Harvard University Offers Online Course on the Selma Voting Rights March

A new online project by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation offers a free online course about the Selma, Alabama, voting rights marches of 1965. The new online course comes just in time as a powerful teaching aid as many schools have transitioned to online instruction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designed in partnership with Left Field Labs and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program, Selma Online is an interactive program that is designed for middle or high school students. The accompanying teachers’ guide makes it accessible and adaptable for teachers.

The platform uses scenes from Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film Selma as a storyboard to bring the voting rights movement to life and invite the next generation to walk in the footsteps of the civil rights crusaders.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, told the Associated Press that “it’s perfect timing, unfortunately, because of the crisis we are in. Not only is the timing optimal for teachers who are developing online lesson plans but also for families.”

Related Articles

2 COMMENTS

Leave a Reply

Get the JBHE Weekly Bulletin

Receive our weekly email newsletter delivered to your inbox

Latest News

Recent Books of Interest to African American Scholars

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education regularly publishes a list of new books that may be of interest to our readers. The books included are on a wide variety of subjects and present many different points of view.

North Carolina A&T State University Mounts Effort to Educate Heirs Property Owners

Heirs property is land passed down through a family, often over multiple generations and to numerous descendants, without the use of wills or probate courts. In North Carolina, the value of land owned as heirs property is estimated at nearly $1.9 billion. Heirs property is disproportionately held by Black landowners.

Higher Education Grants or Gifts of Interest to African Americans

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.

New Legislation Aims to Boost Entrepreneurial Efforts of HBCU Students

Congresswoman Nikema Williams (GA-05) has introduced the Minority Entrepreneurship Grant Program Act, bipartisan legislation that creates a grant program with the Small Business Administration for entrepreneurs at minority-serving institutions like historically Black colleges and universities.

Featured Jobs