The classes are held at least once a month on Mondays at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET for 90 minutes. In each session, the historian is interviewed by a teacher and breakout rooms allow participants (in small groups) to meet each other, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. We designed the sessions for teachers and other school staff, however, parents, students, and others are welcome to participate. ASL is provided.
March 22, 2021: The Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike
Tera W. Hunter, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, will provide an historical context for the election victory in Georgia.
Hunter will focus on the 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike, when 20 laundresses met in Atlanta to form a trade organization, the Washing Society. They sought higher pay, respect, and autonomy over their work and established a uniform rate at $1 per dozen pounds of wash. With the help of Black ministers throughout the city, they held a mass meeting and called a strike to achieve higher pay at the uniform rate.
April 26, 2021: The Carceral State
Historian Garrett Felber and abolitionist organizer Stevie Wilson will talk about the growth of the carceral state and resistance movements.
Felber, author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement and the Carceral State, is project director of the Parchman Oral History Project and was the lead organizer of the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference. He co-founded Study and Struggle, a project that organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. They provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi.