Rosa Louise McCauley Parks is best known as a public figure but the documents in the Rosa Parks Papers at the Library of Congress allow students to explore the private side of this civil rights legend.
Reading labels as historical objects and applying historical thinking strategies can help students discover what these sometimes-overlooked objects can communicate with us in the present day.
Join Library of Congress education specialists for a free one-day Teaching with Primary Sources professional development program featuring the papers of Rosa Parks on February 2, 2020 from 9am-3pm at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Through primary source inquiry and discussion, teachers can present a more nuanced telling of school desegregation and the complexity of state-federal relationships.
The All American News, an organization that created newsreels for African American audiences, produced a thirty minute documentary on the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. This event took place on May 15, 1957, the third anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education.
The multidimensional nature of music allows artists to explore and communicate complex perspectives. Through exploring the Fort Valley recordings, students can discern how performers connect musical elements and cultural referents to create strong, nuanced messages.
On Easter Sunday 1939, one of America’s greatest voices sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She donned a fur coat against the fifty-degree bluster to perform outdoors. Despite the direct intervention of the First Lady, performance venues across Washington, D.C., had refused to open their stage doors to the world renowned African American contralto, Marian Anderson.
The Library also decided to try something new. Members of the Learning and Innovation team contacted two local high schools with active media production programs for students and asked whether they might be interested in learning about the Omar Ibn Said and helping us tell its story through film.
In the January-February 2019 issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article discusses the Life of Omar ibn Said, the only known extant narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. Analyzing this unique manuscript provides students with an opportunity to expand their understanding of some of the people who were brought to the United States from Africa to be enslaved. How educated were they? What did they believe?