In August, Michigan history teacher James Gorman watched televised images of torch-bearing white supremacists marching on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and decided to use the incident to teach his students about similar events that happened in a divided United States 150 years ago.

He'd compare the race-based hatred spurring protests by white nationalists, like those in Charlottesville, to segregationists' efforts during the Reconstruction era to roll back advances made after the Civil War. During Reconstruction — which many historians date from roughly 1865 to 1877 — enslaved people were freed, former slaves and free blacks gained citizenship rights and black men were granted the right to vote. As a result, African-Americans made huge strides in education, entrepreneurship and political power. Historians estimate that as many as 2,000 blacks were elected to local, state and federal offices during Reconstruction.

Most of those gains were lost, however, in 1877 when the federal government pulled troops out of the South. Once the federal government left, a backlash began. Racist legislators effectively stripped blacks of their Constitutional rights by passing laws mandating segregation and restricting voting rights ...

To inform his lessons, Gorman chose a curriculum called Teach Reconstruction created by the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between social justice education nonprofits Teaching for Change, based in Washington, D.C. and Rethinking Schools, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The creators of the Teach Reconstruction project are actively campaigning for the inclusion of lessons about Reconstruction in history and social studies classes. The project provides educational materials and teaching guides for teachers.

Read the full article about teaching kids about race with historical context by Avis Thomas-Lester at The Hechinger Report