True History, in Every School

Maya Angelou said it well: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” 

As one of many curators of the civil rights story, KIDS is passionate about the history taught in our schools, and the belief that it must be both fact-based and complete in its telling. 

This is the driving motivation behind the KIDS True History initiative, a steady, relentless effort to improve the quality and breadth of civil rights history taught throughout the Birmingham area and beyond.

• In 2021, KIDS was the originating force behind a new initiative, the Coalition for True History. Today, solidified by 14 co-sponsoring organizations and more than 300 individual members, the Coalition is engaged in multiple tactics to motivate Birmingham-area schools to improve their teaching of Alabama’s civil rights history.
  • • The Coalition for True History—through regular e-newsletters and Zoom gatherings—serves as a hub to bring together classroom educators with the Coalition’s co-sponsoring organizations and the myriad resources they’ve produced—lesson plans, curricula, videos and films, oral histories packaged for classroom use, and professional development opportunities.
    • Throughout 2024, the committee formed to revise the Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies (the state’s standards for teaching social studies) benefitted from insights and guidance recommended by the education, nonprofit, and university leaders who are now unified through the Coalition. The updated standards reflect many ideas we proposed—attention to helping students connect history lessons to present-day events, inclusion of more examples of contributions from Asian and Hispanic Alabamians, and the central role of housing discrimination and its legacies.
    • The Coalition for True History offers valuable guidance and support to educators navigating the challenges posed by new legislation that could limit the ways our shared racial history is taught.

• One tactic for improving the teaching of Alabama’s civil rights history is an ongoing KIDS program, Civil Rights History Schoolwide, funded by the Alabama Humanities Alliance, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We challenge Birmingham-area teachers to develop lesson plans conveying civil rights historical content in subjects beyond Social Studies.
  • • To date, six Birmingham-area teachers have created and piloted lesson plans that incorporate our stories (as primary source material) and civil rights content into subjects as diverse as chemistry, art, music, and language arts. 
    • Birmingham filmmakers T. Marie King and Patrick Johnson have created short videos to promote these unusual lesson plans to the Alabama educational community and beyond.
    • Academic journals—Social Studies and the Young Learner and The Social Studies—have featured one of these lesson plans, making available to educators across the country a plan they can adopt to teach Birmingham’s civil rights history. 

See next KIDS initiative, Housing Is Everything

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