Exploring Racism and Slavery in American History

In this poem, the speaker explores how our culture would be lacking—in people, in music, in movements, in contributions—without contributions of African Americans.

Maleeka gets made fun of at school about her clothes, her grades, even the color of her skin. In this chapter, she talks about getting teased on a school trip and how even her friend Char was ashamed to be seen with her because of her clothes.

Mari and her family have been sent to an internment camp in Utah. She does not understand what they have done to deserve their internment and longs for her backyard in California where she used to grow sunflowers.

In this excerpt, Garang tells his story of how he became a lost boy when war destroyed his village. Walking with thousands of other orphaned boys, Garang travels thousands of dangerous miles from southern Sudan to a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

“I remember a private swim club...”

“The next day, the police car pulled up and they said, 'We're taking y'all to jail.'”

Helen Tsuchiya, born a U.S. citizen, tells what it was like to move from her home to an internment camp surrounded by barbed wire after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

Protesting the death of Alton Sterling and the Baton Rough Police Department’s request for Black Lives Matter demonstrators to clear roadways, Iesha Evans stands in the middle of a street as two Louisiana state troopers, dressed in riot gear, approach to arrest her.

This photograph from the Associated Press shows Martin Luther King Jr. in a crowd of people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963.

Doreen Rappaport tells the story of a young Suzie King Taylor and her brother who attended a secret school for black children in Georgia in the mid-1800s. Later on, Taylor would become the first black woman to teach openly in a freedmen's school.

Letitia and Mae join children leaving school to march in Birmingham, Alabama. Disappointed that they were not arrested while picketing Woolworth’s, they feel reassured by Rev. Bevel, who tells them they made a great contribution to the movement.

Hussein, the narrator of My Name Was Hussein, lives in Bulgaria. His Muslim family takes great pride in their religion and traditions. But soldiers soon arrive in their village and force all of the Muslims to adopt Christian names, thereby inhibiting their freedom and identities.