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The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq marked my first year of teaching. When one of my students referred to Iraqis as “towel heads,” I told him he had to do extra homework researching turbans and present a report to me the next day. It took him a week to complete the assignment, and instead of gaining insight and compassion for a different group of people, he probably just became more resentful. I now see this as a lost opportunity. As a precursor to our social studies unit on conflict in the Middle East, I taught a unit this year on world religions. We started off studying seven of the world’s major faiths and then narrowed it down to the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is my favorite book to teach. It’s the reason I became a high school English teacher. Years ago when my teacher handed me that book, I was both engrossed and frightened to learn of a dystopian world in which books were not only illegal, they were burned.

To confront current education censorship and voter suppression, modern social justice projects build on the foundations of the historic 1964 Freedom Schools.

Modeled after the 1964 Mississippi Freedom schools, which were designed to change a community by giving residents the tools to develop leaders and exercise political power, modern Freedom Schools—such as those run by the

The calculated murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner show just how real the risks of Freedom Summer were.