The Memphis 13 Foundation is deeply committed to educating the public about the children who desegregated Memphis schools and the broader history of the Civil Rights Movement in our city. We believe that understanding our past is vital for building a more just future, so we offer community/classroom resources for educators, students, families, and community members who want to learn from this history and carry it forward.

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Our Memphis 13 curriculum unit, led by Dr. Gina English Tillis, Dr. Anna Falkner, and Dr. Crystal Cook, was co-developed with members of The Memphis 13, University of Memphis faculty, Memphis Shelby County Schools teachers and instructional coaches, and civil rights educators. It features classroom activities, primary sources, oral history projects, and critical discussion prompts that help students explore themes of social justice, equity, inclusion, and children’s leadership in civil rights struggles. Lesson plans are tailored for multiple grade levels and provide clear, day-by-day guidance, multimedia materials, and reflective exercises that support active participation, critical thinking, and connections to students’ own schools and neighborhoods.

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Our Drivers

• Collectively developed for our community, by our community.

• Centers children in our curriculum as advocates for social justice, equity, and inclusion.

• Contextualizes the struggle for civil rights as socio-historically experienced by members of our community.

• Challenges students to engage in critical historical thinking for a more meaningful engagement with history, humanities, civics, and social studies.

• Critically interrogates lived and learned schooling experiences to take informed action.

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Together, we have reached thousands of Memphis educators and students through district curriculum adoption, workshops, community screenings, and local media coverage. The partnership’s work has been featured in Chalkbeat (Testino, 2024) and Education Week (Sparks, 2024) as a national model for how oral history can help educators engage students with complex and contested history. We have also published a public archive on the sociopolitical history of Black education in Memphis (Tillis, 2023), and essays on community-created curriculum (Falkner & Tillis, 2025) and on leveraging community funds of knowledge to resist curricula censorship and erasure (Tillis & Falkner, in press).

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