In this lesson from Teaching Tolerance, students will focus the most recent constitutional expansion of voting rights: extending them to people between 18 and 21 years of age. Students will read the 26th Amendment and learn about its history. They will view an NBC report from Nov. 5, 2008, that explains how important the youth vote was to the election of Barack Obama. Finally, they will examine the results of a recent study showing that young voters have very different concerns than older voters, and hypothesize about how young voters might affect elections in the future.

Students will read the Constitutional amendments that guaranteed African Americans citizenship and the right to vote for African-American men, as well as use primary sources to develop a deeper understanding of why it was so difficult vote despite the passage of the 15th Amendment.
Students will understand why granting voting rights to African American men threatened the status quo in the South and evaluate the role of the federal government in expanding the right to vote.

In this middle school lesson from Teaching Tolerance, students will explore the calendar to determine why different religions celebrate different holidays and establish what factors school and government leaders should consider when deciding whether public schools should be closed for religious holidays. Students will work in groups to create solutions for school calendars that respect all students and beliefs.

In this lesson, students reflect on ways they have experienced or participated in bias based on physical size and appearance. Students discuss how society's expectations about body image and appearance affect people.

In this lesson, students will consider the strategies Ida B. Wells deployed to raise awareness of social problems and weigh the effectiveness of nonconformity to address a specific audience. Students will use Wells' story to write about a personal experience of conformity or non-conformity.

In this lesson, students will understand excerpts from an autobiographical work and retell scenes from the book. They will also collaborate to convert segments of the text into dialogue, creating a brief play about Susie King Taylor's involvement in the Civil War.

In this lesson, students will analyze written documents for position of writer and content. They will then synthesize a historical position based upon document analysis and connect historical struggles for equality with current movements.

This article discusses the events leading up to and the effects that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

These discussion questions explore the impact of Brown v. Board of Education and the current state of segregation.

This article discusses the resurfacing of segregation in schools over 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, in the wake of the Supreme Court decisions ending desegregation orders.

This collection of primary resources and corresponding activities sheds light on the endurance of peaceful protesters in Montgomery, Ala., who overturned an unjust law.

In this lesson, students will confirm, negate, and build information about the nation’s changing demographic using an organizational chart; write a letter to respond to a viewpoint offered in the central text; and talk about their own multiple identities in relation to those around them.

In this lesson, students will review and summarize questions about the struggle for equality and apply them to other civil rights struggles. Students will also devise a timeline regarding other civil rights struggles.

In this lesson, students will learn the factors that can both determine and perpetuate poverty over a lifetime and into succeeding generations. Students will understand the difference between short-term need and long-term poverty, brainstorm the circumstances that can lead to each and reach conclusions about which people in our society are most vulnerable to generational poverty.

In this lesson, students summarize biographies of leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, Claudette Colvin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this lesson students will define the terms community and activist, explore the “results of activism,” and determine a variety of characteristics and actions that would make someone a leader.

Students gain an understanding of emphathy, practice ways to be more understanding, and reflect on the effects of emphathetic listening.

Students evaluate sources of identity and use a variety of tools to evaluate sources for bias and accuracy.