Detroit Under Fire: Exploring the history of police violence in Detroit
Instructional materials designed to complement Detroit Under Fire, a website and digital archive focused on the history of community organizing to challenge police violence in Detroit.
Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era is a public history exhibit created by the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, an initiative of the University of Michigan Department of History and a component of the U-M Carceral State Project's Documenting Criminalization and Confinement initiative. Detroit Under Fire has a wide range of media and resources about police violence in Detroit from 1957-1973. Curriculum resources include a Teaching Guide overview with planning guide that teachers can use to develop their own inquiry projects using these resources. Additional resources include an Instructional Materials document that provides more detailed ideas for instruction including:
- a lesson that can be used to build classroom norms for constructive conversations around race;
- an idea for building background knowledge along with links to additional resources;
- and a detailed teacher’s guide for use and implementation of a StoryMap Student Reading Guide (in a separate document) for three StoryMaps that supplement the website. These three story maps condense and organize a more limited set of resources about police violence in Detroit for 1957-1963, 1964-1966, and 1967.
