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This lesson is intended to help guide children to respond to literature with an eye toward social justice.

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.

This lesson presents excerpts from a recent Girl Scouts Research Institute study showing girls may be more interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers than previously thought. Students compare and contrast white, African-American and Hispanic girls’ perceptions of STEM fields.

In this lesson, students will read an excerpt of an interview given by Mary McLeod Bethune and will learn that she founded the Daytona National and Industrial School for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College) in 1904. Through close reading, they will explore and discuss connections between events from Bethune’s life experiences and their own lives, and connections between past and current events.

Mass incarceration is fueled by a highly funded and minimally constrained criminal justice system that traps people branded as “criminals,” even individuals without a criminal record, into a permanent undercaste.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explores complex questions about the criminal justice system and the history of race and racial justice in the United States.

Racialized social control has adapted to race-neutral social and political norms in the form of mass incarceration. Criminalization stands in as a proxy for overt racism by limiting the rights and freedoms of a racially defined undercaste.

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.