Fifty years ago, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." In exploring the story of the events behind the essay, and the Supreme Court case that resulted, "Walker v. Birmingham", 399 U.S. 307 (1967), educators will find a pedagogically powerful lens through which to review the seminal…

Steve Sheinkin's "The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights" recounts the explosion at a U.S. Navy base in the summer of 1944 that claimed 320 lives. It is also a story of African American resistance against prejudice, segregation, and injustice in the armed forces during World War II. The book was a 2015…

Eminent African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his book "The Miseducation of the Negro," published a generation before the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, concerned himself not with the racial composition of classrooms and schools, but with the curricula taught both in the schools and the larger culture. Certainly Woodson…

May 17, 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in the historic school desegregation case, "Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et al." After concluding a survey of elementary school teachers about the struggle for school desegregation in the 1950s and 60s, this author found that, in most…

If colleges and universities want to avoid a relapse into increased racial segregation in light of current political and legal pressures against affirmative action, they must make the case for the need for racial diversity to further their core educational purposes. They must also enlist faculty help in identifying and articulating its educational…

This unit is one of a series that represents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. This unit focuses on the black experience in the critical years after Reconstruction. Using the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the unit opens with an examination of conditions in black America…