Free Printable Social Studies Reading Worksheets (Grades 3-4)

In 1955, buses in Montgomery, Alabama were segregated. Black riders paid the same fare but had to sit at the back. If the front filled up, they had to give up their seats.

On December 1, a woman named Rosa Parks was asked to stand up so a white passenger could sit. She said no. She was arrested.

People sometimes say she refused because her feet were tired. Parks wrote later that this was not true. She was the secretary of her local civil rights group and had worked on cases like this for years. She was tired, she said, of giving in.

Four days later, Black riders in Montgomery stopped using the buses. They walked. They shared cars. Many walked several miles each way to work.

The boycott lasted 381 days. Most bus riders in the city were Black, so the bus company lost most of its money. In November 1956 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was against the Constitution.

1Before the Civil War, millions of people were enslaved in the southern United States. Some escaped north. The network of people who helped them was called the Underground Railroad.

2It was neither underground nor a railroad. It was a chain of hiding places and guides, and it borrowed railroad words to keep its meaning hidden. A safe house was a station. A guide was a conductor. The people traveling were passengers.

3Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849. She could have stayed safe in the north. Instead she went back, again and again, to lead others out. Historians estimate she made about thirteen trips and guided roughly seventy people to freedom.

4The danger was real and it grew. A law passed in 1850 required officials in free states to help capture escaped people and return them. After that, safety often meant reaching Canada, not just crossing into a free state.

5Tubman was never caught, and neither was anyone she guided. During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army as a scout and a spy.

1In 1863 two companies began building a railroad across the United States. One started in the east and built west. The other started in California and built east. They would meet somewhere in the middle.

2The crew building east from California faced the Sierra Nevada mountains almost immediately. Tunnels had to be cut through solid granite. In one winter the crews worked through snowdrifts deep enough to bury the camps.

3That company hired thousands of workers from China. By the peak of construction they were the large majority of its workforce. They were paid less than white workers and, at first, were not given food or housing. In 1867 thousands of them went on strike over pay and hours.

4The two tracks met at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869. A ceremony was held and a famous photograph was taken. Almost none of the Chinese workers appear in it.

5The journey from New York to San Francisco had taken months. Now it took about a week.

In 1860 a letter from Missouri to California took about three weeks. It went by ship or by wagon. People wanted it faster.

So a company started the Pony Express. A rider carried the mail on horseback. He rode hard for about seventy-five miles. Then a fresh rider took the bag and kept going.

The horses changed even more often, about every fifteen miles. A tired horse was a slow horse, so no horse ran far.

The route was nearly two thousand miles long. The mail crossed it in about ten days. That was twice as fast as anything before it.

The Pony Express lasted only eighteen months. In October 1861 a telegraph line reached all the way to California. A message could now cross the country in minutes. Two days later, the Pony Express shut down.