Quick Summary
Minitex staff and librarians who work with eLibraryMN, Ebooks Minnesota, Minnesota Digital Library, and Resource Sharing have come together to create Resource Packs for Minnesota schools! This month's pack features fiction, nonfiction, and primary sources about the Civil Rights Movement.
Roy Wilkins, civil rights leader and director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), spoke at the University of Minnesota in 1964. University of Minnesota Archives, accessed 2/13/2024.
Primary sources and academic research on the civil rights movement are essential for teaching and learning about American history, and reading the stories of those who lived through these events can make students feel like they were there. Find these curricular resources, research sources, and selected readings in this month’s Civil Rights Resource Pack.
For ebooks that the whole class can read together, young learners can find stories on Ebooks Minnesota that reflect the experiences of famous leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, the additional information about the history of nonviolent resistance. Grades PK-5 students can view PebbleGo’s collections of biographies of civil rights leaders to make connections to the people who changed the world.
Students in Grades K-12 can read an authoritative overview of the Civil Rights movement in Britannica, adjusting the reading level and language according to their needs. They can also utilize the new Ebsco user interfaces for elementary and middle school students to browse the Social Studies/American History/Civil Rights theme with curated, age-appropriate items for their research and learning.
Middle and High School students can find the information that they need in the Gale in Context Middle and High School Civil Rights and Black History Month topics, or dive deeper into the the more complex causes of inequality and injustice under Ebsco Explora and Points of View Reference Center's Racism and ‘Race and Culture’ topics.
Finally, you can find several primary source materials on the fight for civil rights through the Minnesota Digital Library (MDL), available via our website or through MDL's collection in the Digital Public Library of America. From a brochure on equal rights in the 1940s to a “March on Washington” button to speeches by NAACP director Roy Wilkins and much, much more, you can access them all for free.
These items and so many more are on the Resource Pack guide, and in the e-resources themselves. Have a topic that you'd like us to focus on in the future? Share it with us and we'll add it to the list!
*Resource packs are theme-based and support Minnesota K12 Academic standards. We plan to release one resource pack per month during the school year, and fully review all content each summer to ensure that all resources are current and up to date. Please submit any ideas you have for resource pack topics that would be helpful for teachers and students and we will add them to the list of future topics.
Each pack will be in a LibGuide format that librarians and teachers can share with colleagues. Resources will be curated around the month’s theme, and will be broken into tabs for younger and older students. Packs can be accessed by unlimited users with no login, and all links will be formatted to ensure seamless access within Minnesota borders.
