Curriculum
Lesson units built directly on the timeline — each with objectives, materials, discussion questions, and the primary sources to teach from.
African Roots & the First Africans
Where the story really begins — the African kingdoms the enslaved came from, the transatlantic trade, and how a fluid servitude was hardened into race-based slavery.
Open unitBlack Excellence: Music, Sport & Science
A first look at Black Americans who changed music, broke barriers in sport, and made discoveries that shaped the modern world.
Open unitBlack Women Who Led
From Sojourner Truth to Shirley Chisholm, the Black women who organized, agitated, and led the freedom struggle — often without credit.
Open unitHidden Figures: Black Science & Invention
The Black scientists, doctors, and inventors who shaped the modern world — and were too often written out of it.
Open unitHidden Histories: COINTELPRO to Mass Incarceration
The less-taught machinery of control — surveillance, the drug war, and the prison boom — and the connections between them.
Open unitMalcolm X & the Black Power Movement
The other current of the freedom struggle — self-determination, self-defense, and Black pride — from Malcolm X to the Black Panther Party.
Open unitMapping Local History: Massacre & Memory
Using the map, students locate racial violence and erased Black communities near them and learn how such history is buried — and recovered.
Open unitMedical Racism & Bioethics
How American medicine used, neglected, and exploited Black bodies — from experiments on the enslaved to Tuskegee to today's maternal-mortality gap.
Open unitSlave Revolts & Resistance
Wherever there was slavery, there was resistance — from the first revolt of 1526 to Nat Turner, and from the maroons of the swamp to the freedom suits of the courtroom.
Open unitThe Anti-Greed Gospel: The Economics of Racism
Following historian Malcolm Foley, students test the argument that the love of money — not an ancient hatred — is the root of American racism.
Open unitThe Civil Rights Movement
How a generation dismantled legal segregation — from Brown to the Voting Rights Act.
Open unitThe Harlem Renaissance
In 1920s Harlem, a generation of Black writers, musicians, and artists declared a "New Negro" and remade American culture.
Open unitThe Road to Emancipation
From the first Africans on this soil to the Thirteenth Amendment — slavery, resistance, and the long, incomplete arrival of freedom.
Open unitThe Sound of a People: Black Music
How Black Americans created the music that became the soundtrack of the modern world — from spirituals to the blues, jazz, gospel, soul, Motown, and hip-hop.
Open unitThe Underground Railroad
How enslaved people freed themselves with the help of a secret network — and how we know their stories.
Open unit