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When my daughter pulls hard on the heavy glass doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School and races upstairs into her fifth-grade classroom, she is living my dream.

Use first-graders’ commitment to fairness to help them connect with the modern civil rights movement.

Although the Montgomery Bus Boycott was successful in galvanizing the civil rights movement and promoting awareness of the injustice of segregated busing, Browder v. Gayle provided the legal basis for ending transportation segregation in Alabama. Despite its importance, the Browder v. Gayle case remains relatively untaught civil rights history.

1964 included a number of important civil rights events critical to the ongoing march for racial equality and justice. These resources can help take students back to this important year. 1964 Civil Rights Milestone

All over the nation people strive to answer Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous invocation: “What are you doing for others?” Many engage in projects to make their community a better place to live. My students at Life Academy in California have answered the call to service in several ways. First, they showed up on campus during a school holiday to beautify the school grounds, paint a mural, clean out an old storage room, build benches and tend to a garden. Second, they launched a 74-day fast “Season of Peace Building.” Students signed up to fast on certain days, in a kind of relay, to highlight the time from MLK day to Cesar Chavez day.

An after-school teacher uses trivia to get her elementary students thinking about the world around them—including civil rights history.