Learn About Black History With This Free Toolkit

This story is from our US partners. We still think it’s relevant to our audience who want to extend their knowledge of Black history. 

If the past month has taught us anything, it’s that many Americans have a long way to go in learning about black history and systemic racism in this country. It may not be our fault that we were taught a bullshit version of American history in school in which we glorify white historical figures who were racist and pretend that racism disappeared when Martin Luther King Jr. told us about his dream. But as adults, it absolutely is our fault if we don’t educate ourselves now.

Luckily, there’s a whole lot of good, accurate, important content out there for us to read, watch and learn from. And even luckier is that there are people like Tyree Boyd-Pates who are willing to curate it and deliver it right to us.

Boyd-Pates, a public historian and museum curator, recently told the Los Angeles Times that he created an anti-racist tool kit, which he named “Freedom Papers,” to send to his social media network and their allies so they could better understand black political education.

“Intergenerationally speaking, this generation has a set of tools in its tool kit — technology that wasn’t available to the previous,” he said. “The approach to challenging white supremacy is something that my generation is actively reimagining, envisioning what it could look like beyond the politics of respectability in order to be deemed more human.”

Over approximately 20 pages, Boyd-Pates has curated for us a list of essential information, including:

• A timeline of black history milestones
• Influential speeches
• Books and articles
• A music playlist
• Films
• Guidelines for being an ally

You can download Boyd-Pates’ Freedom Papers toolkit here and visit his website to subscribe to his newsletter for more of his work.