This article details how a team of fourth-grade teachers in Rockingham County, Virginia used the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to deepen student understanding of Barbara Johns and the Moton Student Strike's fight for racial justice in Virginia and to reframe their overall approach to Black history in general. Although Rockingham County Schools are…

In this reflective essay, the author recalls his socialization to White Supremacist ideology as a child in Virginia in the 1950s as a way to consider how racist perspectives are perpetuated across generations.

The year 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the Supreme Court's most important decisions on race, justice, and equality. In 1967, the Court in "Loving v. Virginia" held that states could no longer prevent people of different races from falling in love and building a family together. The decision had been a long time coming. For…

The 1954 rulings in the United States Supreme Court cases of "Brown v Board of Education" was a landmark event in civil rights history. As momentous as the rulings were, they were not embraced by many Southern politicians. This was especially true in Virginia where Harry F. Byrd, Sr., U. S. Senator from Virginia, embarked on a campaign…

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…

This paper focuses on how shifting conceptions of youth underpinned young people's activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper specifically examines conceptions of youth as it changed throughout the twentieth century. G. Stanley Hall articulated a distinct notion of "adolescence" in the early twentieth century. But the "Scottsboro…

This article presents an interview with Dr. Edward Ayers, a recognized expert on Southern history and president of the University of Richmond. According to Dr. Ayers, 2011 marks the start of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and the emancipation of African-Americans. It is an important distinction based on the evolution of Civil War…

A typical U.S. high school student today might be able to recite some milestones of civil rights history--the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56; the Freedom Rides of 1961; and (some would add) the election of the first African American president in 2008. But how many students understand that these events, which historians call out as milestones,…

In this classroom simulation, students travel back in time to 1945, when racism was institutionalized in many states through segregation. Though students cannot literally travel back to the Jim Crow era, teachers can create a situation that brings home the point of injustice and the choices individuals are faced with in such situations. Suddenly,…

This essay examines Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America as evidence of his craft as a storyteller. Specifically, I argue that Jefferson deploys a series of narrative renderings, the rhetorical effect of which is to eliminate the possibility of any genuine reconciliation with the English government. On the basis of this…

On May 17, 2004, the United States will observe the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. By invalidating the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the field of public education, a doctrine that had been approved by the same court nearly sixty years earlier in Plessy…

In this article, the author discusses the 50th Anniversary Commission of the "Brown v. Board of Education" that draws both praise and criticism from nationally prominent figures in education, civil rights, and government--including its own commissioners. As the federal commission commemorates the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme…

The limited coverage of blacks in "The Virginia Gazette" during integration marked a symbolic step toward greater, or equal inclusion of black society in the newspaper but proved far from fulfilling the newspaper's role as a community newspaper. Personal interaction between blacks and whites in Williamsburg (Virginia) did not occur very…

What do Matthew Brady, Carrie Chapman Catt, Ansel Adams, Orson Welles, and J. Howard Miller have to do with the 100 milestone documents? A few hints: Matthew Brady created the first photographic documentation of a war. Carrie Chapman Catt was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1920. Orson Welles produced plays for…

After the Commissioner of Education's introduction, Volume 1 presents state school system statistics and a list of U.S. Bureau of Education publications. Chapters cover central European education; Ohio public school legislative history; school consolidation and pupil transportation; U.S. industrial education; educational pathology; formation of an…