Search

Despite the diverse coalition of activists who fought for its passage, the 19th Amendment didn’t bring voting equality to all women. Women’s Equality Day offers an opportunity to correct the record and explore how a whitewashed version of history is sustained and supported to this day. These resources can help you encourage students to think critically about this important anniversary, celebrate steps toward justice and recognize the injustices we still need to fight.

To mark the anniversary, teach a more complex version of this historic milestone and the civil rights movement. LFJ has resources to help. Listen to this podcast episode and watch this webinar—based upon our guide by the same title—to help students delve deeper into the history of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For additional context, students can discuss Browder v. Gayle, an often unheard-of civil rights case that overturned segregated public transportation in the South.

This week, a photograph of a math assignment asking fifth graders to set prices for enslaved people went viral. Assignments like this are clearly harmful. But students can learn about slavery in ways that recover the lives and histories of enslaved people or dehumanize them; celebrate their resistance or erase their agency; recognize how slavery shaped our nation or ignore it completely. Educators can teach this hard history—and teach it well—in any discipline, to students of almost any age. Here are a few examples of how.