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The story of Emmett Till, in part, represents a fight against erasure and mistruths. Recently, a group of students joined that fight.

Forty percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago, according to a Gallup poll released late last week. In other words, they subscribe to creationism.

Have you ever been the only (fill in category) person in the room? Race, class, gender, age, body type, marital status—any number of identifiers can place us outside the norm, depending on the room. Otherness is a specific experience, especially for those who don’t live it every day. A couple of my students unwittingly placed themselves squarely into the role of “other” in an assignment outside our classroom, and I suspect learned a more powerful lesson than I ever could have taught them in class. The assignment was to find, attend and write an article covering an event. When two students proposed attending a senior citizen fundraising fashion show on the other side of town, I immediately approved the idea.

When JT Eberhard of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA), an organization providing support to nontheistic students, received a letter from a teacher bragging about blocking formation of an atheist club, the lack of a return address didn’t slow him down. He used the email address provided by the sender to locate the teacher and alert administrators.