How the Word Is Passed

It is wonderful to see Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed in Times Square.

We'd be even more thrilled to see photos and stories about how you use the book in your classrooms.

As Smith suggests, one cannot understand United States history without focusing on the centrality of slavery. This history is essential to help our students make sense of the world around them.

At the Zinn Education Project, we offer lessons, discussion questions, and writing prompts to take students deeply into Smith’s brilliant New York Times best-selling book.

Share a story about using any of the lessons or discussion questions for Clint Smith's book and we'll send you a people's history book in appreciation. These are the lessons:

In appreciation for your teaching story, you can choose Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, a compilation by William Katz of hundreds of first-person stories and primary documents, or Faces and Masks by Eduardo Galeano, the second volume in his brilliant, student-friendly Memory of Fire trilogy. (These titles were donated to us to share with people's history teachers.)

Only One Week Left

Director C. J. Hunt, a former middle school teacher and a field producer with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, has made a poignant, hilarious, historically astute documentary on Confederate monuments and the myth of the Lost Cause. We recommend it for use with students grades 7+.

Watch it with your family. You’ll think. You’ll laugh. You’ll have great conversations.

Thanks to a donation by the author, we will send you a copy of Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes in appreciation for your teaching story about any of the lessons in the Teach Climate Justice campaign.

We also recommend The Mystery Woman in Room Three by Aya de León, a new young adult novel on immigration rights, climate justice, the Green New Deal, and youth activism. Available for free download at Orion Magazine.

The right-wing attacks are well-funded and getting huge media attention. Please donate so that we can support educators who #TeachTruth and can continue to offer free people's history lessons.