Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, With Documents, Updated for the AP® Course

Alysha Butler is a 24-year veteran social studies teacher who currently teaches AP® African American Studies and U.S. History for District of Columbia Public Schools. She has also served on the Development Committee for the AP® African American Studies course. As a Senior Program Manager for Inclusive Social Studies Curriculum for the Digital Team at GBH, she has developed and written online resources for PBS LearningMedia’s History and Civics Collections. She graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a B.A. and M.A. in History with a special focus on African American women during Reconstruction. She was awarded the 2024 Margaret Sue Copenhaver Contribution to Education Award, recognized as the 2019 History Teacher of the Year by the Daughters of the American Revolution for the District of Columbia, and was 2019 Gilder Lehrman National History Teacher of the Year for her innovative lessons and civics-based student projects. In 2019 she was a D.C. Community Cornerstone Awardee, and in 2020 she became the first teacher ever appointed to the Gilder Lehrman Board of Trustees. She has presented at the National Council for Social Studies Convention, the CCSSO Social Studies Collaborative, and the Middle States Council of Social Studies Convention. Her most recent published essays include “Why My Students Were Not Surprised on January 6th” and “Avoiding the Trap of Whitewashing the Founding Era: Teaching Black Liberation during the American Revolution.” She is also author of the chapter “Giving Honor and Teaching History in Life and Death: Teaching History and Civic Duty with the Preservation of Black Cemeteries” in Bringing Teachers to the History Museum: A Guide to Facilitating Teacher Professional Development (Rowman & Littlefield) and “Insurrection Nation” in Hot Button: Teaching Sensitive Social Studies Content (The Book House).

Rachel Williams-Giordano is a high school social science teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds M.A.T. and M.Ed. degrees from Emmanuel College and a B.S. in Political Science from Georgia Southern University. Rachel has over 15 years of experience in the classroom and was a Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year finalist in 2023. She currently teaches AP® United States History, AP® United States Government and Politics, and AP® African American Studies, which she launched at Cambridge Rindge Latin School during its pilot phase. She has also served as a Reader and Question Leader for the AP® African American Studies Exam as well as a Reader for the AP® United States Government and Politics Exam. In addition to her work in the classroom, Rachel has mentored student teachers from Harvard University and Brandeis University, served as co-chair for the Faculty Advisory Committee at her school, and currently serves as a union representative. In her previous teaching roles at Boston Collegiate Charter School, Rachel developed a new curriculum for her ninth-grade Global Studies course and led the ninth-grade teaching team at Boston Collegiate Charter School. After five years at Boston Collegiate, Rachel was offered a principal fellowship with UP Education, which led to her accepting a role as Principal of Match Charter School, where she led instructional programming and supervised staff and students. As the lead APSI consultant nationally for the AP® African American Studies course since 2022, she facilitates the training of both new and experienced teachers nationwide.

Deborah Gray White (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago) is Emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of many works including Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994; Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804–1860; Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; and the edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history. She is a recipient of the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Living Legacy Award. As co-editor of the three-volume Scarlet and Black series, White led the investigation of the three-century history of Native Americans and African Americans at Rutgers University.

Mia Bay (Ph.D., Yale University) is the Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include the Bancroft Prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells; The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925; and the edited volume Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. She is a recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship and the National Humanities Center Fellowship. An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the executive board of the Society of American Historians, serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of African American History, Modern Intellectual History, and the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives blog, and is on the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Currently, she is at work on a study of African American views on Thomas Jefferson.

Waldo E. Martin Jr. is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley. The principal focus of his scholarship and teaching is the Modern African American Freedom Struggle. With Joshua Bloom, he co-authored Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013, rev. 2016). With Jetta Grace Martin and Joshua Bloom, he coauthored a Young Adult history of the party: Freedom! The Story of the Black Panther Party (Levine Querido, 2022). The second edition of his Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents was published in 2020. His first book, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1985. His book of essays No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America came out in 2005. With Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay, he is the coauthor of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (2017). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he is the coeditor of Civil Rights in the US: An Encyclopedia (2 vols., 2000). His current book project is A Change Is Gonna Come, an analysis of the cultural politics of the modern African American freedom struggle.