About This Lesson
This lesson is intended to help guide students through a historical and contemporary
examination of citizenship schools and civic education. During the civil rights era,
citizenship schools were an integral part of the effort to educate African Americans about
the rights that they had as United States citizens so that they could vigorously assert these
rights in the fight against segregation. Presently, citizenship education tends to be
associated with efforts to prepare noncitizens to meet the requirements for becoming
naturalized U.S. citizens
