NCSS Conference Speakers Highlight Music & History, Native Americans, and the Right to Protest

Racial Justice and Reform: How Change Happens

Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, will address the 96th NCSS Annual Conference being held December 2-4, 2016, in Washington, D.C. The book was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice (EJI) Initiative and a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

At the EJI website, www.eji.org/resources, teachers will find important resource on issues concerning the U.S. justice system and its dysfunctions: “A History of Racial Injustice: An Online Timeline” (you can browse expanded content and images from EJI’s award-winning calendars); “The Alabama Death Row Map” (an Interactive map shows current death sentences in Alabama); and numerous videos in which Stevenson discusses the workings of America’s criminal justice system and how we might initiate reforms.

A MacArthur fellow, Stevenson has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. He has successfully argued several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and in 2012 won a historic ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 and younger are unconstitutional. He also recently served on President Obama's task force on 21st-century policing.

Terrence Roberts will address the upcoming 2016 NCSS Annual Conference. In 1957, Roberts joined eight other teenagers to become one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the first black students to attend a formerly segregated public high school—Central High—in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Roberts’ first book, Lessons from Little Rock, is a memoir describing his experiences that year standing up to daily oppression in all its forms, from nagging insults to sudden life-threatening violence. Simple, Not Easy: Reflections on Community, Social Responsibility and Tolerance consists of essays that guide the reader toward more assertive, socially responsible actions in civic life today.

Roberts has served as director of mental health at St. Helena Hospital and Health Center in California, assistant dean in the UCLA School of Social Welfare, and co-chair of the Master of Arts in Psychology program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Roberts is now CEO of Terrence Roberts Consulting, a management consultant firm devoted to fair and equitable practices in business and industry. He speaks from a vantage of having survived, as a youth, a school year of brutal bullying from his peers, then going on to a successful career as an educator, mental health administrator, and advocate for racial justice.

Warren Zanes, a New York Times bestselling author and producer of the Oscar-winning documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, will address the 96th NCSS Annual Conference, being held in Washington D.C., December 2-4, 2016.

This November, the website “Rock and Roll: An American Story” (teachrock.org), which has been endorsed by NCSS, will be featuring new lessons that support the much-anticipated PBS series Soundbreaking. Zanes, a producer of the series, will be exploring some of the ways in which it provides unique points of entry for the social studies teacher and his or her students.

Initiated by Beatles producer George Martin, Soundbreaking is an eight-part series, broadcast this November on most PBS stations, that looks at the technology behind such legendary recordings as those made by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Run-DMC, Aretha Franklin, and more. At the conference, Zanes will highlight connections between music technologies, those of both the creators and the consumers, and broader social studies themes, including technology and modern life, the African-American voice on record and the civil rights era, and the many ways that popular recordings have both reflected and changed American identity.

Zanes’s most recent book, Petty: The Biography, was released in 2015 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. He is currently the executive director of Steven Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular music, offering rich educational materials that help middle and high school students and teachers make connections between the music they love and the worlds from which that music emerged.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who is also addressing the Conference, has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. She grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a white tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. After receiving her Ph.D. in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book, The Great Sioux Nation, was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at UN Headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico and, most recently, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.

Mary Beth Tinker grew up in Iowa, where her father was a Methodist minister. In 1965, saddened by news of the Vietnam War, Tinker and other students wore black armbands to school to mourn the dead and call for a Christmas truce. For that action, they were suspended. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the suspension in court, leading to the landmark 1969 Supreme Court ruling for students' rights in Tinker v. Des Moines that neither teachers nor students "shed their constitutional rights . . . at the schoolhouse gate." The Tinker ruling has been cited in more than 6,000 subsequent cases involving students' rights.

Tinker, who will address the NCSS Annual Conference, lives in Washington, D.C., but travels the country on a "Tinker Tour" to promote civic education, student journalism, youth rights, and youth voices. She is a registered nurse with Master's degrees in nursing and public health.