African-American History Month
The nation mourns the passing of Coretta Scott King, a civil rights leader who carried on the legacy of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., after his assassination in 1968. For more information, a biography, and photos of this important American, visit the EDSITEment-reviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project.
February’s African-American History Month is the perfect time to investigate the tremendous contributions that African-Americans have made to the United States’ history and the development. In this feature, teachers, parents, and students will be introduced to a few of the most influential voices from African-American history and literature.
Voices from the Past
The beginning of African-American history is intricately intertwined with the history of slavery in the Americas. When we speak of the history of slavery in the United States, however, the individual identities of the men, women and children who were slaves are often not delineated. The historical record keeping processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seldom devoted space towards the collection of slaves’ stories, experiences, and family histories. Furthermore, slaves were not often educated, and teaching a slave to read and write was illegal in many places, which hindered the ability of the slave community to write its own history.
Despite this there are a number of primary sources for learning more about the lives of African-Americans who lived under slavery. Amongst the most famous first hand accounts of slave life in America are the writings of Frederick Douglass, in particular his 1845 publication the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, which is available in digital form from the EDSITEment reviewed web resource The American Memory Project. Douglass’ account describes in detail what the life of a slave in early nineteenth century America consisted of- descriptions which highlight the brutality and the humiliation inherent in the practice. His writings also provide a moving and eloquent argument for an end to the South’s “peculiar institution” in the land of liberty.
Students can learn through Douglass’ biography about his struggle to gain an education, despite the obstacles set in place by his master, as well as his pursuit of freedom and a release from bondage. Teachers and parents may want to visit the EDSITEment curriculum unit From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography. This unit consists of three lesson plans which are designed to help students investigate the rhetorical devices used by Douglass while placing his writing in their historical context. Finally, you and your students can gain a more complete perspective on the time period and the lives of African-Americans in the nineteenth century by visiting the online exhibition by the EDSITEment reviewed web resource, The Schomburg Center’s Digital Schomburg.
- At one point early in Douglass’ narrative he quotes Mr. Auld on the question of teaching slaves to read and write:
It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.
Why do you think that Mr. Auld believes that knowledge would make it impossible to keep a man as a slave? Do you think that knowing how to read and write made Douglass “discontented and unhappy”? Explain your answers.
Voices on the Page
Frederick Douglass was certainly not the only person to put the African-American experience into prose. The history of American literature is filled with the voices of African-American writers, many of whom took their own local communities, from New York to New Orleans as their subject. After many years of slow gestation, African-American literature, music, and art burst forth beginning in the 1920s during a period known as the Harlem Renaissance. Not all writers, musicians and artists associated with the cultural rebirth (renaissance is a French word that literally means “rebirth”) were based in Harlem throughout the period, but most spent at least some period living amongst the “bumper crop of artists” that made Harlem a hotbed of artistic expression. You and your students can learn more about some of the poets who were part of the Harlem Renaissance from the EDSITEment reviewed web site The Academy of American Poets.
Many of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance reflected in their work not only the daily reality of African-American life, but the cadences and sounds of African-American communities like Harlem. This included capturing the colloquial construction of language that brought to life the writing of poets like Sterling Brown, whose poem Riverbank Blues is available from The Academy of American Poets. Poems such as Brown’s “Riverbank Blues” were part of a growing interest in capturing and recording contemporary life in African-American communities as they were.
Another writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who was also known for her sharp ear for the vernacular is Zora Neale Hurston. Not only was Hurston a novelist, a short story writer, and an essayist, but she was also a trained ethnographer, having studied under the tutelage of the famous anthropologist, Franz Boas, at Columbia University in New York City. She is the author of numerous short stories, an autobiography, and a number of novels, including her most renowned work, the 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. You and your students can learn more about Hurston’s writing, as well as her ethnographic research on African-American folklore, in the EDSITEment lesson plan, Folklore in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
One of the most celebrated and beloved poets of the twentieth century, and an artist who was an integral member of the Harlem Renaissance, is the writer Langston Hughes. In a recent survey by The Academy of American Poets Hughes was voted America’s favorite poet. Hughes is best known for his vivid depictions of African-American life in America from the 1920s of his youth, through to his death in the late 1960s.
According to The Academy of American Poets’ brief biography of Hughes, he “wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.” His poems are often built on a foundation of emotion, which sometimes bursts forth like the anger in his well known work, I, Too, Sing America:
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Students and teachers can learn more about the life and the work of Langston Hughes with the The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You EDSITEment lesson plan for 6-8 students.
Harlem and the members of the Harlem Renaissance, which came in with the economic boom of the post World War I decade were, like the rest of the country and most of the world, hit hard by the Great Depression. The artists and writers who had been the movement’s engine struggled to get by. The movement slowed and eventually petered out as the world moved toward another world war. You and your students can investigate the period and the place in images with the online exhibits created by the EDSITEment-reviewed web resource Digital Schomburg, created by the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture in collaboration with the New York Public Library,
- Why do you think many of the members of the Harlem Renaissance sought to recreate the sound of the African-American vernacular in their writing?
- Who do you think was the audience for the works of writers like Hughes, Hurston, and Sterling?
Voices Raised
Students will surely be familiar with the name Martin Luther King, and will most likely have read or have heard Dr. King’s speech, which is available from the EDSITEment reviewed web resource, Great American Speeches. Dr. King is today one of the most well-known faces and voices of the Civil Rights Movement, and the push for racial equality that is so key to understanding the history of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. He was known as a great orator, and his speeches were created with a masterful rhetorical style that combined Biblical references with those drawn directly from America’s history. And with words that call to mind Langston Hughes’ poem, I, Too, Sing America. Dr. King declared that the time had come for action. The tomorrow of Hughes’ poem was today:
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of "now." This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
EDSITEment has resources for students of all ages on Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. K-2 students will be introduced to the Civil Rights Movement and to the "I Have a Dream" speech with the lesson plan Dr. King’s Dream. Older primary school students can engage with the subject of the late Dr. King with the 3-5 lesson plan Let Freedom Ring: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School students will be able to investigate the deep links between Dr. King’s pursuit of change through nonviolent means and the successful campaign by Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi to free India from British colonial rule in the 6-8 lesson plan Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Power of Nonviolence. Finally, high school students will have the opportunity to learn about tthe civil rights movement by visiting the places where the battles of the Civil Rights Movement took place- such as in the South’s public school systems as they were forced to desegregate- with the 9-12 lesson plan, Ordinary People, Ordinary Places: The Civil Rights Movement.
Dr. King’s words still resonate today as one of the most eloquent calls for justice ever uttered:
Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring, and when this happens...when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
- Why do you think school desegregation was such an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement?
- What was Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream? Has it been realized?
Conclusion
Parents and educators might wish to introduce the ideas of this feature using short activities which ask students to think about African-American history and literature.
1. Talking about Slavery
Frederick Douglass’ autobiography is among the most well known slave narratives, however, it is certainly not the only such telling of life under the yoke of slavery. You and your students can investigate some of these stories by utilizing the Voices from the Days of Slavery page from the EDSITEment reviewed web resource The American Memory Project.
Have students listen to or read one of the seven interviews that are available from the Voices from the Days of Slavery web site. Have students take notes while they listen to the interviews. Not every interviewee will have discussed all of these topics, but students should answer all of the following questions which apply to the interview they heard:
- How does the person interviewed describe their life as a slave?
- What does he recall about the person or people who owned them?
- How was he treated as a slave?
- What does he recall about the Civil War?
- How did he learn that slavery had ended?
- How did his life change after the end of slavery?
- What has their life been like in the twentieth century?
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