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Explore Maya Angelou’s life and legacy by creating a customized Learning Plan that gives your students the opportunity to closely read her work and engage with her words through a social justice lens.

Youth activists co-create a scalable anti-racist curriculum with an emphasis on action to aid in the national fight for justice.

Several stacks of fake dollar bills enclosed in a Plexiglas case sit at the center of an exhibit entitled “RACE: Are We So Different?” at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. One stack towers over the others. This teetering pile of bills represents the average net worth of “white” people’s assets in relation to those of other racialized groups based upon data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau from 1997 to 2000. While the “Asian” stack is almost as high, the “black” stack can hardly be called a stack at all; the “Latino” stack is almost as low.

I’m constantly struck by the memory of my first time in a jail. It was during a tour as a part of SPLC’s efforts to monitor the conditions of detention facilities. I recall being shocked at how young some of the people looked. When I stepped into the first cellblock, I muttered a prayer. In front of me stood rows and rows of black men. I was sick to my stomach; so many of them looked like they could be my cousins, uncles and other loved ones.

The United States Justice Department recently struck a blow against bullying behavior. Officials there reversed a decade-old policy and asked to intervene in a harassment suit brought by a gay youth.

Maya Angelou was an activist up until the very end of her life: visible, accessible, present to the people to whom her work and her message of hope meant the most.