This article explores the extent to which official social studies curriculum documents acknowledge difficult questions raised by the persistence of poverty in the United States. As it turns out, just as some parts of social studies curricula tell distorted stories about U.S. history, other parts tell misleading stories about the nation's present…

The authors show how elementary-school age students and teachers can use picture books, young adult literature, and poetry to uncover and explore the hidden histories and untold stories of Elizabeth Jennings, Ida B. Wells, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Keys Evans, and Claudette Colvin, among others, and their protests for African Americans' right to ride…

On May 15, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division issued a fact sheet highlighting examples of the Division's recent work to protect students and combat segregation and race-based discrimination in schools. The Civil Rights Division has worked for decades to ensure equal educational opportunities for all of America's…

The purpose of this paper was to initiate a conversation among scholars, educators, citizens, and policymakers over the vital question of what happened to Black teachers outside of the South as a result of the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling and subsequent desegregation efforts. As a history of Black teachers before and after Brown…

It is important to prepare middle level teacher candidates with the dispositions, content knowledge, and pedagogy needed to implement justice-oriented practices in middle level curriculum. This article explores using "Hateful Things," a traveling exhibit curated by the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, to integrate issues of…

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

The author examines the childhood experiences of formerly enslaved children. He suggests that the conventional understandings of scholars and historians concerning play may not be applicable to the complex lives of enslaved children because researchers do not consider such children as always propertied beings. Their play practices were molded by…

As educational justice scholarship addressing racial oppression continues to name the role of the spirit, there is a need for Black and Brown Christian educators and researchers to locate ourselves as grounded in the epistemologies and pedagogies of Christ as our spiritual home. This paper brings together eight Black and Brown Christian educators…

White Christian supremacy, by definition an intersectional system of oppression, has influenced all aspects of American society since the time before the country's founding, as it was used to justify the stealing of native lands through colonization and the enslavement of African peoples. White Christian supremacist influences persist today, even…

This opinion piece explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on exposing educational inequity. The historically racist and discriminatory practices related to both academic instruction and discipline are long-standing in the history of American education, but have been brought to the attention of White, middle-class America as a result of the…

This article is a conversation with Juliet King, EdD, the AMS 2022 Living Legacy. Dr. King began her career in South Florida some five decades ago, teaching in Miami-Dade County when public schools were beginning to desegregate. She transferred to an inner-city school with a Title I Montessori program; this was her first introduction to the…

Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was an African American composer and pianist of singular merit and influence. Academic interest in Joplin has increased in recent years, leading to new discoveries about the composer's activities, yet teaching materials have not been updated at the same pace as 21st-century findings. Joplin was an entrepreneur, a…

Typically, when a community's historical materials encounter a large academic library's archives, the engagement is transactional: they sign forms, they hand over their archives, and we assure them that their materials will be valued by researchers. These procedures make assumptions about comfort with gift agreements (what if communities seek…

Octavius Catto was one of the only Black members of Philadelphia's premier scientific organization, the Franklin Institute; principal of the city's foremost school for African Americans, the Institute for Colored Youth; and founder of the Pythians, the baseball team that went undefeated in the Negro league and ultimately crossed "the color…

This article documents collective memories of the founding, curriculum, and attendees of one of the first (1866) Reconstruction Era Quaker-Freedmen School sites in the Southeastern United States. It applies critical oral history methodology including the collection of primary documents, previous investigations into the school, and interviews of…