Race & Social Justice Teacher Resources: DEI & US Gov & Politics

Blog article
December 10, 2020
Includes primary source documents and teaching suggestions.

Blog article
October 9, 2020
Discusses resources regarding Hispanic-Latinx rights. Includes primary source documents and teaching suggestions.

Note: Language warning at 00:00:07.
"In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act that made it illegal to discriminate in housing. Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Sw!tch (Switch) explains why neighborhoods are still so segregated today. " (April 11, 2018; 00:06:36)

"As they navigate the uncharted waters of global politics, representatives of the United States and its international interlocutors can look to their shared past for insight. There are lessons, some positive, some negative, to be learned in the long, complicated, and often messy history of the United States in the world. Narratives tracing the rise and contours of what has been called American hyperpower form an important part of that history. Equally important, however, are stories about fog-shrouded horizons and unexpected opportunities, stories in which unease, confusion, and leaps into the dark played a decisive role in shaping the outcomes of global events.
In our latest series, 'Uncharted Waters,' Not Even Past will bring those stories to life through detailed historical case studies, highlighting moments when American foreign policy agents grappled with the uncertainties of power. Material for the series will come from the cutting-edge research projects supported by our co-sponsor, the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. Through 'Uncharted Waters,' Not Even Past and the Clements Center will show you tantalizing glimpses of global uncertainty past, present, and future."
August 26, 2022

Article by Jade Snow, Aaron K. Yoshino
Honolulu Magazine
May 14, 2019

"Lecture by N. Bruce Duthu, Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies, Dartmouth College
Originally recorded as part of the 'New Perspectives in American Indian History' teacher workshop held on November 21, 2020"
(video recording of 11/21/2020 event, 00:42:33)

A timeline of legislation related to immigrations and ethnic history.
*Click on the item name/event for brief summaries.
Immigration History is a project of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

"The white nationalist ideas of Madison Grant [author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916)] influenced Congress in the 1920s, leaders in Nazi Germany, and members of the Trump administration. This week, we share an episode we loved from It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders that explores a throughline of white nationalism in American politics from the early 20th century to today."
Original air date: May 9, 2019
(Audio recording, 34:50; and transcript)

Article by Adam Serwer
The Atlantic
April 2019

"Historian Woody Holton discusses the regional, racial and economic forces that shaped America's beginnings."
"... Holton is a historian at the University of South Carolina, a leading scholar of America’s founding and the author of numerous books on the period, including, most recently, 'Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution.'
"Holton’s work presents a fundamental challenge to the version of the American Revolution that most of us were taught in grade school. In his telling, America’s 'founding fathers' were far less central to the country’s founding than we imagine. Class conflict was just as important a cause of the Revolution as aspirational ideals, if not more. And the way Holton sees things, the American Constitution was a fundamentally capitalist document designed to rein in democracy, not expand it."
October 19, 2021 (audio, 00:59:16)

"On December 1, 1955, during a typical evening rush hour in Montgomery, Alabama, a 42-year-old woman took a seat on the bus on her way home from the Montgomery Fair department store where she worked as a seamstress. Before she reached her destination, she quietly set off a social revolution when the bus driver instructed her to move back, and she refused. Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested that day for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses."

"This activity asks students to read, analyze, and summarize Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission."

"n May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the "separate but equal" precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement during the decade of the 1950s."

"Many Americans are concerned about the US election system although we don’t always agree on the main problem or how best to fix it... This issue advisory presents three options for moving forward, each reflecting a different view of the problem and each suggesting a different set of ideas about what should be done. Most people will find something to agree with in all three approaches, but each also has trade-offs, risks, or drawbacks that need to be taken into account and worked through."

National Museum of the American Indian (NMIA)

*Click on "Filter Lessons" to search by grade level, social justice domain, subject, or topic.
"These robust, ready-to-use classroom lessons offer breadth and depth, spanning essential social justice topics and reinforcing critical social emotional learning skills."

"Primary source collections exploring topics in history, literature, and culture developed by educators — complete with teaching guides for class use."

"Explore the ways Americans have fought for, attained, and protected their rights."

Hundreds of digitized Native American treaties.
*Click on "Resources" in the upper right corner for curriculum units.
The National Archives in partnership with the Indigenous Digital Archive project of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Explore teaching materials by time period, theme, resource type, or keywords.
"The Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People’s History website offers hundreds of free, downloadable teaching activities for middle and high school classrooms to bring people’s history to the classroom. Coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the site also lists hundreds of recommended books, films, and websites. The teaching activities and resources are organized by theme, time period and grade level. This is the only collection of its kind for educators — print or online — in the country."

Digitized document from the U.S. National Archives.
Context: "Dred Scott decision, formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7–2) that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war."
Urofsky, M. I.. "Dred Scott decision." Encyclopedia Britannica, April 13, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/event/Dred-Scott-decision.

"The Chinese Exclusion Act was approved on May 6, 1882. It was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States.
In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. For the first time, Federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities."

"The records of the Constitutional Convention of 1894 include stenographic recordings and minutes of the proceedings, committee reports, resolutions, petitions, amendments, four drafts of the constitution, outgoing correspondence, election results, record of disbursements, sample vouchers for election expenses, and miscellaneous material that were kept by C. T. Rodgers, secretary of the convention. The original constitution is in box CC1894-4.
Below are the digitized Records of the 1894 Constitutional Convention. The originals remain physically at the Hawaiʻi State Archives."

"This Congressional resolution, which proposed extending the right to vote to women, became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution."

Article citing T. R. Ybarra
The New York Times
June 23, 1933, (page 8)
"Chancellor says in interview that United States restricts immigration of Jews."

Executive Order 9981 dated July 26, 1948 in which President Harry S. Truman bans the segregation of the Armed Forces.

08/10/1988 Became Public Law No: 100-383.
Overview and link to PDF document.
Title I: United States Citizens of Japanese Ancestry and Resident Japanese Aliens - Civil Liberties Act of 1988
Title II: Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution - Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act

The first-ever online portal to Brings together and make available congressional archives from across the U.S.
"The American Congress Digital Archives Portal is a collaborative, non-partisan project that makes congressional archives available online, bringing the history of the People’s Branch to the people. We provide open access to archival materials and the descriptive information (metadata) about those materials... Congressional archives are the primary materials generated by Congress and that document the work of Congress. They are separated into official records and personal papers. Personal papers, which this portal features, include materials created or received by an individual Member of Congress as documentation of their career, the organization and functions of the office, and the work of office staff."
Collaboration lead by West Virginia University Libraries.

"The Hawaiʻi Congressional Papers Collection (HCPC) comprises the papers of Hawaiʻi delegates to the U.S. Congress from statehood in 1959 to the present."

"Since 1986, the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) has recorded more than 2500 interviews with former participants in the U.S. foreign affairs process. Collectively, these oral histories span over 80 years. About 60 new interviews are added annually. The series also contains some significant oral histories dealing with American diplomacy, which were provided by universities and presidential libraries."

"A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens. Organized in Summer 2015 by Cleveland residents and professional archivists from across the U.S..."

"Four essays, written by Sarah Shepherd during her Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced Internship at the Library of Congress in 2021, explore civil discourse in the Woodrow Wilson Papers on women’s suffrage, the early civil rights movement, anti-Japanese immigration policy, and Prohibition."
*Author names within are linked to the scanned letters.

Hundreds of digitized Native American treaties.
*Click on "Resources" in the upper right corner for curriculum units.
The National Archives in partnership with the Indigenous Digital Archive project of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

"Includes interviews conducted over several years with Secretariat officials, ambassadors, and other eminent people on the establishment of the United Nations and UN involvement in various situations around the world." Joint project of the UN Library and Yale University.

Images of posters.

"SINCE THE SIGNING of the Declaration of Independence, our rights as citizens of the United States have been debated, contested, amended, and documented. The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, established our basic civil rights. Later amendments and court decisions have continued the process of defining our human and civil rights.
Documents in the National Archives give voice to our national struggle for personal rights and freedoms. From the Emancipation Proclamation to the five cases that comprised Brown v. Board of Education, this exhibit features a sampling of documents from all regions of the National Archives."

"In the 1930s the federal government created redlining maps for almost every major American city. Mapping Inequality lets you explore these maps and the history of racial and ethnic discrimination in housing policy."

"Established in 2006 by Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo, American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL) provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books. Dr. Jean Mendoza joined AICL as a co-editor in 2016."

"Here are more than 70 carefully selected lists of multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators." With link to the "Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children's Books."

Browse books by culture, subject, theme, etc., or search for activity by title.

Browse books by Subject; view lesson plans and activities.

By Louise Derman-Sparks

"LGBTQ Reads is a site dedicated to promoting curated LGBTQIAP+ literature for all ages, run by author and blogger Dahlia Adler."
Includes lists of "Books featuring characters anywhere on the queer and/or trans spectra (including but not limited to Queer, Questioning, Undefined, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, Pansexual, Asexual, Demisexual, Aromantic, Intersex, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Agender, Bigender, Demigender, Two-Spirit, and/or Non-Binary)."

"Recently, ten librarians from across the country, brought together by the American Library
Association (ALA) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investor Education Foundation
(FINRA Foundation), gathered for a series of virtual meetings. Their goal: to create an inclusive list of
financial education titles for children and teens.
Why were these librarians so focused on identifying thoughtful and inclusive financial education
books? Because teaching young people financial understanding and sound practices requires a
genuine embrace of diversity. Our financial world works best when everyone can participate and
when it responds to and respects the many cultures, backgrounds, experiences, circumstances, and
values comprising our society."

Various resources about book selection and a blog including book recommendations. The OurStory book database is free but requires login.

Summer reading booklists by year, created by educators.
"The We Are Kid Lit Collective works to create materials and opportunities to recognize the humanity of Indigenous and People of Color (IPOC) in youth literature."