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If young people are to make the vision of a just and peaceful world a reality, we must give them the tools to build a strong multiracial democracy—and those tools include an accurate, comprehensive and inclusive history of the United States. We are thrilled to introduce Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, our newest curriculum, which begins in 1877 with Reconstruction and continues the narrative of the movement for equality and civil rights to the present. At this critical moment in which states and districts are attempting to censor discussions of race and racism in U.S.

How can history help us resist hate in society today and work toward a more inclusive future? Opposition to equality is, unfortunately, not new to the history of the United States. Recognizing the relevance of history to today’s justice movements is crucial for understanding and countering current pushbacks against democratic values. And with the intense efforts to dismantle public education and to erase and alter our country’s history, teaching accurate history — including the hard truths of our nation’s past — is essential. 

In the continuing fight for justice and the expansion of democracy, understanding intersecting movements to end oppression is imperative and inspiring. Those at the intersections of geography, gender, poverty and race, as LFJ Director Jalaya Lyles Dunn explains, “will determine the fate of our democracy,” and have often been the agents of change, as witnessed by the connections between the past and the present highlighted in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center.