Depth and Dimension with Five Black History Month Lessons

Add depth and dimension to your Black History Month lessons with an amazing collection of resources highlighting key events, movements, and traditions as well as notable leaders, poets, and musicians. These highlighted resources are a small sample of the quality content in PBS LearningMedia. Create an account to build interactive, personalized, media-rich learning experiences for engaged, real-world relevant learning.

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross | Video and Lesson Plan Collection | Grades 2-13+
Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounts the full trajectory of African-American history in his groundbreaking series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. The series explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed — forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds. Using video clips from The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, this collection of lesson plans addresses a wide range of themes of the African-American experience from 1500 to the present.

March on Washington Collection | Various | Grades 3-12
This year marks the 52nd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and will be commemorated by teachers and students across the country and around the world. Help your students understand the significance of this event – and its role in the larger Civil Rights Movement using this collection of digital content.

More Than a Month? | Videos and Educator Guide | Grades 5-13+         
Should Black History Month be ended? That’s the question explored by African American filmmaker Shukree Hassan Tilghman as he embarks on his cross-country campaign. Both amusing and thought provoking, More Than a Month examines what the treatment of history tells us about race and power in America. Classrooms can use the guide without watching the entire film, by watching the film clips and discussing the synopsis. “Whose History” provides a one-to-three day lesson plan designed to further students’ understanding of the film and to explore the question of how different cultural groups are acknowledged in American history, media, and culture.

Using Oral History | Lesson | Grades 9-12
“A Place Out of Time: The Bordentown School” provides teachers with a touchstone to convey important concepts in American history to high schoolers. In this lesson, students compare ideas and information from various sources to understand how oral histories contribute to our understanding of segregation. Students then conduct their own interviews to further their own understanding of individual experiences during segregation.

Finding Your Roots | Video Collection | Grades 9-13+
The basic drive to discover who we are and where we come from is at the core of the 10-part PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the 12th series from Professor Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.