Civil Rights in the United States: A Toolkit 

Welcome to the Civil Rights Toolkit. This page is a work-in-progress devoted to helping high school students and interested community members learn more about the history of civil rights in the United States across different time periods and communities (with a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries).

 

 

Disclaimers:

– This site is meant to be a launching pad, NOT a landing place. 

 

– This site is not a definitive toolkit or resource. We’re learning as we create the page, and we’ll be adding more links as we go along. There are entire books and bookshelves and courses (if not majors and departments) for each of the units in the class. 

 

– Most of the resources are online, for ease of access, but there is also a recommended list of books in each subject area. The resources prioritize (but are not limited to) histories and voices from within the communities involved. 

 

– CommonSenseMedia and Kanopy.com are some good resources to help screen or preview resources for age appropriate content. (“13,” for example, is an important documentary, but contains graphic imagery.) 

 

Image Credits – all licensed (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0):

 

  • Unknown author / Public domain – Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
  • Citizen University / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) – Alicia Garza
  • Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine; Restored by Adam Cuerden / Public domain – Fannie Lou Hamer
  • Image courtesy of the family of Fred T. Korematsu / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) – Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, and Fred Korematsu
  • Rowland Scherman / CC0 – Civil Rights March on Washington
  • dignidadrebelde / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) – Yuri Kochiyama
  • Tamiko Nimura – WA State Women’s March, Jan 2016
  • unknown (Congressional Portrait File, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-122137) – Patsy Mink
  • Kyle McDonald – Grace Lee Boggs
  • Eric Guo – Dolores Huerta
  • Eddie Hernandez Photography – Alice Wong
  • Tara Houska (self portrait)
  • Kyle Kotajarvi – Overhead photo of the Black Lives Matter Mural in Capitol Hill, Seattle, created by many local artists supporting the George Floyd protests.