Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching: About the Editors

Deborah Menkart
Deborah Menkart is Executive Director of Teaching for Change, a non-profit organization working for social and economic justice by promoting equity-related teaching materials, offering professional development, and increasing parent power in schools. In her 19 years as executive director,Menkart has developed a catalog that over 40,000 educators from across the country rely on for progressive teaching materials and helped launch the school reform collaborative, DC VOICE. She is also the co-editor of Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development.

Menkart’s activism began in junior high school when she joined protests of D.C.’s “taxation without representation” and the “dresses-only” dress code for girls. During the 1970s she lived in San Diego, California, where she worked as a shipyard electrician and was involved in the anti-war, women’s, international solidarity, and labor movements.

Menkart received a B.A. in Human Services and a master’s in curriculum and instruction from George Washington University, but attributes most of her learning to colleagues at Teaching for Change, Rethinking Schools, DC VOICE, and the National Coalition of Education Activists.

Alana D. Murray
Alana D. Murray is an educator-activist who has taught world history on both the middle- and high-school levels in Montgomery County, Maryland public schools for seven years. She has created pilot lessons on African-American history, conducted youth leadership training workshops for several organizations (including the National Youth Leadership Forum) and has provided professional development to educators at conferences across the country. Murray has participated in the National Endowment for the Arts Summer Institute for Teachers and the Fulbright Summer Scholars program in Mexico.

Murray received a B.A. in government and politics from the University of Maryland and a M.A.T. from Brown University. Her work on this project stems from both professional and personal experience. She is the granddaughter of Donald Gaines Murray, whose landmark lawsuit against the University of Maryland Law School successfully desegregated the university. Her grandparents dedicated their careers to an equal education for all children and her parents instilled the critical roles of research and community organizing.

Jenice L. View
Jenice L. View is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. For more than 20 years, View has worked with a variety of educational and non-governmental organizations, including a public charter school, the Just Transition Alliance, Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She has a B.A. from Syracuse University, an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University.

View, a native of one of the last U.S. Colonies (Washington, D.C.), is the proud mother of two daughters, Ava and Leah. She hopes to pass on her inheritance of being a politically aware and socially active woman that she received from many including her paternal grandparents (among the first organizers in the Nation of Islam in the 1940s), and her parents (who have helped form and sustain many local D.C. community institutions).