Rosa Parks: Countering the Master Narrative

Jesse Hagopian’s African ancestors survived the middle passage and enslavement on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jesse is a high school teacher in Seattle, and the author of the forthcoming book, Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. Jesse an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, a founding member of Black Lives Matter at School, and an organizer for the Zinn Education Project’s “Teaching for Black Lives” campaign. He is the co-editor of the books, Black Lives Matter At School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, Teaching for Black Lives, and the editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing. He is recipient of the national “Secondary Teacher of the Year” award winner from the Academy of Arts and Sciences and “Social Justice Teacher of the Year” award from Seattle Public School’s Department of Racial Equity.

I started teaching social studies in a public school in a suburb of Portland, OR in 2000. I am on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools magazine and currently work as a program manager at the Zinn Education Project. I have written articles and lessons on voting rights, redlining, deportations, COINTELPRO, climate justice, Red Summer, the Cold War, and more. The era of U.S. history I find most inspiring, humbling, and relevant is always the one I am currently unlearning, relearning, and building curriculum around.