Freedom City Teaching Pack

A teaching resource for the Martin Luther King Peace Committee

Following on from the success of our last teaching resource pack, we were asked by the Martin Luther King Peace Committee to continue where we’d left off – this time for Freedom City 2017. Freedom City is a programme of events across Newcastle marking the 50th anniversary of Dr King’s visit to Newcastle University to accept an honorary degree in 1967. His impromptu and moving acceptance speech in which he addressed the three ‘urgent and great problems’ of our time – racism, poverty and war – was to prove his last outside the U.S. before he was assassinated in April 1968.

This free resource pack aims to bring the legacy of Dr King alive for a new generation of young people and encourage them to think about the world in which they live and how they can change it for the better. The pack is suitable for Key Stages 2, 3 & 4 and includes lesson plans and worksheets produced by local schoolteachers and staff at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, spanning a range of subjects including History, RE, Geography, English, PHSE, Music, Drama, Art and even Chemistry.

We’ve spent a long time working on this resource pack and we think it looks great. There are a limited number of hard copies available but for the most part it will be distributed as a digital document, allowing teachers to print out any relevant lesson plans and hand-outs individually. We hope that teachers and students alike will find it useful and thought-provoking, and that it provides the ideas and impetus necessary to engage with the topic of civil rights, both in the UK and elsewhere.