In this spoken word piece, Elizabeth Acevedo addresses the beauty standard that is epitomized by fair skin and straight hair.

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

Two memorials have been built in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation-one in 1896 and 1998. And while they both pay tribute to the same event, they depict the African Americans within them in very different lights.

Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.

In 1916, one family battled against the unjust laws aimed at immigrants of Japanese ancestry. In doing so, they lent their own voices to the growing chorus of Asian Americans insisting: "We belong here."

One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.

In Boston, widely regarded as the center of the abolitionist movement, black leaders called on citizens to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 in order “to make Massachusetts a battlefield in defense of liberty.”

“In response to legislation that would have criminalized immigrants, thousands of high school students from across the country walked out of their classrooms and into history.”

Ela Bhatt was a pioneer in women’s empowerment and grassroots development. In addition to establishing the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, Bhatt also founded India’s first women’s bank, Cooperative Bank of SEWA, and served as a member of the Parliament of India from 1986 to1989.

This text explores the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, two self-made men whose lives intersected near the end of America's Civil War.