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Multimedia
Hair
In this spoken word piece, Elizabeth Acevedo addresses the beauty standard that is epitomized by fair skin and straight hair.
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Informational
A Personal Mission: Sammy Younge Jr.
Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.
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Informational
On Emancipation Day in D.C., Two Memorials Tell Very Different Stories
Two memorials have been built in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation-one in 1896 and 1998. And while they both pay tribute to the same event, they depict the African Americans within them in very different lights.
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Informational
Atlanta Compromise 1895
Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.
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Literature
The House on Lemon Street
In 1916, one family battled against the unjust laws aimed at immigrants of Japanese ancestry. In doing so, they lent their own voices to the growing chorus of Asian Americans insisting: "We belong here."
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Informational
Freedom's Main Line
One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.
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Informational
Who Claims Me?
In Boston, widely regarded as the center of the abolitionist movement, black leaders called on citizens to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 in order “to make Massachusetts a battlefield in defense of liberty.”
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Informational
Si Se Puede
“In response to legislation that would have criminalized immigrants, thousands of high school students from across the country walked out of their classrooms and into history.”
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Visual
The Negro Motorist Green Book
These images are from The Negro Motorist Green Book 1940 edition. The Green Book, published from 1936 – 1964, served as a guide for African Americans traveling around the country during the Jim Crow segregation era. To explore the complete issues visit the New York Public Library Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=ab…
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Informational
Una Vida de Esperanza
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.