Taking the Fight Against White Supremacy into Schools

By Adam Sanchez

As a history teacher, there are times when the past reasserts itself with such force that you have to put aside your plans and address the moment. Charlottesville is one of those times. The image of white supremacists openly marching in defense of a Confederate general, viciously beating and murdering those who are protesting their racism — is an image we hoped had died with Jim Crow. That this image is not a relic of the past, is a reality that teachers and students must face.

What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should

By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian

Black Panther Party history holds vital lessons for today’s movement to confront racism and police violence, yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Black Panthers.

This local organizing that Panthers engaged in has been erased in the textbooks, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support. Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, as the Panthers grew, so did what they organized around. They fought in Black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education, and much more.

What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement After 1965? Don’t Ask Your Textbook

By Adam Sanchez

Fifty years ago this week, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairperson Stokely Carmichael made the famous call for “Black Power.” Carmichael’s speech came in the midst of the “March Against Fear,” a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage African Americans to use their newly won right to vote. But while almost every middle and high school student learns about the Civil Rights Movement, they rarely learn about this march — or the related struggles that continued long after the Voting Rights Act.

Bombed out cars by Jo Freeman | Zinn Education Project

‘Is This America?’: Sharecroppers Challenged Mississippi Apartheid, LBJ, and the Nation

By Julian Hipkins III and Deborah Menkart

Fannie Lou Hamer gripped the nation with her televised testimony of being forced from her home and brutally beaten (suffering permanent kidney damage) for attempting to exercise her constitutional right to vote.

“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?” she asked the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

White House Black History | Zinn Education Project

Missing from Presidents’ Day: The People They Enslaved

By Clarence Lusane

Schools across the country are adorned with posters of the U.S. presidents and the years they served in office. U.S. history textbooks describe the accomplishments and challenges of the major presidential administrations — George Washington had the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln the Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt the Spanish-American War, and so on. Children’s books put students on a first-name basis with the presidents, engaging readers with stories of their dogs in the Rose Garden or childhood escapades. Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution welcomes visitors to an exhibit of the first ladies’ gowns and White House furnishings.

Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery.

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