Two movies about events in 1963 and 1972 are discussed. They are Rustin and Shirley. The movies concern the actions of Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on Washington for Peace and Jobs and the actions of Shirley Chisholm in organizing her campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The events took place more than half a century ago.…

The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 or EO 9066 on February 19, 1942. EO 9066 led to the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into ten racially segregated concentration camps throughout the U.S. This article discusses the educational and literary…

Heggert and Flowers (2019) offer important insights into how social media provides students with important opportunities to engage in meaningful civic engagement and political activism. They argue that students are more politically active than some recent studies would have us believe because they are utilizing social media platforms, methods not…

In this reflective essay, the author addresses fellow educators and their responsibility to students on issues surrounding the ongoing struggle for civil rights. She links the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas schools in 1957 with the 2018 student protest against gun violence following the Parkland, FL mass shooting. As a facilitator of…

Teachers don't typically encourage students to bring iPods to school, but when a girl in Ken Giles's class brought him "One Tribe," a song by the Black Eyed Peas, he was thrilled. Giles, a music teacher in Washington, D.C., uses protest music to illustrate the connections among culture, art, history and social movements and to help his students…

While Muhammad Ali has been the subject of countless articles and books written by sports historians and journalists, rhetorical scholars have largely ignored him. This oversight is surprising given both the tradition of social movement scholarship within rhetorical studies and Ali's influential eloquence as a world renowned celebrity espousing…

Background/Context: Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the…

In this article, the authors offer social studies educators a way to deepen students' understanding of civil disobedience as a democratic and nonviolent means of instigating social change. The authors explore the concept of civil disobedience from a historical perspective and examine the justifications and ramifications of each historical example.…

What is the relationship between Indigenous peoples and violent reactions to contemporary states? This research explores differing, culturally informed notions of attachment to land or place territory. Mechanistic ties and organic ties to land are linked to a key distinction between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples. Utilizing the…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

In recent decades many people came to know Howard Zinn for his outspoken advocacy on a wide range of progressive causes, including civil rights, free speech, workers' rights, education reform, and opposition to U.S. imperialism. The author's own first encounter with Howard Zinn's special combination of scholarship and activism occurred several…

Describes the Nashville (Tennessee) lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, civil-rights demonstrations led by students, and the resultant boycott of downtown businesses by blacks and sympathetic, or uneasy, whites. Many participants in the Nashville sit-ins went on to larger roles in the civil-rights movement. (SLD)

Argues that the struggle for integration, though winnable, will be longer and more arduous than many had hoped; but that for Abernathy, there is still the dream and vision of a slightly earlier day, and the he can still elicit the euphoria that always went with it. (RJ)

This biography for younger readers depicts the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Nobel Peace Prize winner who dedicated himself to the struggle for equal rights for African Americans while embracing the principle of nonviolent resistance. The book presents an overview of the civil rights movement and chronicles King's role as national leader…

This biography for younger readers presents the life of Stokely Carmichael, who made famous the phrase "Black Power" as he fought for the rights of black people in the United States and who later settled in Africa, where he organizes young Africans to work for their rights. The book is introduced by an overview of the civil rights…