Voting Rights: Additional Lessons

LESSON

Stepping into Selma: Voting Rights History and Legacy Today
By Deborah Menkart

This lesson invites students to step into the long history of the freedom struggle in Selma, introducing them to people, turning points, and issues. Each student takes on the identity of someone involved in one way or another in the Selma freedom movement. If used in advance of viewing the film Selma, it can help students recognize more of the people and issues that are referenced.

LESSON

Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
By Jenice L. View, Julian Hipkins, et al

This lesson explores one of the most important events in the fight for true democracy in the U.S., when a coalition of grassroots activists challenged the Mississippi political system, the federal government and the national Democratic Party to abide by the U.S. Constitution. Working within the political “rules,” the activists formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP or FDP) in 1964 and mounted a legitimate challenge to the existing system of race-based exclusion.

LESSON

History Detectives: Voting Rights in Mississippi, 1964
By Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View

This lesson introduces students to the history, strategies, and challenges facing by people in Mississippi in their struggle for voting rights in the early 1960s.

LESSON

Meet Medgar Evers: Introduction to the Southern Freedom Movement
By Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View

Medgar Wiley Evers was one of Mississippi’s most impassioned activists, orators, and visionaries for equality and against brutality. This is an interactive lesson to introduce students to his work and inspire them to learn more.

LESSON

Freedom Song: Tactics for Transformation
By Alana D. Murray

Viewing guide for the drama Freedom Song about SNCC in Mississippi, which is by far one of the best films for students about the Civil Rights Movement.

LESSON

A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act
By Emilye Crosby

This lesson uses a case study of Lowndes County, Alabama and three SNCC-related documents from the early 1960s—just before and after the Voting Rights Act—to explore the impact of the Voting Rights Act (and 1964 Civil Rights Act) on every day southern Black citizens: What did the legislation mean to them? Did they achieve their goals? 

LESSON

Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Unit with three lessons on voting rights, including the history of the struggle against voter suppression in the United States. The first lesson considers the question of who should vote. Students first share their understanding of what makes a “qualified” voter, then reconsider their thinking after a close reading of an oral history by Fannie Lou Hamer. The second lesson asks students to predict how policymakers might have restricted the right to vote for certain groups to thwart movements and laws that expanded voting rights. The final lesson is a mixer role play in which students learn about a variety of people with firsthand experience having their voting rights granted or denied.

LESSON

Teaching With Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

Students engage in an interactive activity with short excerpts from Martha Jones’ book to learn about the leading role of Black women in the fight for voting rights throughout U.S. history.