Black History Month resources for teachers

Author Author Coshandra Dillard writes about the importance of going beyond trauma and struggle to examine the liberation, civic engagement, creativity and intersecting identities of Black people during Black History Month. Shared in Teaching Tolerance.

This high school English teacher encourages educators to focus on African Americans' contributions to the United States, with the Harlem Renaissance as a way to begin. By Jamilah Pitts in Teaching Tolerance.

Avoid minimizing black history; include the full human experience beyond enslavement. By Coshandra Dillard in Teaching Tolerance.

This Black History Month, we’re encouraging educators to recognize and teach that Black history includes narratives that don’t focus solely on trauma. While it’s imperative to teach about the realities of racial oppression, it’s just as important to engage students with the many ways Black people have consistently and powerfully resisted white supremacy. In Teaching Tolerance.

Perspectives on Global African History features accounts and descriptions of important events in Global African history recalled often by those who were witnesses or participants or viewpoints about historical developments shaping the contemporary black world. Many of these accounts will be instant primary sources available to current visitors to BlackPast and to future historians. Each article is accompanied by a brief biography and photo of its author.

The African-American Mosaic is a Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture. This collection is divided into the following sections:  colonization, abolition, migration, and WPA.

 

The Race Stories essay series, published monthly on the Lens Blog of the New York Times, is a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race by Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture Research Professor and Chief Curator, Dr. Maurice Berger.

 

RACE: The Power of an Illusion is the most widely taught documentary in the United States. The filmmakers and collaborators have created a series of lesson plans and collated other materials to guide discussion and engagement in the classroom.

This resource is a searchable datatabase of books that feature Black girls as the main characters. Users can filter all books in the database by reading level or search by title, author or keyword. (Scroll all the way down to use the database.) 

Please note this is a database of book titles designed to facilitate the process of locating books; there are no options to download the books; . The 1000 Black Girl Books Resource Guide was created by Marley Dias, Creator of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign and is hosted by the GrassROOTS Community Foundation in West Orange, New Jersey.

Africa Access was founded to help schools, public libraries, and parents improve the quality of their K-12 collections on Africa. Their website provides annotations and scholarly reviews of children’s and young adult books that focus on Africa. Africa Access also sponsors the Children's Africana Book Awards, which give annual awards for the best children’s and young adult books on Africa available for purchase in the United States. 

BlackPast timelines that explore the rich history of blacks in the world. The timelines are filterable by year range, year, event keyword, and location.

A list of strategies to help students get the most out of Black history and Black History Month. Created by Teaching Tolerance.

Lessons for students on the institutionalization of racism and the long struggle for human, economic, and civil rights in the U.S. Shared by Teaching for Change.
 

Four films are the centerpiece of the project Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle. The films, The Abolitionists, Slavery by Another Name, The Loving Story, and Freedom Riders connect the stories of the long civil rights movement and address issues of race and rights. The films invite students to confront the complicated history of race relations in this nation from the perspectives of individuals who felt personally wronged and through the eyes of those who saw themselves as part of a larger persecuted and disenfranchised community.

The films are available freely from this site, but Adobe Flash player is required to view them. The site also shares discussion group questions and curriculum material. Given time constraints, the videos may be assigned to a setting in a library/media center so that students may also view and take notes outside of the classroom setting.

 

Zaretta Hammond writes about the careful planning, thoughtfulness and alliances that will help educators avoid the pitfalls of Black History Month. In Teaching Tolerance.

This companion website to the PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow provides a variety resources for teachers. Recommended are the first-hand accounts by individuals who experienced Jim Crow and the interactive maps. The maps detail the following: the Jim Crow Laws that were passed after Reconstruction; historic information on the black colleges and universities that were founded between 1830-1960; state-by-state population statistics for blacks and whites and the number of blacks who migrated between the states over six decades and more.  

 

This PBS collection captures the voices, images, and events of the Civil Rights Movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality in America. (Select a topic within "civil rights" from the menu on the left side.) All grade levels. Shared by PBS Learning Media.

This multi-media collection of resources is provided to help educators broaden their own knowledge; create new curriculum to correct misinformation, omissions, and tokenization; and to continue learning not only about the contributions of African countries but the many missing and misrepresented histories that make up the mosaic that is our planet. (There are resources that can be used directly with students included as well.) Compiled by scholars for the Early Childhood Education Assembly. 

The History Channel provides a collection of 49 short videos on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his career.

 

BlackPast.org is a repository of information relating to Black History on the web; the content is organized into three categories: African American History, African American History in the American West, and Global African History. There is a BlackPast in the Classroom section for teachers that shares ideas and tips for using the site with students.

 

In this story shared in Facing History, Tanya Huelett asks how we move past the reliance on Black History Month as a catch-all for representation of the experiences, contributions, and voices of African Americans? You can stand up for black history every month of the year by thinking about things like:

• Ask yourself - which books have you read this year, in school or on your own? How many of them are by black authors?
• When you study American history in school, how often do you learn about the history of black people in our country? If you don’t study much about black people outside of Black History Month, can you make your next project in history class about a black leader or about a part of history like the Freedom Riders or the Selma-to-Montgomery march?
• When you study history textbooks at school, who wrote the textbooks? Are any of your textbooks by black authors? How do you think that what you read in the textbook might be influenced by the experiences and identities of the authors?

More Than a Mapp is a free iPhone and iPod app that allows users to discover and contribute to the African American history that exists all around us. The location-enabled application can reveal sites of significance to black history in your city, and allows you to upload map points of your own. The crowd-sourced and moderated data will grow to reveal that history doesn’t just live in books; it has a presence in the everyday places we find ourselves.