Alexandria Library Sit-in Goes National

The American Association of School Librarians has accepted our presentation on how teachers and librarians in Virginia have collaborated to include historic little-known events in history and language arts instruction. AASL’s national conference will be in Phoenix in November 2017.

Linda Mitchell, librarian at Stonewall Middle School in Manassas, VA, and I will repeat a version of the presentation we did at the Virginia Association of School Librarians conference last fall in which I told the story of the sit-in and Tucker’s work desegregating public schools and Linda explained stations students used to learn about civil rights history. We’ll also share how 7th graders at Davis Middle School in Hampton have used Samuel Wilbert Tucker: The Story of a Civil Rights Trailblazer and the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-in  for the last three years to compare violent and nonviolent protests, explore effective ways to resolve conflict and learn how ordinary people have the power to overcome obstacles and change their world.