Freedom Fighters Freedom Writers

Freedom Fighters, Freedom Writers is a semester-long curriculum for grades 7-12 that teaches the United States Colored Troops through the documents they left behind.

Students work with archival-quality primary sources: soldier letters in original handwriting, pension records, recruitment flyers from the National Archives, census data, and rare photographs including images taken by the author. They analyze these sources using OPTIC and SOAPSTone - the same frameworks historians use.

The instructional design is explicit and scaffolded. Before writing their own Civil War-era letter, students learn the five parts of 19th-century correspondence, then identify each part in a real soldier's letter, then draft. Before analyzing census data, they receive clear guidance on calculating percentages from population figures.

Across four modules and sixteen lessons, students meet real soldiers like Sergeant Tillman Valentine, whose letters to his wife reveal duty, danger, and family love and Private Alonzo Reed, whose signatures across two years of letters show his growing literacy and confidence in the field.

The final module opens into student-driven research: local USCT history, family genealogy, poetry and music as resistance, Civil War medicine, and the wartime mail system.

Whether you're homeschooling, afterschooling, or teaching in a classroom, this curriculum treats students as capable historians - and treats Black soldiers as the thinkers, writers, and freedom fighters they were.