Learn how writer Zora Neale Hurston incorporated and transformed black folklife in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By exploring Hurston's own life history and collection methods, listening to her WPA recordings of folksongs and folktales, and comparing transcribed folk narrative texts with the plot and themes of the novel, students will learn about the crucial role of oral folklore in Hurston's written work.

This collection uses primary sources to compare and explore the relationships between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The resource is a learning module that contains a three-part curriculum about the social psychology of racial bias and biased policing. It includes several TEDx lecture videos, textbook and primary source article readings, journals and written assignments for reflection, and resources for acting for social justice. It can generate a certificate of completion after the parts are marked as reviewed and reflection papers submitted.

It is currently available in Blackboard and Canvas LMS versions. We are working on a Google Docs version. If you would like to import it and adapt it for another LMS, and want to contribute to this project, please let me know and we'll get you added to the project.

It was inspired by my university releasing the university from work in honor of the George Floyd memorials. I created it as an extra credit opportunity, but could be integrated in the psychology curriculum when teaching about stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

Dana C. Leighton, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Texas A&M University—Texarkana
Director, Peace and Justice Psychology Lab
903-334-6627 • dleighton@tamut.edu
home: http://danaleighton.net • blog: http://danaleighton.edublogs.org
preferred pronouns: he, him, his

Gordon Parks and the writer Ralph Ellison collaborated to show that Harlem is everywhere. Gordon Parks, Off on My Own (Harlem, New York), 1948. Gelatin silver print. The Art Institute of Chicago, Amanda Taub Veazie Acquisition Fund, 2016.125. © The Gordon Parks Foundation. From "Harlem is Nowhere," a collaborative project between Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison. A Seeing America video. Speakers: Michal Raz-Russo, David and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago and Dr. Steven Zucker Special thanks to Michal Raz-Russo, Sarah E. Alvarez, The Gordon Parks Foundation, the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker. Find learning related resources here: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/

A selection of Library of Congress primary sources exploring the Harlem Renaissance. This set also includes a Teacher's Guide with historical context and teaching suggestions.

Discrimination undermined the sense of victory for African-American vets. Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice, 1943, oil on canvas, 46 x 35.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art). A conversation with Dr. Jessica T. Smith, Susan Gray Detweiler Curator of American Art and Manager, Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Dr. Steven Zucker. Find learning related resources here: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/

A world-class fencer, Ibtihaj Muhammad made history as the first American to wear a hijab in Olympic competition at the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro.

This resource is from a collection of biographies of famous women. It is provided by the National Women's History Museum, and may include links to supplemental materials including lesson plans about the subject and related topics, links to related biographies, and "works cited" pages. The biographies are sponsored by Susan D. Whiting.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Ida B. Wells and anti-lynching activism. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Identity is complicated, and changes depending on who you are and where you are. In our country, identity is directly tied to power and some are afforded privileges and others have disadvantages. This course will study identity as a social construct, and will go into further depth on race. Students will study the complications and nuances that go into the formation of identity and race, historical injustices and responses tied to it. We will study redlining, and a specific chapter of history, the South Bronx in the 1960’s. Rap music is currently the most successful music genre, even having small ripples in the country music world. Its origins, often overlooked due to the multi-faceted nature of the music, is a culture with a rich history rooted in social justice, giving a voice to the voices that were silenced. Its origins in the South Bronx, and its usage as a platform in response to social inequity, is often overlooked. Rap is a platform used worldwide to express a specific message. However, its role in academia, and in music in general, is often polarizing. We will do a specific study in rap as a form of response to systemic racism. By interacting with this curriculum, students engage in ethical reflection, in a safe space, finding a platform for their voice, learning content that’s relevant to current day. They will engage in informed conversations about race and equity, producing creative and analytical writing, while significantly improving their analytical reading and writing skills.

In this activity, students will examine documents from the FBI case file about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. They will answer questions to show understanding of the events that took place, and how the spread of information about Selma impacted the Civil Rights Movement. They will also be asked to think about whether the Federal Government would have acted differently if the FBI knew that the public may be able to see their files — the Government was not required to release records like this until the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gave the public the right to request Federal agency records in 1966.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explores complex questions about the criminal justice system and the history of race and racial justice in the United States.

Students will engage in viewing and researching videos and artifacts about thriving black communities that developed in the early 20th century amidst the violence of Jim Crow. The dominant narrative about US History from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-20th century has often portrayed Black people as hopeless and destitute. In reality, many Black people left the south, moved north or Midwest to establish flourishing communities. Black communities in Tulsa, Knoxville and Chicago were making great progress in the first two decades of the 20th century. But during the Red Summer of 1919, the aforementioned communities and others were burned down by white mobs and never rebuilt. One community was burned down and filled in with water, later becoming a lake. These mobs murdered blacks, decimated their townships, and then attempted to conceal this history, often erasing it entirely from history books.

Students’ culminating project is research, documentation, and presentation of their findings through a student-led Community Action Event.

Video by Art21. Where does a painter find her subject matter? With a process that takes her from the streets of Harlem to her studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn, artist Jordan Casteel paints vibrant large scale portraits, making visible the often unrepresented humanity of Black men. At first struggling to find subject matter that could speak to the political realities of police violence and implicit bias, Casteel drew inspiration from her twin brother. "People follow me like I’m a threat," the artist remembers her brother saying, "but they don’t know anything about me." Together Casteel's paintings illustrate the multiplicity of Black male experience; she began with nudes in domestic interiors before expanding to men on the sidewalk, the color and compositions celebrating the visual texture of her Harlem neighborhood. Casteel's work is probing in its tender depiction of Black men who, although often strangers to the artist, gaze directly and intimately out at the viewer. Jordan Casteel (b. in 1989, Denver, Colorado) lives and works in New York. Learn more about the artist at: https://art21.org/artist/jordan-casteel/

This Latinx History curriculum outlines a yearlong course, one which can be taught on its own, but which is being conceived as part of a course that will integrate both African American and Latinx history. The curriculum begins by naming the problematic dominant narratives that one may internalize or reproduce when learning about or teaching Latinx history, along with the counter narratives that tell a more accurate, complete, and political history. The five units covered in this curriculum begin with an analysis of the various terms used for Latinx people, and a history of them, concluding with a debate that asks: Are these terms more helpful or harmful to the community they claim to serve? Following this unit, the course takes on a chronological format, beginning with the history of the indigenous people of Latin America and their resistance to Spanish colonization. Next, the unit follows the independence and revolutionary movements across Latin America in the 1800s and early 1900s, followed by U.S. imperialism and changing borders throughout the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century. The curriculum concludes with a unit on the intersectional Latinx movements of the 20th century, with an emphasis on culture as a tool of resistance and survival.

Malcolm X argued that America was too racist in its institutions and people to offer hope to blacks. In contrast with Malcolm X's black separatism, Martin Luther King, Jr. offered what he considered "the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest" as a means of building an integrated community of blacks and whites in America. This lesson will contrast the respective aims and means of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to evaluate the possibilities for black American progress in the 1960s.

In 1957, Little Rock African Americans made their city the most significant test case for the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education rulings.

Students will display their understanding of the symbolism and references that Dr. King used to enrich his famous speech on August 28, 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by constructing a "jackdaw," a collection of documents and objects.

This kit explores the ways in which King and his legacy have been portrayed in various media forms. The first lesson follows a chronology of King's life through interactive decoding of rich media documents (comic books, billboards, songs, music videos, etc.). The following lessons use excerpts of Dr. King's speeches from 1963, 1967 and 1968 to examine his views on social change; explore the portrayal of King in magazine covers, advertisements, Web sites, film clips and monuments; and use letters to the editor about celebrating King to explore challenges to change.

In this lesson, created in partnership with the Association for Cultural Equity, students discover how the banjo and music making more generally among slaves contributed to debates on the ethics of slavery. They listen to slave narratives, examine statistics, and read primary sources to better understand how slavery was conceptualized and lived through in the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout the lesson, students return to videos created by Alan Lomax of pre-blues banjo player Dink Roberts as a way to imagine what music among slaves in the United States may have sounded like.