Black History Month
February’s Black History Month is the perfect time to investigate the tremendous contributions that African Americans have made to the history and cultural development of the United States. In this feature, teachers, parents, and students will be introduced to a few of the most influential voices and the most memorable images from African American history, art, and literature.
Slavery and Abolitionism
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. Among 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 that 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, his release from bondage, and his advocacy of abolition. 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 that are designed to help students investigate the rhetorical devices used by Douglass while placing his writing in their historical context. Finally, teachers and 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 Images of African Americans from the 19th Century.
- 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.
Ask students why they think that Mr. Auld believed that knowledge would make it impossible to keep a man as a slave? Do they think that knowing how to read and write made Douglass “discontented and unhappy”? Ask them to explain their answers.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass urged African American men to enlist in the army to support the Union. The first regiment of these men recruited in the North, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Infantry was commanded by Robert Shaw. The dramatic story of this regiment was told in the movie Glory and can be studied through the National Park Service website Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th regiment. Students will be fascinated to learn about the bronze public monument to these brave and loyal soldiers created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial which is included among the images in Picturing America as no. 10-A.
The period after the Civil War, called Reconstruction, began with the African Americans’ high hopes that the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments would provide them with the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship and the “equal protection of the laws.” Despite the failure of the federal government to implement these amendments, black people seized the opportunity created by the end of slavery to establish as much independence as possible in their working lives, consolidate their families and communities, and stake a claim to equal citizenship.
African Americans were passionate about getting an education yet they faced enormous challenges in doing so. In his powerful autobiography, Booker T. Washington told the story of his and his people’s struggle in his two-volume autobiography Up From Slavery. Students can learn about Booker T. Washington’s life and legacy through the new EDSITEment lesson on contemporary sculptor Martin Puryear and his sculpture Ladder for Booker T. Washington. (Background information on the sculpture is available at on the Picturing America website as no. 20-B). The lesson uses Puryear’s work to explore Washington’s career and achievement, then considers the ladder as a metaphor for an individual’s or a group’s struggle to overcome obstacles toward the achievement of a goal.
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were certainly not the only persons who attempted to articulate to the African American experience. The history of American culture is filled with the voices of African American writers and artists, many of whom took their own local communities, from New York to New Orleans, as their subjects. One of the most important events in twentieth-century African American history was the migration of African Americans out of the rural South to the great northern cities. This exodus was gathering strength at the time of World War I and fundamentally altered the ethnic mix of New York City and industrial centers such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Students can learn more about this story through the Migration Series paintings of Jacob Lawrence, which is available through the Phillips Collection feature. One of these panels, No. 57, is included in the National Endowment for the Humanities Picturing America initiative as no.17-A.
Beginning in the 1920s, after many years of slow gestation, African American literature, music, and art burst forth 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 among the group of artists that made that community a hotbed of artistic expression. Teachers and 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 not only reflected the daily reality of African American life, but also the cadences and sounds of African American communities like Harlem in their work. 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. Brown’s “Riverbank Blues” and as well as poems by other black writers exemplify a growing interest in capturing and recording contemporary life in African American communities as it was actually lived.
Zora Neale Hurston is another writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who was had a sharp ear for the vernacular. Not only was Hurston a novelist, a short story writer, and an essayist, but she was also a trained ethnographer, having studied under 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. Teachers and 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 explodes 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 in the The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You an EDSITEment lesson plan for 6-8 grade students.
The Harlem Renaissance came in with the economic boom of the post-World War I decade, and the artists and writers who had stoked the creative fire of the movement were, like most of America’s and the world’s population, hit hard by the Great Depression. Although the Harlem Renaissance struggled to get by, the momentum that drove it through the 1920s slowed and eventually faded away as the world moved toward another world war. Teachers and students can investigate this important period and the Harlem community of the 1920s in images with the online exhibits produced by the EDSITEment-reviewed web resource Digital Schomburg, which has been created by the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture in collaboration with the New York Public Library.
Ask students:
- 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?
The Civil Rights Era
Students will surely be familiar with the name Martin Luther King, and will most likely have read or have heard Dr. King’s speech that is available from the EDSITEment-reviewed web resource, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research & Education Institute. 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. Study the long train of marchers in one of the greatest images of this movement. Photographer James Karales created this photograph during the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965 for Look magazine. The image is included in the Picturing America portfolio as no. 19-B. Ask students to imagine what it was like to travel on foot for four days, trudging the 54 miles between these two cities in the damp, early March weather.
King 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. 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 are 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 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 grade lesson plan Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Power of Nonviolence. Finally, high school students have the opportunity to learn about the 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 grade 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!"
Ask students:
- 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?
The optimism generated by Dr. King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movements and its successful culmination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was echoed in the work of the African American artists who were asserting their creative identities on the American scene. Romare Bearden, one of the first artists to depict popular black culture from an African American point of view, is a noteworthy example. Ask students to examine his collage The Dove, another of the images (no. 17-B) from Picturing America, as the embodiment of this optimism. Ask them to consider what Bearden is saying about the role of the black artist and the black urban community in this tumultuous period.
Conclusion
Parents and educators might wish to introduce the ideas of this feature using short activities that ask students to think about African American history and literature.
1. Talking about Slavery
Frederick Douglass’ autobiography is among the most well known of the slave narratives; however, it is certainly not the only such telling of life under the yoke of slavery. Teachers and 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 website. 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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