Margot Stern Strom, with Facing History and Ourselves, Taught Students Worldwide to Reject Bigotry and Hatred

Born in Chicago on November 10, 1941, Margot Stern was 5 when her family moved to Memphis, where her parents — Lloyd Stern and Fannye Wener Stern, who was known as Fan – ran a furniture store.

“My mother brought priests, poets such as Randall Jarrell, lectures on Shakespeare, and books from college into our home,” Ms. Strom wrote in a history of her nonprofit. “My dad, an author and an artist, clipped and saved articles about people and topics that would inspire his children. He gardened, made scrapbooks about successful women in all professions.”

Fan Stern, who had been a top student at the University of Alabama, was the household’s scholar and guiding light.

Gerald Stern, who was an attorney with the civil rights division of the US Justice Department under then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, said Ms. Strom “was very close to our mother, who led us: This is what you should be doing, this is what you should be reading, this is how you should be feeling.”

The middle child of three siblings, Ms. Strom went to Central High School in Memphis and studied history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree.

While registering for classes with students lined up alphabetically, she met Terry Strom, who was standing next to her. They married in 1964, and he became a renowned researcher in organ transplant immunology.

“To know him was to adore him,” she said for his Globe obituary in 2018.

After college, Ms. Strom initially taught in Skokie, Ill.

“I knew that I did not want to be another link in a conspiracy of silence,” she wrote. “I wanted to honor my students’ potential to confront history in all of its complexity, to cope, and to make a positive difference in their school, community, nation, and the world.”

And in an approach that continued for the rest of her life, “I quickly discovered that although I was officially the teacher, I was learning about adolescents and myself from my students.”

After the Stroms moved to Brookline in 1970, she began teaching eighth-grade language arts and social studies at the Runkle School, and received a master’s from Harvard University in 1977.

In the early 1970s, some Brookline residents asked if the school system taught about the Holocaust.

Troubled by gaps in her own knowledge about the Holocaust, and by memories of how that history wasn’t mentioned when she was young, Ms. Strom and Brookline social studies teacher William Parsons launched Facing History and Ourselves in 1976.

Parsons, who later was chief of staff at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, died in 2016.

For Ms. Strom, “history was not something to be memorized. It was something to be ripped apart and fought with. The complexity was important, and not to be ducked,” said her son, Adam Strom of Brookline.

He worked with his mother for many years at Facing History and is now executive director and cofounder of the Boston nonprofit Re-Imagining Migration, of which Ms. Strom was a founding board member.

As a founder and the guiding force of Facing History for nearly four decades, until stepping down several years ago, Ms. Strom “was both a visionary and an incredible listener,” Adam said. “She got so engaged in everybody’s ideas, whether they were mine or my sister’s or anybody’s at work.”

At work and home with her children and four grandchildren, Ms. Strom “was the most present person in every aspect of what she was doing,” said her daughter, Rachel Fan Stern Strom of Brooklyn.

In addition to her son, daughter, brother, and grandchildren, Ms. Strom leaves her sister, Paula Stern of Washington, D.C., who formerly chaired the US International Trade Commission.

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, March 29, in Temple Israel of Boston.

Working alongside and becoming friends with Ms. Strom “certainly changed the trajectory of my life and my career,” said Minow, who counts herself among those inspired by her friend’s drive, compassion, and ability to guide people of all ages to confront the complex ways bigotry and hatred have been powerful forces in history.

“Margot was always unusual in that she has combined a kind of charm and intellectual curiosity with a kind of nonlinearity,” Minow said. “So she would jump from the most personal to the most historical, and yet you could see the patterns and creativity in her thought.”

Ultimately, Ms. Strom wanted Facing History and Ourselves to spare students far into the future from what she faced as a schoolgirl in Memphis.

“Who influenced my development and readied me to learn and teach about injustices? I will never know the answers to these questions,” she wrote.

“I only know that my teachers did not trust us with the complexities of history — the dogmas were more secure, more comfortable. My classmates and I were betrayed by that silence. We should have been trusted to examine real history and its legacies of prejudice and discrimination and of resilience and courage.”

(Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com)