Fifty years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign, conceived by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a means to advocate for equality and opportunity, was launched in Mississippi, defiantly, in the weeks after his assassination.

A half-century later, countless retrospectives often present the tumultuous spring of 1968 as the closing of the Civil Rights era. Here in Mississippi’s Quitman County, we are also commemorating these events. But we reject the notion that the Civil Rights era ended then, or ended at all. The Civil Rights era is not a discrete historical period, but an ongoing effort.

The College Board’s Advanced Placement courses prepare high school students for college rigor, enhance admission prospects, and, in many cases, reduce college costs by enabling students to earn college credit prior to matriculation. AP classes increasingly are a standard component of a college preparatory curriculum — students took about 5 million AP tests in 2017, more than quintuple the total 20 years earlier. However, many schools have failed to keep up. Demand for AP classes, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, vastly outpaces the supply of qualified teachers, exacerbating educational disparities.

Nearly half of rural school districts do not offer any AP courses; all but 5 percent of suburban districts do. Similarly, among high-poverty public high schools serving primarily black and Hispanic students nationwide — which more than doubled in number since 2001, and now enroll about 17 percent of all students — under half offer AP classes.

Read the full article about AP physics and civil rights by Evelyn Jossell at The Hechinger Report.