Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade-which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas-stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
What are the most salient similarities between mass incarceration and Jim Crow? Mass incarceration is a system of racialized social control that, like slavery and Jim Crow before it, operates to discriminate and create a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.
In this interview, Luis Rodriguez describes how the systemic demoralization he faced in school and society at a young age drove him to join a street gang and how writing his book, Always Running, was an attempt to call his son and other young people in similar situations to change their lives.
This essay places side by side the historical oppression of African Americans in the South and the recent surge of African Americans moving back to the South of their own free will. In her discussion, Maya Angelou questions why such choices are considered remarkable.
Growing up with a racially conscious mother, Katherine Watkins has been educated on Native American and African American literature and continues to enrich her knowledge as an avid reader. With African-American, Cherokee, Apache, Choctaw, Comanche and Irish ancestry, she is extremely interested in improving race relations, as can be seen in her classroom and activism work. Watkins is a veteran teacher of 20 years and is working on her second memoir and a novella.
In this lesson of the series, “Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice,” students will read and analyze text from “The Progress of Colored Women,” a speech made by Mary Church Terrell in 1898. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization that was formed in 1896 from the merger of several smaller women’s clubs, and was active during the period of Jim Crow segregation in the South.