A New Generation Confronts Racism’s Legacy

Young people are teaching the rest of us how to prevent the history of racist violence from repeating itself.

We invite you to meet inspiring students and teachers from the U.S. and Germany who have educated their communities about the local history of racism and anti-Semitism. They show how confronting past injustice can inspire and mobilize people to build a better, more just future.

Panelists

Khari Bowman and Dr. Marilyn Taylor. They helped to lead a community education project that focused on the lynching in 1917 of Ell Persons, an African American man, in Memphis, Tennessee. Students helped to uncover the truth about this lynching, known as one of the most brutal in American history.  

Ms. Bowman, now a student at Bryn Mawr College, was a cofounder of Students Uniting Memphis. In 2017, these high school students from different schools developed a memorial that marked the lynching, and educated the larger community about what happened. Dr. Taylor taught the Facing History and Ourselves elective at Overton High School in Memphis.

Christiane Simon and Sabeth Schmidthals.  At the Theodore-Heuss School in Berlin, they helped organize history projects that taught students how the Holocaust unfolded right near the school. One student-led initiative created a permanent memorial at a nearby train depot, where thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths by the Nazis. 

Ms. Simon was a student leader and Ms. Schmidthals is a teacher at the school, where the majority of the students are from immigrant families, and many have faced discrimination themselves. Ms. Schmidthals helps them develop empathy for Jews during the Nazi era based on their own experience.

Moderator: Marc Skvirsky, Vice President of Special Initiatives, Facing History and Ourselves, which uses the lessons of history to help teachers and their students stand up to bigotry and hate.

Event date: December 9, 2020