The Rosewood massacre or pogrom, which led to the total destruction of the rural Black town in Florida, began on Jan. 1, 1923. 

Learn about the Rosewood Massacre or pogrom from:

• The 1997 film Rosewood by John Singleton with actors Ving Rhame and Jon Voight.

• Virtual Rosewood website offers primary documents, oral histories, a digital documentary, plans for virtual reconstruction, and more.
• Rosewood massacre a harrowing tale of racism and the road toward reparations by Jessica Glenza in The Guardian (Jan. 3, 2016)
• Rosewood Massacre (1923) via BlackPast.org
• González-Tennant, Edward. 2012. Intersectional Violence, New Media, and the 1923 Rosewood Pogrom. Fire: The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies 1(2):64-110.

Remembering Rosewood, a website by the Rosewood Heritage Foundation Inc, offers oral histories, photos, and detailed information about the history of Rosewood, Florida. The foundation also offers a scholarship fund for undergraduates descended from Black families affected by the massacre. It has organized globally and locally to preserve the memory and history of Rosewood, Florida. Also see the Rosewood historical marker.

Teach about the legacy of these “race riots” with “Burned Out of Homes and History: Unearthing the Silenced Voices of the Tulsa Race Riot” by Linda Christensen from Rethinking Schools. Read about more massacres in U.S. history.

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People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. — Studs Terkel

On this anniversary of the birth of Studs Terkel born on May 16, 1912, below are resources for teaching about and with his oral history interviews.

Studs Terkel in 1992, taking a bus home after working on his show at WFMT radio in Chicago. Chris Walker/The Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press.

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At the Poor People’s Campaign march on Washington, Coretta Scott King shares temporary shelter from the rain with Juanita and Ralph Abernathy. Source: Bob Fitch Archive, Stanford University Libraries

Poor People’s Campaign poster. Source: Stanford King Institute.

In a planning meeting in 1967, Dr. King said:

I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

[W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…

In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.

In a planning meeting in March of 1968, King described why this should be a coalition effort,

This is a highly significant event, the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.

Many leaders of American Indian, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and poor white communities pledged themselves to the Poor People’s Campaign. Read more of the history at Dr. King’s Vision: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1967-68.

And what we are saying, it is time for a moral confrontation, a nonviolent moral confrontation, because whether you look at the morality of our Constitution, the establishment of justice, or you look at the morality of the Scriptures, that says, for instance, in Isaiah 10, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right and make women and children their prey.”

It is immoral to have 37 million people without healthcare. It is immoral not to pay living wages when we know we can do it. It is immoral that people don’t have single-payer healthcare for everybody as a matter of human rights — and children have access to public education and college, and that we stop the trend of resegregation.

It is immoral the way we’ve suppressed the vote in a way that allows people to get elected who, once they get elected, using racialized methods to do so, they then vote policies that hurt women and children and disabled. They’re against living wages. They’re against healthcare. They’re against unemployment — and those things that hurt families, hurt children, hurt women and hurt the disabled.

Watch the full interview below.

This post includes excerpts from the entry on the Poor People’s Campaign at the Stanford University Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.

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Street scene woodcut by Eric Ruin.

By Rosemarie Frascella

The concept of sacrifice is nothing new for my immigrant students. They have heard, seen, and lived the sacrifices their family members made coming to the United States. Some risked their lives crossing deserts and borders; others sailed through the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean in pitch-black containers. Most left loved ones and land in order to survive. Their parents may not have a shot at the “American Dream,” but they have all sacrificed tremendously to give their children a chance to make it. However, the idea that they or their parents may not really have had a choice in the sacrifices they made is new to many of my students, who escaped lands and economies made uninhabitable by capitalism and its hunger for fossil fuels and profits.

I teach 11th-grade English at an international high school in Brooklyn. My students come from more than 30 different countries and speak more than 15 languages. They are all English language learners and have been in the United States less than four years. Their diversity is stunning, but also a challenge. They come to my classroom with an array of literacy levels and academic skills in English and in their native languages. With a multicultural student body, it’s a struggle to find materials that address and respect their various homelands. I often search for ways to allow them to do their own research and share their knowledge with the rest of the class. In my eight years of teaching, I’ve learned Haitian history, eaten Bengali food, practiced my Dominican Spanish, and heard reflections on colonialism from Asia to Latin America.

Last fall, I started my English language support class exploring police brutality and the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. My students were stunned that such racism happened in the United States and lacked the historical context to understand these events. Esther, one of my Haitian students, told me: “I’m scared of the cops in Brooklyn. I’m moving back to Haiti.”

I asked, “You don’t have racism in Haiti?”

“We discriminate more by what you wear and how much money you make.” She added: “You all are crazy here. I’m afraid to leave my house.”

I struggle teaching about race and racism in the United States for a couple of reasons. As a white woman, I need to be aware of my own privilege and respect the fact that my students may not always feel safe talking freely in front of me. And it’s a challenge to find that perfect balance between agitation and hope. Unfortunately, I tend to do better at agitating than instilling hope; perhaps that’s the inherent nature of the U.S. education system.

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Aerial photograph documenting mountain top removal mining atop Kayford Mountain. Source: Greenpeace.

By Hannah Jones

“If you go home and don’t do anything, then I’ve wasted my time,” we heard amidst the distant hum of heavy machinery.

I heard this from anti-mountaintop removal activist Adam Hall, echoed from the late Larry Gibson as we stood on his family’s land on Kayford Mountain. We were standing in an island of trees and homes surrounded by a moonscape of leveled rubble. When I visited, I could see bulldozers in the distance, digging, shoveling, scraping away at the earth.
This is called mountaintop removal coal mining, a type of surface coal mining in which the top of a mountain is blasted off to expose the coal seam underneath. The rubble is then pushed into a nearby valley, covering streams and poisoning watersheds. Hundreds of thousands of acres of mountains and valleys in Central Appalachia have been destroyed by mountaintop removal, along with communities and lives.

Larry was a longtime activist against mountaintop removal coal mining. He had been living on Kayford Mountain his whole life, as did his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. When the coal company came a-knocking, Larry stood his ground, refusing to allow his home to be obliterated. His property still stands, through bullying, death threats, the murder of his dog, and more. His piece of land still stands, surrounded my strip mining.

Through his organization the Keepers of the Mountains Foundation, he would host student groups, church groups, and more to come see the devastation firsthand, and tell them his story. Visitors heard about poisoned water, coal company thugs shooting his dog and sending him death threats, centuries of political corruption, shirking of clean air and water standards, and more.

In 2010, when I was a student at Swarthmore College, a group of students visited Larry and heard his story. And as he said to most of his visitors, he told the group that his time was wasted if we didn’t do anything. As a group of impressionable students, this was a powerful call to action. And while many of us were sympathetic to sustainability pushes on campus, visiting West Virginia made it clear that composting at Swarthmore College wasn’t going to stop the coal industry. We needed to step up our game.

Download article to continue reading.

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Yup’ik children learn traditional methods of preparing salmon. Source: Clark Mishler.

By Jill Howdyshell

I teach 6th grade in a small Yup’ik fishing village in southwestern Alaska. Alaska and other arctic regions are at the forefront of experiencing climate change. “The arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card. As the climate changes, the traditional ways of subsistence are threatened. Climate change is having a real and direct impact on this community now, yet the school and curriculum continue to be almost completely silent on the issue — and so much else that matters in my students’ lives.

My family moved to rural Alaska from Portland, Oregon, driven by a love for adventure, a need for employment, and a desire to make a positive impact. Arriving in 2013, we experienced one of the mildest winters in this Alaska region’s history. Dust built up on snowmobiles (we call them snow-goes) instead of snow. In desperation, some villagers began taking their snow-goes across the snowless tundra. Time and again, elders talked about how they had never seen weather like this.

In 2014, I arrived back in the village after summer break, and a beloved teacher and local resident greeted me with heart-sickening news: “There are no berries this year.” The tundra has to freeze for a certain length of time and to a certain depth for the tundra blackberries and salmonberries to regenerate. The practice of harvesting and preserving berries goes back hundreds of years, and all of my students talk about their experiences picking berries with their mothers or grandmothers. These days the berries are used in making the ever-popular akutaq (pronounced uh-GOO-dic) ice cream. In several “I Am From” poems, students included the line “I am from akutaq,” stressing the importance of berries to their personal identities.

Our principal is a Yup’ik elder who left his village to get his education and returned to work in the school. He cares deeply about the students and community. I asked about the condition of the permafrost in the area. He didn’t know if there was any permafrost left. He told me that the next time someone dies I could go down to the cemetery and check where the excavator digs the hole to see if it hits frozen ground. He didn’t think it would. He said that Yup’ik people used to dig deep holes to store food, creating a freezer in the ground. We didn’t talk about the fact that permafrost holds vast amounts of carbon frozen in the ground. As the permafrost disappears, tons of carbon are released into the atmosphere, an example of the frightening “feedback loops” that will accelerate climate change as the planet warms.

Download article to continue reading.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Rethinking Schools.

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Michele Roberts, environmental justice coordinator, Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, D.C. Source: www.dicksimon.com.

By Alma Anderson McDonald

Since Hercules closed its doors in 2009, there had been talk around town that there could possibly be a lawsuit filed by the city against the company for environmental pollution. So it came as no surprise to me when in 2013 I received my letter to attend a meeting for a class action lawsuit against Hercules and its parent company, the Ashland Company.

The meeting was two weeks later on a Thursday at Lake Terrace Convention Center. When we entered the building, we were directed toward two lines: one for just property owners and one for property owners with medical claims. Though non-property owners with medical conditions were allowed to come to the meeting, this phase of the suit was only for property owners with or without medical claims. Non-property owners could not file a claim on this case and would have to wait until a secondary lawsuit was filed in the future. I was glad my claim was just as a property owner without a medical condition.

Once I made it to the front of the line, the lady at the table asked for my address.

“203 West 7th Street,” I said.

At which she let out a long “Oooo,” and said, “Yeah, you’re right in the area.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. So, I signed my name and took the forms that she handed me and went into the large conference room.

The number of people who were there surprised me. We all had this look on our faces that was a mixture of hope, fear, concern, and anger. As we waited for the meeting to begin, I overheard some telling stories of their experiences or those of relatives who had lived in Hattiesburg their whole lives.

Download lesson to continue reading.

Classroom Stories

Our school is located in an overwhelmingly white, affluent rural town bordering a national park. It would be an understatement to say our community is isolated from much of the environmental and racial issues plaguing our country today. Not only does The Red Dot of Environmental Racism lesson by Alma Anderson McDonald plainly define environmental injustice for my students, but it also opens their eyes to the fact that these issues are not only playing out in far-flung, developing countries, but also in their own backyard.

In addition, I think the lesson really drives home the idea that environmental injustice is not a thing of the past, but rather something that must be addressed today. It is one more way that our nation has institutionalized racism.

—Drew Overholser

High School Social Studies Teacher, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

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In a magisterial work of narrative nonfiction that weaves together the racially fraught history of public education in Milwaukee and the broader story of hypersegregation in the rust belt, Lessons from the Heartland tells of an iconic city’s fall from grace — and of its chance for redemption in the twenty-first century.

A symbol of middle American working-class values and pride, Wisconsin — and in particular urban Milwaukee — has been at the forefront of a half-century of public education experiments, from desegregation and “school choice,” to vouchers and charter schools. Picking up where J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Common Ground left off, Lessons from the Heartland offers a sweeping narrative portrait of an all-American city at the epicenter of American public education reform, and an exploration of larger issues of race and class in our democracy. Miner (whose daughters went through the Milwaukee public school system and who is a former Milwaukee Journal reporter) brings a journalist’s eye and a parent’s heart to exploring the intricate ways that jobs, housing, and schools intersect, underscoring the intrinsic link between the future of public schools and the dreams and hopes of democracy in a multicultural society. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781595588296 | New Press

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March for Justice and Jobs flier. Source: National Archives and Records Administration.

On March 22, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Community on the Move for Equality called for a march in Memphis, Tennessee in solidarity with sanitation workers who were on strike.

The flier calls for the use of “soul-force which is peaceful, loving, courageous, yet militant.”

The strike had begun in February when African American sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed by a truck compactor in Memphis.

Their deaths, along with the racist treatment of the sanitation workers, led more than 1,100 workers to strike for better wages, conditions, and safety on Feb. 12, 1968.

Find resources below to teach about the strike and the Civil Rights Movement after 1965.

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Wisconsin Workers Unite 2011.

The 2011 Wisconsin Workers protests were a series of demonstrations that began on Feb. 14, 2011 involving  as many as 100,000 protesters opposing the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair bill.”

Subsequently, anti-tax activists and other conservatives, including Tea Party advocates, launched small pockets of counter protests.

The protests centered on the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, with satellite protests also occurring at other municipalities throughout the state.

Demonstrations took place at various college campuses, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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