Immigration

Grassroots organizing of parents and students in Oakland and around the country provides a vital counterbalance to the destabilizing influence of disinvestment and privatization on school systems and communities. Across the country, organizing is an essential tool for elevating the voices of low-income communities and communities of color in the conversation about public education. As Dr. Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA, says in The Long View, ‘The most important thing we have to learn is that the community can’t just leave decision-making up to the Board and the Superintendent. The public’s role is critical, and in order for the public to be heard, the public has to be organized.”

Delve into the writings of Mark Twain, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin in this half-hour video from the American Passages series. American culture was changing rapidly in the post-Civil War era: new technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad bound the continent together, postwar racial tensions brought the issue of the "color line" to the forefront of American consciousness, and a new commitment to realistic representation transformed literary style. Writers responded to these cultural developments by producing texts that paid close attention to the specifics of people and place in particular regions of the country, evoking the distinctive culture of areas of America that had not been previously represented.

Lean about Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance through the poetry of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes in this half-hour video from American Passages. This video focuses on the effects of the Great Migration, urbanization, the rapid technological change of ordinary life, and racial prejudice. Centering on Hughes, Williams, and Eliot, the film shows how different strands of modernism developed and influenced one another.