Black History Month resources for teachers

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

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. 

Resources such as teaching guides, lesson plans and articles to teach students about the Civil Rights Movement. This long list can be filtered by resource type and reading level. Created by the Zinn Educaton Project. 

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.

 

While the tunnels, secret passages, hidden rooms, and other such romantic visions of the Underground Railroad persist in the American imagination, the true story of the Underground Railroad is coming to light. Although the exact number of slaves who successfully escaped bondage will never be known, it is certain that the Underground Railroad did exist, though not quite in the organized or conspiratorial form of myth and legend. This interactive timeline is created by the Oxford African American Studies Center. 

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.  

 

 An interactive timeline filled with video and text about the events that shaped the Civil Rights Movement.  Also included is a timeline guide that denotes the event and the length of its corresponding video. 

 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.