If We Knew Our History - Zinn Education Project Monthly Column

Presented by the Zinn Education Project
A Collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change

'Is This America?'

50 Years Ago Sharecroppers Challenged Mississippi Apartheid, LBJ, and the Nation

By Julian Hipkins III, Teaching for Change curriculum specialist, and
Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project

MFDP delegates demonstrate as President Lyndon Johnson is being nominated. Center is Victoria Gray from Hattiesburg, Miss. Photo: George Ballis, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Fifty years ago this month, Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer gripped the nation with her televised testimony of being forced from her home and brutally beaten (suffering permanent kidney damage) for attempting to exercise her constitutional right to vote.

"Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?" she asked the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Continue reading.

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"'Is This America?': 50 Years Ago Sharecroppers Challenged Mississippi Apartheid,
LBJ, and the Nation" is the newest article in the Zinn Education Project series,
If We Knew Our History, posted on Common Dreams and Huffington Post.

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Related Resources
	Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Teaching Activity. By Julian Hipkins III, Deborah Menkart, Sara Evers, and Jenice View. Role play on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).	Constitution Role Play: Whose "More Perfect Union" and The Constitutional Convention: Who Really Won? Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. A role play on the issues involved with the framing of the Constitution.
	Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer Reader Book - Non-fiction. Edited by Michael Edmonds. Anthology of first hand accounts and primary documents from the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.	Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America Book - Non-fiction. By Wesley C. Hogan. A study of what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee accomplished and how it fostered significant social change in such a short time.
See more resources on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

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