Khan Academy
Khan Academy: Us History: 1865 1898: Jim Crow
After Reconstruction, states in the South passed laws that barred African Americans from voting and segregated schools, restaurants, and public accommodations.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Eugenics Archive: Eugenics Popularization
This article explains how the idea of eugenics, based on poor science, became popular in the 1920s as a reaction against immigration and African Americans.
Curated OER
History Matters: Atlanta Compromise Speech, 1895
Read an excerpt from Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, in which he stresses accommodation rather than resistance as way to deal with racism. Includes a short audio clip - the only surviving recording of Washington's...
Read Works
Read Works: Famous African Americans Muhammad Ali: The Greatest
[Free Registration/Login Required] Biographical information about the famous boxer Muhammad Ali is contained in this passage. This passage is a stand-alone curricular piece that reinforces essential reading skills and strategies and...
Read Works
Read Works: Famous African Americans Martin Luther King, Jr.
[Free Registration/Login Required] This biographical sketch contains information about the Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. This passage is a stand-alone curricular piece that reinforces essential reading skills and...
Read Works
Read Works: Famous African Americans Marian Anderson
[Free Registration/Login Required] This passage contains brief biographical information about the famous singer named Marian Anderson. This passage is a stand-alone curricular piece that reinforces essential reading skills and strategies...
Read Works
Read Works: Famous African Americans Thurgood Marshall
[Free Registration/Login Required] This mini-biographical pieces shares information about Thurgood Marshall. This passage is a stand-alone curricular piece that reinforces essential reading skills and strategies and establishes...
Scholastic
Scholastic History Mystery: Roaring '20S: Ossian Sweet
Students try to guess the mystery subject Carlotta Facts, the History Mystery Museum's professor, is studying. They read the clues, do some online and offline research, and then attempt to identify the game's mystery person, Ossian Sweet.
US National Archives
Nara: Powers of Persuasion: United We Win
In spite of racial discrimination and segregation in the military and in civilian life, the overwhelming majority of black Americans participated wholeheartedly in the fight against the Axis powers. This site explores the posters,...
PBS
Pbs Need to Know: Florida Ex Felon Voting Laws
Did you know that one in ten adults in Florida is currently not eligible to vote due to having been convicted of a felony? Find out how African Americans in particular are disproportionately affected. Article has particular emphasis on...
Yale University
Yale New Haven Teachers Institute: Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots
A lesson unit with good background information for students. Details the history of lynching and race riots in America and the treatment of African-Americans from 1880 to 1950.
Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Tween Tribune: The True Story of "Hidden Figures"
"Hidden Figures" was a blockbuster movie and book about African-American women working for NASA beginning after WWII. These women not only made great strides for the space program but also advanced the civil rights movement. Learn more...
Siteseen
Siteseen: American Historama: The Exodusters
Learn about the Exodusters, thousands of African Americans, from the southern states along the Mississippi River, who migrated to Kansas.
Library of Congress
Loc: Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s 1960s
Timeline of the history of baseball, from 1860 to 1972, with a focus on the events leading to the integration of African Americans into the major leagues.
PBS
Pbs: Identity, Oppression, and Protest
This lesson plan supplements a study of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The lesson is designed to help students understand the impact of Jim Crow Laws and their impact of oppression on African Americans. Blues music is shared to help...
Library of Congress
Loc: Baseball, Race Relations and Jackie Robinson
In this lesson, students draw on their previous studies of American history and culture as they analyze primary sources from Jackie Robinson and Other Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s in American Memory. A close reading of two documents...
CommonLit
Common Lit: Book Pairings: "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou recounts her coming of age story as a mature but apprehensive girl in the American South and California during the Jim Crow era. Selected (8) reading passages (grades 7-10) to pair with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by...
Digital History
Digital History: To the Heart of Dixie
In the early 1960s civil rights activists put the ban on segregation to the test. In 1961, "Freedom riders," boarded buses headed south to test the federal ban on segregated travel. And in 1962, the University of Mississippi was ordered...
Black Past
Black Past: Buxton, Iowa
This is an interesting encyclopedia article about the multi-ethnic town of Buxton, Iowa, a coal-mining town with little racial discrimination.
University of Washington
Seattle Civil Rights Project: Ku Klux Klan in Washington State, 1920s
Find extensive essays, photographs, articles from newspapers, and documents that trace the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Washington State in the 1920s. Be sure to look through this entile site to see the anti-African American,...
University of Missouri
Famous Trials: The Sweet Trials
The KKK membership was on the rise in Detroit in the 20s. An angry mob gathers at the home of an African-American doctor and shots ring out from the upstairs. Investigate the trial through transcripts and eye witness accounts.
PBS
Wnet: Thirteen: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow: The Atlanta Compromise Speech (1895)
Find out how Booker T. Washington tried to allay the fears of white Southerners in his speech in Atlanta in September, 1895. Although hailed as a new era in which blacks would give up their civil and political rights and in return get...
PBS
Pbs Learning Media: Voter Registration Training Tool
Students at Miles College in Birmingham developed this "crib sheet" and questionnaire to help black citizens become registered voters and to document racial discrimination in the voting process in the 1950s.
Siteseen
Siteseen: American Historama: Racial Segregation History in the United States
This article contains numerous facts about black segregation history in the United States from the Civil War through the end of the Civil Rights Movement.