Labor history lessons, rally resources, books, and more.
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Coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.
Take Action This May Day
While workers around the globe commemorate May Day, here it has been pushed to the margins of public memory. But this year, the labor movement is challenging that organized forgetting.
Across the country, people are planning mass May Day actions to revive the holiday’s roots in collective struggle — and to confront the growing power of billionaires, authoritarian politics, and attacks on public education and democratic rights.
By Ricardo Levins Morales. Click to order poster. Please do not reprint without permission of artist.
This moment is part of a broader movement — building on the legacy of labor organizing, the immigrant rights movement, and the uprisings for Black lives, and echoing campaigns like No Kings — pushing back against fascism, corporate control, and the censorship of history itself. Educators have a crucial role to play: not only by teaching the truth about May Day, but by joining and supporting the organizing efforts unfolding in their communities.
When students learn about May Day, they learn that solidarity can cross lines of race, language, and nationality. They learn that injustice can be confronted. And they learn that ordinary people have always fought to transform their conditions — and that they can, too.
Below are some ways educators, students, and communities can get involved.
Bring the history of May Day into your classroom or community. Teach our labor historylessons, organize a lunchtime teach-in, or invite students to research and present on labor struggles past and present.
Bring messages and materials to May Day Events. We need to reach as many people as possible with information about the chilling effect of censorship laws and how they threaten any chance of an informed and engaged democracy.
There are lots of ways to make your voice heard, including:
Get educators together for a monthly reading circle on Teachers Unions and Social Justice,an anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism.
The articles describe the growing movementto forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.
Then put your ideas into practice with collective action to transform your union.
Be sure that your classroom or school library includes pre-K–12 titles on labor history and labor organizing. Here is a list of recommended titles from Teaching for Change’s Social Justice Books.
The Zinn Education Project hosts the Prentiss Charney Fellowship to support a cohort of people’s history educator leaders to study, learn, and organize. Today we celebrate fellow Nicolle Fefferman.
Nicolle is developing a role play based on the 1990 Battle of Century City, a monumental janitors’ strike in Los Angeles. The lesson focuses on three key aspects of this history:
The solidarity built among Black, U.S.-born workers and their Latin American, undocumented immigrant co-workers
The decision to return to the streets after the L.A. Police Department’s brutal beatings of workers and allies
A contract that addressed injustices created by multinational corporations
We are lucky to teach, learn, and organize alongside Nicolle and all the Prentiss Charney Fellows. Consider a donation to continue and expand the fellowship in memory of education activist and union leader Michael Charney and leading Ohio education lawmaker, C. J. Prentiss.
Events
Check out these events hosted by the Zinn Education Project and our coordinating organizations (Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change). All events are online unless noted otherwise.
Rediker will explore the many enslaved people who escaped the horrors of bondage in the antebellum South not by land, but by sea.
ASL interpretation and professional development certificates provided.
On Monday, May 11, Jesse Hagopian, Teaching for Black Lives co-editor and Rethinking Schools editor, will facilitate a 45-minute informational session for educators interested in forming a Teaching for Black Lives study group in their school, district, or statewide.
Join us to learn about the benefits and logistics. There will be time to ask questions and meet other educators in small groups. Learn more and register.
Join Rethinking Schools on Thursday, May 14, for a conversation on how teacher unions are leading the fight against fascism and ICE in their communities and schools. In this webinar, we will learn, celebrate, and amplify the lessons of the people heroically fighting back against ICE occupation — from Chicago to Los Angeles to Minneapolis.
From the classroom to the streets, we need to defend our students and together learn the most effective ways to kick ICE out of our schools and communities.
Join us for a Media Workshop onThursday, May 21.
This is a participatory and informative workshop on effective media strategies — with time to practice responding to Teach Truth FAQs and American Revolution FAQs in small groups. Facilitated by Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian. Learn more and register.
Teachers are under attack for teaching truthfully about U.S. history. Please donate so we can continue to offer free people’s history lessons and resources, and defend teachers’ right to use them.
