On May 19, 2025, the Zinn Education Project hosted an end-of-year showcase for the 2024–2025…
Julia SalcedoMay 23, 2025
Let’s make teaching for Black lives the norm, not the exception.
The Teaching for Black Lives Campaign helps educators reject racism and anti-Blackness through critical self-reflection in study groups, equips them with classes and curricula that enable the teaching of honest history, and creates a network of collaboration and support for social justice educators across the country.
Explore the links below to build a toolkit to teach for Black lives.
Monthly Teach the Black Freedom Struggle Online Classes.
The Zinn Education Project offers a series of online classes with people’s historians on the history of the Black Freedom Struggle. Teachers learn directly from leading historians and also interact with peers from across the country. Professional development certificates and ASL interpretation are provided. Listen to excerpts from the classes below and register today!
Teaching Resources
Teaching for Black Lives Book
Emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement, this book highlights the ways educators can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of joy, justice, and liberation in the movement to dismantle anti-Blackness and white supremacy in education.
Study Groups
The Zinn Education Project supports Teaching for Black Lives Study Groups across the United States. Each study group receives copies of Teaching for Black Lives, a Rethinking Schools, subscription for each participant, access to dozens of workshops and seminars over the course of the year.
Lessons
The Zinn Education Project offers dozens of lessons on the history of the Black Freedom Struggle — from resistance to enslavement to redlining to the ongoing fight for voting rights and reparations.
Online Classes
Our “Teaching the Black Freedom Struggle” online classes offer the chance to learn directly from leading historians and to meet peers from across the country. In each session, a historian is interviewed by a teacher, and participants break into small groups to meet each other, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. Sessions are designed for teachers and other school staff — but parents, students, and others report loving the classes too.
Teach the Black Freedom Struggle Podcast
Zinn Education Project’s popular Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes are available as audio recordings. Listen to teacher interviews with leading people’s historians and journalists including Jarvis Givens, Martha Jones, Robin D. G. Kelley, Clint Smith, Bryan Stevenson, Jeanne Theoharis, Kidada Williams, Dave Zirin, and many more.
Rethinking Schools Magazine
In addition to the book, Teaching for Black Lives, Rethinking Schools publishes a quarterly magazine dedicated to promoting equity and racial justice in the classroom. Each issue offers new ideas for how educators and communities can make schools sites of joy and justice and dismantle white supremacy and other oppressive structures.
Snapshots
At JC Harmon High School in Kansas City, Kansas, educator Crystal Yakel-Kuntz builds community and…
Julia SalcedoMay 12, 2025
Since 2020, the Zinn Education Project has hosted hundreds of Teaching for Black Lives Study Groups. Each…
Julia SalcedoApril 30, 2025
Events & Announcements
Teaching for Black Lives Study Groups 2025–2027
June–September: The Zinn Education Project is accepting applications for Teaching for Black Lives educator study groups for the 2025–2027 school years. Apply today! Each year the Zinn Education Project hosts Teaching…
Read More How the Word Is Passed: Remembering Slavery and How It Shaped America
Monday, August 25, 2025: Author and educator Clint Smith will discuss the new young readers edition of How the Word Is Passed: Remembering Slavery and How it Shaped America, which was…
Read More Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
Monday, September 22, 2025: Scholar Eve L. Ewing, in conversation with Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian and Rethinking Schools executive director Cierra Kaler-Jones, will discuss her book, Original Sins: The…
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