Ways to honor Black History Month at school and home
February is Black History Month
On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved a joint resolution to submit the proposed 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, to the state legislatures. While the history of Black Americans involves so much more than slavery, it is imperative that students fully understand the institution of slavery, its dissolution and the aftermath in order to understand today’s racial inequity.
We have compiled some meaningful collections of resources for Black History Month. These resources may be of interest to educators in the classroom, unions, and families and communities.
FOR EDUCATORS
Teaching hard history: American slavery
Here are some lesson plans to work with children from pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade to teach the history of slavery in America to better understand racial inequity. In response to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center showing schools are failing in teaching about slavery, this collection includes lessons about Juneteenth and the Gettysburg Address, with a podcast from SPLC as well as the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframes the legacy of slavery.
Virtual events at Smithsonian celebrate Black History Month
The Smithsonian celebrates Black History Month with virtual programming this year. There are offerings for all ages, including a social media campaign on uplifting the Black family, Joyful Fridays with art for children, an African Americans In STEM Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, and a program on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the economy and the African American community.
The African American mosaic at the Library of Congress
This resource guide to the Library of Congress’ African American collection offers access to the collection’s materials on colonization, abolition, migrations, and the Works Progress Administration. Included are ex-slave narratives, personal stories of colonization, histories of important abolitionists, and writers and artists of the federal projects in the 1930s documenting the move north.
Learn about a preeminent labor unionist and civil rights activist
This site provides biographical information and other resources about Randolph, who organized the first predominantly African American union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His activism led to Franklin D. Roosevelt issuing an executive order to ban discrimination in the defense industries in World War II, and Randolph also helped plan and organize the 1963 March on Washington.
Black workers, unions, and the labor movement
This site includes African American labor history guides, articles, books, and films. Topics covered included how unions have brought gains for workers of color, immigrants and women in California, the impact of the Great Recession on public employment, the job losses in the public sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing fight for a decent minimum wage.
6 elementary school lessons on civil rights and labor
Here’s an elementary school curriculum — Civil Rights and Labor: Joint Struggles for Justice — with six lessons on the similarities and differences between the fight for labor rights and for civil rights. Students will discuss and write about the role of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the U.S. labor movement and examine some parallels between the country in the 1960s and today.
4 DVDs on Black labor history and civil rights
DVDs from California Newsreel offer a way to learn about different aspects of labor history and the civil rights struggle.
- Oh Freedom After While is about the1939 interracial sharecroppers strike in Missouri.
- A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom chronicles labor activist Randolph’s efforts to make society more equitable.
- Randolph is also featured Miles of Smiles, about the first Black trade union — the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he fought for more than a decade.
- The hour-long documentary, At The River I Stand, chronicles the fight for working people, highlighting the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
3 books about Black workers, race and labor
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Black Freedom Fighters in Steel
Ruth Needleman’s book tells the story of five black organizers, long-distance runners who were indispensable to building the steel workers union as well as the civil rights movement in northwest Indiana. -
Servitude to Service:
African-American Women as Wage
Earners
Teachers can access Rita G. Komen’s book as a download from the OAH Magazine of History. The book examines the employment position of African-American women in the South. -
For Jobs and
Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865
Robert H. Ziegler’s book analyzes the position of African American workers in the U.S. economy and social order over the past century and a half in this comprehensive study focusing on black workers’ efforts to gain equal rights in the workplace. It deals extensively with organized labor’s complex and tumultuous relationship with African Americans.
10 historic Black teachers who revolutionized the system
These educators, who fought white supremacy and helped change society, include Septima Poinsette Clark, who Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “Mother of the Movement for her work in literacy and for voting rights as well as to get Black teachers hired at universities. There’s also psychology professor Edmund Gordon, who founded the federal Head Start program and the Institute for Urban Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fanny Jackson Coppin, the first African American principal and school superintendent who advocated higher education for women.
FOR HOME, FAMILY & BEYOND
26 little-known Black history facts you may not have learned in school
This list of Black history facts covers literature, history, sports, and entertainment with items like the first Black woman to get a college degree in 1850 from Oberlin, Phyllis Wheatley being the first African American to publish a book of poetry in 1773, and that from 1810 to 1850, an estimated 100,000 enslaved people escaped to the North on the Underground Railroad.
10 podcasts that bring me happiness as a Black listener
Here are 10 podcasts with Black voices offering connection, humor and resources. There’s everything from finding a sense of peace and creating stillness with Black Girl in Om, to The Friend Zone where they explore mental health, because “who the hell wants a musty brain?” to two New York Times reporters discussing news and culture in Still Processing.
14 African American inventors to remember this Black History Month
You may have heard of some of the inventors here like George Washington Carver, who not only invented peanut butter (for which we offer a heartfelt thank you), but also created new products from peanuts and sweet potatoes including ink, dye, and soap, and Madame CJ Walker, the first Black woman millionaire, who created a line of hair products. But there are lots of others including the chemist who gave us a drug to treat glaucoma, an ophthalmologist who invented a a device to remove cataracts, and a telecommunications researcher whose work led to the touch-tone phone, fiber optic cables, and caller ID.
44 of the best books by Black authors you should read in your lifetime
This list of books by includes Ta-Nehisii Coates’ 2015 National Book Award winner, Between the World and Me, a letter to his son about being Black in America, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, where a young woman in 1976 Los Angeles is transported to a Maryland plantation during the Civil War, and the best-selling book of 2018, Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, where she writes about her marriage and life in the White House and out of it.
8 ways to celebrate Black History Month from the New York Times
The author lists a series of cultural events to honor Black History Month. Among them is Atlanta honoring the memory of Representative John Lewis, a giant in the civil rights movement with a living memorial made up of shrubs, daffodil fields and more than 300 blooming trees. She mentions two movies by Black directors about important moments in history, “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “One Night in Miami,” and the books, “The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop,” by Clover Hope, and “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019,” where 90 writers each examine a five-year period in history.
“Let’s have our voices count!” urge CFT Black leaders
Avalanche of protests call for racial justice following murder of George Floyd
For days, hundreds of thousands of people have filled the streets of 160 cities across the country, even during the coronavirus pandemic, expressing their outrage and grief at the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Two Black leaders of the CFT, with long histories of fighting for racial equity, say they could not help being profoundly moved by the murder itself, and the outpouring of rage in response.
CFT members testify before Select Committee on Ending the School to Prison Pipeline
On Wednesday, June 26 three CFT members testified at the State Capitol at the first ever hearing of the California Assembly Select Committee on Ending the School to Prison Pipeli
Racial Equity Task Force delivers draft report to CFT Convention
UPDATE: On April 1, delegates to CFT Convention unanimously passed Resolution 14 titled “Reclaim the promise of racial equity for Black males in California,” which called for adoption of the report written by the Racial Equity Task Force.
Were You a Racist?
On the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. day, I asked my fifth-graders if they knew why we had the day off. One suggested, “To celebrated MLK’s birthday.”
To be honest, for a ten-year-old that wasn’t bad.
“No,” another piped in, “It’s cuz he fought for blacks’ rights.”
“Good and you’re 100 percent correct.” I replied. Let’s call the child who piped up with that answer Isaiah. He’s perceptive and often sees the big picture.
Classified Conference 2016: Black Lives Matter conversation engages, unites
“When we say Black Lives Matter, we’re saying that we need an agenda that puts our lives right up there with everyone else’s,” said Christopher Wilson, from Alliance San Diego, a group mobilizing for change in low-income communities and communities of color.
Wilson spoke at the Classified Conference on October 8, before attending the funeral for Alfredo Olango, a black man killed by police in nearby El Cajon.
Racial justice: Tim Wise says the purpose of education is to get free
Whenever we see inequalities in our society we need to remember one thing, antiracist activist Tim Wise told attendees — there are no accidents, just precedents.
Wise, who has written seven books, most recently Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America, talked about how the inherent injustice of the educational system must be transformed — the system was never meant to bring equity.
Restorative justice seeks to end the school-to-prison pipeline
How educators can help transform classrooms and school climates
If an African American male student is suspended, there’s a 90 percent chance he’ll end up in prison some time in his life. In 2013-14, there were half a million suspensions in California schools, many those of black and brown children. These statistics make equity in education one of the great civil rights struggles of our time, said Ali Cooper, the executive director of the Restorative Schools Vision Project.
“No Time to Quit”
A look at school desegregation by former CFT President
By Miles Myers, Former CFT President
In the nation’s first school desegregation case, on February 13, 1931, in Lemon Grove, California, the Mexican parents of Roberto Alvarez went to court to stop the Lemon Grove Grammar School from denying access to Mexican children. A victory for Roberto in the local court stopped the case from reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. But the same issue did reach the U.S. Supreme Court almost twenty-two years later (1953) when the Black parents of ten-year-old Linda Brown sued the Topeka (Kansas) School Board, demanding that skin color (and race) not be used to deny her access to her neighborhood public school. Unlike the Lemon Grove court, Topeka courts did rule that skin color could be used to deny Linda’s entrance to the nearby public school and, thus, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. Her local public school, she said, was her gateway to opportunity, and thus, that gateway should not be blocked by segregationist policies. She won.