Black History Month Resources on the AHTC

February is Black History Month. As you plan your activities, please keep the AHTC website in mind.

In the past year , the AHTC has put on workshops about The Civil Rights Movement, African-American Education, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. There are website lists online that contain dozens of websites with information, student activities and lesson plans. There are also website lists from our Middle Passage workshop in 2008, the Brown vs the Board of Education workshop in 2006, Resistance to Slavery in 2007 as well as many more!

If you're looking for something more specific than the web resources, head over to the lesson plans section. Our teachers have put together some really amazing lesson plans over the years, and many of them have been posted the website. The lesson plans are sorted by topic and many have the suggested grade level under the title. There is also a separate page highlighting the elementary level lesson plans.

For example, take a look at Kyle Sondgeroth's lesson "What was Martin Luther King Jr doing in Memphis on April 4, 1968" intended for grades 3-5 for a great introductory lesson to Martin Luther King Js's life and work. Todd Searing's Fellowship lesson plan on the Crosswhite Fugitive Slave case is intended to introduce middle schoolers the the effects of the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1793. Mary Ann Jusko's lesson on The Barbershop Project on the University of Illinois Campus helps her upper elementary kids tie the civil rights movement to local issues. In order to teach his students in grades 7-12 that Jim Crow and segregation was not just a problem in the South, Amos Lee has an excellent lesson plan entitled "Discrimination against African Americans in Illinois." These are only a few examples of the great lesson plans on African-American history that are available on the website.

If you already have an activity in mind, but you are looking for primary sources to ground your activities in local history, head over to the Local Primary Sources section of the website. This section contains scans of local documents. The sources are organized into spreadsheet by topic, and the spreadsheets can be sorted by name or date. The sources about World Wars I and II are especially rich.