2/26/19
A high school government class wanted to help solve civil rights crimes. So they drafted a bill that is now law
Breaking Newstags: civil rights, education, political history, law, public records
They weren't born when the civil rights movement ended. Even many of their parents weren't alive then.
And yet a high school class in Hightstown, New Jersey, has found an impressive way to shed light on unsolved civil rights crimes from the 1950s and '60s.
The AP class, studying US government, drafted a bill that would create a board to review, declassify, and release documents related to such cases.
Then they went one step further.
The students from Hightstown High School went to Washington, walked the halls of Senate office buildings and passed out folders with policy research and information about their bill, said former student Joshua Fayer.
Their efforts caught the attention of Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, who introduced the bill -- modeled after the JFK Assassination Records Act -- in March 2017.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel