Septima Clark teaching at a Citizenship School on the South Carolina Sea islands.

Septima Poinsette Clark was born on May 3, 1898. Clark developed the literacy and citizenship workshops that played a key role in the drive for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement.

Here is the opening to her profile at the SNCC Digital Gateway Project.

Septima Poinsette Clark pioneered the link between education and political organizing, especially political organizing aimed at gaining the right to vote. “Literacy means liberation,” she stressed knowing that education was key to gaining political, economic, and social power.

Septima Clark and Rosa Parks at the Highlander Center in 1955. Source: Library of Congress

Long before SNCC’s Freedom Schools, Clark was developing a grassroots citizenship education program that used everyday materials to think about big questions. From reading catalogues to writing on dry cleaner bags instead of chalkboards, Clark not only found creative ways to teach literacy but also helped people become leaders. Continue reading.

Watch a powerful two-minute video about Clark by Professor Greg Carr.

Let’s take two minutes to sketch the arc of Septima Poinsette Clark, a Master Teacher. She and her comrades’ Citizenship Education Program our intellectual work at the center of liberation praxis. #JailbreakTheBlackUniversity pic.twitter.com/BfJL8PQxxy

— Greg Carr (@AfricanaCarr) March 31, 2020

Learn More

Citizenship Schools: They Say I’m Your Teacher. 9-min. documentary directed by Lucy Massie Phenix and Catherine Murphy.

Oral History Interview with Septima Poinsette Clark from Documenting the American South, July 30, 1976.

Find more resources below, including the biography Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark.

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Newspaper account of African Americans killed and wounded during labor strife in Polk County, from the New York Times; August 10, 1896. Source: Guy Lancaster

On Aug. 5, 1896, white workers attacked Black workers in Arkansas who were coming to work on the Kansas City, Pittsburg, and Gulf Railway.

As a result, three African Americans were killed and eight wounded. This was part of a pattern of labor-related, white supremacist terrorism that was sweeping Arkansas at the time.

There were continued attempts by white people to drive African Americans from the Mena (in Polk County) area. Nonetheless, African Americans established a small Black community, named Little Africa, just east of town. This was followed by continued attacks, and a lynching in 1901.

Excerpted from and continue reading at the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

Learn More

Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924 Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality by Guy Lancaster

Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen

Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession: A lesson on teaching about the history and legacy of African Americans being forcibly denied access to their land, employment, housing, and more, see

Massacres in U.S. History

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U.S. landing site. Guánica, Puerto Rico.

The island, as well as Cuba and the Philippines, were spoils of the Spanish-American War which ended the following month.

Puerto Rico remains a U.S. commonwealth today.

To learn more, watch the 2007 Democracy Now! segment, “On 109th Anniversary of U.S. Invasion of Puerto Rico” and see the related resources further below.

Puerto Ricans have had U.S. citizenship since 1917, but residents of the island cannot vote for president and lack voting representation in the U.S. Congress. We speak with two prominent Puerto Rican voices. Photojournalist and activist Frank Espada has worked for decades documenting the Puerto Rican diaspora, as well as the civil rights movement in the United States. Martín Espada is Frank’s son and an acclaimed poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst

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Illustration from the St. Louis Republic depicting one of the marches during the 1877 St. Louis General Strike.

On July 22, 1877, approximately 1,500 rail workers and residents of St. Louis, Missouri briefly took over the city as part of the wider Great Railroad Strike of 1877​. Below is part of their statement.

Whereas, The United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,

Resolved, That we, the workingmen’s party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.

Resolved, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

— United States Workingmen’s Party

To avoid disrupting passenger service, but still achieve the goals of the strike, workers continued to operate passenger rail cars, collecting the fares themselves.

The strike spread to other sectors in the city, including flour mills and breweries, and bosses across the city agreed to higher wages and shorter work days.

These gains were soon lost with the arrival of the U.S. Army and state militia.

Description by Howard Zinn​ from A People’s History of the United States​ and list of demands from McCabe, James Dabney; Winslow, Edward Martin (1877). The History of the Great Riots: The Strikes and Riots on the Various Railroads of the United States and in the Mining Regions Together with a Full History of the Molly Maguires.

Lucas Square, an open market, was the site of the mass meetings held by workers for three nights.

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The 1897 Petition Against the Annexation of Hawaii. Source: National Archives

Who was in favor of annexation? Just look at who was named Governor of the newly annexed islands by President McKinley: Sanford B. Dole.

Here is a description of the annexation from our report on teaching about Reconstruction.

During the later years of Reconstruction, the federal government withdrew military power from the South and increasingly channeled it into western U.S. expansion and settler colonialism. Non-native white officials and industrialists in Hawai’i made plans to monopolize the islands’ sugar trade and other resources, increasingly pushing for annexation. In January of 1893, U.S. troops invaded the capital city of the Hawaiian Kingdom and incited a coup. They immediately helped these pro-annexation, non-native residents overthrow Queen Lili’uokalani, who had recently issued a new constitution that would expand suffrage for native Hawaiians. As the United States moved toward annexation, the islands’ Indigenous people organized to assert Hawaiian sovereignty. This image shows one page of a petition that more than 21,000 native Hawaiians — over half of the islands’ Indigenous population — signed in 1897 to protest annexation. The United States annexed Hawai’i the following year.

Learn more in the related resources below.

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Striking workers shooting, using a canon and fireworks left over from July 4th celebrations, at the Pinkerton barges.

The Pinkerton men leaving the barges after the surrender. Harper’s Weekly, July 16,1892. Source: WikiCommons.

On July 6, 1892, there was a major pitched battle during the Homestead Strike between the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the striking steelworkers. Carnegie Steel was engaged in an all out campaign to break the steelworkers union. As explained by Howard Zinn in Chapter 11 of A People’s History of the United States:

In early 1892, the Carnegie Steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, was being managed by Henry Clay Frick while Carnegie was in Europe. Frick decided to reduce the workers’ wages and break their union. He built a fence 3 miles long and 12 feet high around the steelworks and topped it with barbed wire, adding peepholes for rifles. When the workers did not accept the pay cut, Frick laid off the entire work force. The Pinkerton detective agency was hired to protect strikebreakers.

Although only 750 of the 3,800 workers at Homestead belonged to the union, three thousand workers met in the Opera House and voted overwhelmingly to strike. The plant was on the Monongahela River, and a thousand pickets began patrolling a 10-mile stretch of the river. A committee of strikers took over the town, and the sheriff was unable to raise a posse among local people against them.

On the night of July 5, 1892, hundreds of Pinkerton guards boarded barges 5 miles down the river from Homestead and moved toward the plant, where ten thousand strikers and sympathizers waited. The crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. A striker lay down on the gangplank, and when a Pinkerton man tried to shove him aside, he fired, wounding the detective in the thigh. In the gunfire that followed on both sides, seven workers were killed.

The Pinkertons had to retreat onto the barges. They were attacked from all sides, voted to surrender, and then were beaten by the enraged crowd. There were dead on both sides. For the next several days the strikers were in command of the area. Now the state went into action: the governor brought in the militia, armed with the latest rifles and Gatling guns, to protect the import of strikebreakers.

Strike leaders were charged with murder; 160 other strikers were tried for other crimes. All were acquitted by friendly juries. The entire Strike Committee was then arrested for treason against the state, but no jury would convict them. The strike held for four months, but the plant was producing steel with strikebreakers who were brought in, often in locked trains, not knowing their destination, not knowing a strike was on. The strikers, with no resources left, agreed to return to work, their leaders blacklisted.

One reason for the defeat was that the strike was confined to Homestead, and other plants of Carnegie kept working. Some blast furnace workers did strike, but they were quickly defeated, and the pig iron from those furnaces was then used at Homestead. The defeat kept unionization from the Carnegie plants well into the twentieth century, and the workers took wage cuts and increases in hours without organized resistance.

Students are often skeptical about the possibility of people genuinely working together when at least their short-term interests appear in conflict. The Homestead Strike offers a historical test case that may challenge their skepticism. Use the free downloadable lesson, The Homestead Strike, by Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond.

Learn more about the strike from the Battle of Homestead Foundation and a chapter from Strike! by Jeremy Brecher. And check out “Homestead,” a song by Joe DeFilippo, a Baltimore songwriter and retired social studies teacher. Performed by the R. J. Phillips Band.

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Marker placed at Press and Royal Streets in New Orleans in 2009.

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.

We all know the Supreme Court’s horrific Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, but less familiar is the incredible organizing by the Comité des Citoyens that led to this test case.

The Comité dedicated years to fundraising, strategic planning, public education (with The Crusader newspaper), and more.

They even raised the funds to hire the guard to arrest Plessy to be sure he was charged correctly in their effort to challenge an unjust law.

Regardless of the outcome of the court case, it is an important example of the strategic efforts by African Americans to challenge state and nationally sponsored white supremacy.

Learn more by reading the article Plessy v. Ferguson: The Organizing History of the Case by Keith W. Medley and the book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance by Mia Bay. Find additional classroom resources below.

Read about many more attempts to desegregate transportation in Transportation Protests: 1841 to 1992.

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Hon. Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi. Source: Library of Congress.

On May 21, 1881 Blanche Kelso Bruce became Register of the Treasury which placed his name on all U.S. currency.

Bruce had served as a U.S. Senator, representing Mississippi from March 4, 1875 – March 4, 1881.

The first African American Senator to serve a full term, Bruce was an outspoken advocate for the rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans. Bruce had been born in slavery near Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia on March 1, 1841.

Learn more about Bruce at BlackPast.org.

Do you know how many African American U.S. Senators there have been to date?

Here are resources to #TeachReconstruction.

Learn more in the Zinn Education Project national report, “Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction,” and find teaching resources on Reconstruction below.

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Pullman strikers outside Arcade Building in Pullman, Chicago with the Illinois National Guard guarding the building in 1894.

The major Pullman Strike began May 11, 1894.

Learn more from the Northern Illinois Digital Library.

Here are resources for teaching outside the textbook about labor history.

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Massacre of Chinese immigrants at Rock Springs, Wyoming, 1885. Source: Harpers Weekly.

On Sept. 2, 1885, 150 white coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, brutally attacked the Chinese workers, killing 28, wounding 15 others, and driving several hundred more out of town.

Tom Rea writes in “The Rock Springs Massacre” at the Wyoming State Historical Society website:

On the morning of Sept. 2, 1885, a fight broke out between white and Chinese miners in the No. 6 mine in Rock Springs. Whites fatally wounded a Chinese miner with blows of a pick to the skull. A second Chinese was badly beaten. Finally a foreman arrived and ended the violence.

But instead of going back to work, the white miners went home and fetched guns, hatchets, knives and clubs. . .

In Chinatown, it was a Chinese holiday. Many of the miners stayed home from work and were unaware of what was developing.

Shortly after noon, between 100 and 150 armed white men, mostly miners and railroad workers, convened again at the railroad tracks near the No. 6 mine. Many women and even children joined them. About two in the afternoon, the mob divided. Half moved toward Chinatown across a plank bridge over Bitter Creek. Others approached by the railroad bridge, leaving some behind at both bridges to prevent any nonwhites from leaving. Still others walked up the hill toward the No. 3 mine, north and on the other side of the tracks from Chinatown. Chinatown was nearly surrounded.

In the buildings at the Number 3 mine, white men shot Chinese workers, killing several. The mob moved into Chinatown from three directions, pulling some Chinese men from their homes and shooting others as they came into the street. Most fled, dashing through the creek, along the tracks or up the steep bluffs and out into the hills beyond. A few ran straight for the mob and met their deaths. White women took part in the killing, too.

The mob turned back through Chinatown, looting the shacks and houses, and then setting them on fire. More Chinese were driven out of hiding by the flames and were killed in the streets. Others burned to death in their cellars. Still others died that night out on the hills and prairies from thirst, the cold and their wounds.

Continue reading “The Rock Springs Massacre” by Tom Rea. Learn more from Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen.

Read “Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession” an article on teaching students about the legacy of dispossession when people of color are forced from their homes, land, and/or employment. 

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