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Tuskegee Airmen | Yellowhammer History Hunt | PBS LearningMedia

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Meet the famed Tuskegee Airmen in this episode of Yellowhammer History Hunt and find out how they helped the Allies win World War II while fighting racism at home. Learn about how their accomplishments in the air and on the ground led President Harry Truman to desegregate the US military.

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Article: The Story of Black History Month

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Article: The Story of Black History Month

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**PLEASE NOTE**: there is a word considered an outdated way to refer to an African-American person in this article. Please read in advance of using this with students and discuss with your students.

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Every February, the U.S. honors the contributions and sacrifices of African Americans who have helped shape the nation. Black History Month celebrates the rich cultural heritage, triumphs and adversities that are an indelible part of our country's history.

This year's theme, Black Health and Wellness, pays homage to medical scholars and health care providers. The theme is especially timely as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately affected minority communities and placed unique burdens on Black health care professionals.

"There is no American history without African American history," said Sara Clarke Kaplan, executive director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C. The Black experience, she said, is embedded in "everything we think of as 'American history.' "

First, there was Negro History Week

Critics have long argued that Black history should be taught and celebrated year-round, not just during one month each year.

It was Carter G. Woodson, the "father of Black history," who first set out in 1926 to designate a time to promote and educate people about Black history and culture, according to W. Marvin Dulaney. He is a historian and the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History ( ASALH).

Woodson envisioned a weeklong celebration to encourage the coordinated teaching of Black history in public schools. He designated the second week of February as Negro History Week and galvanized fellow historians through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which he founded in 1915. (ASNLH later became ASALH.)

The idea wasn't to place limitations but really to focus and broaden the nation's consciousness.

"Woodson's goal from the very beginning was to make the celebration of Black history in the field of history a 'serious area of study,' " said Albert Broussard, a professor of Afro-American history at Texas A&M University.

The idea eventually grew in acceptance, and by the late 1960s, Negro History Week had evolved into what is now known as Black History Month. Protests around racial injustice, inequality and anti-imperialism that were occurring in many parts of the U.S. were pivotal to the change.

Colleges and universities also began to hold commemorations, with Kent State University being one of the first, according to Kaplan.

Fifty years after the first celebrations, President Gerald R. Ford officially recognized Black History Month during the country's 1976 bicentennial. Ford called upon Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history," History.com reports.

Why February was chosen as Black History Month

February was chosen primarily because the second week of the month coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Lincoln was influential in the emancipation of slaves, and Douglass, a former slave, was a prominent leader in the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery.

Lincoln and Douglass were each born in the second week of February, so it was traditionally a time when African Americans would hold celebrations in honor of emancipation, Kaplan said. (Douglass' exact date of birth wasn't recorded, but he came to celebrate it on Feb. 14.)

Thus, Woodson created Negro History Week around the two birthdays as a way of "commemorating the black past," according to ASALH.

Forty years after Ford formally recognized Black History Month, it was Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, who delivered a message of his own from the White House, a place built by slaves.

"Black History Month shouldn't be treated as though it is somehow separate from our collective American history or somehow just boiled down to a compilation of greatest hits from the March on Washington or from some of our sports heroes," Obama said.

"It's about the lived, shared experience of all African Americans, high and low, famous and obscure, and how those experiences have shaped and challenged and ultimately strengthened America," he continued.

(Canada also commemorates Black History Month in February, while the U.K. and Ireland celebrate it in October.)

There's a new theme every year

ASALH designates a new theme for Black History Month each year, in keeping with the practice Woodson established for Negro History Week.

This year's Black Health and Wellness theme is particularly appropriate, Dulaney said, as the U.S. continues to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

"As [Black people], we have terrible health outcomes, and even the coronavirus has been affecting us disproportionately in terms of those of us who are catching it," Dulaney said.

"There's never been a time where Black people and others should not celebrate Black history," Broussard said. "Given the current racial climate, the racial reckoning that began in wake of George Floyd's murder ... this is an opportunity to learn."

NPR has compiled a list of stories, performances and other content that chronicles the Black American experience for Black History Month. See the whole collection here.

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Here's the story behind Black History Month - and why it's celebrated in February

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Black History Month grew from a weeklong celebration that started nearly 100 years ago - and it's not random that it's in February.

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Mansa Musa, the richest person in history

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Mansa Musa, the richest person in history

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Mansa Musa and his rich legacy have often been written about by chroniclers and travelers. Primary sources are very important tools used to help us learn more about Mansa Musa. Let's explore some writings that give us more insight on the Kingdom of Mali during the 14th century from people who actually lived closer to that time. When reading these sources, please use your imagination to visualize the imagery expressed in the writing, and make inferences about what Mansa Musa was like as a ruler.

In this translated passage from his book "Chronicle of the Seeker" African Muslim scholar Mahmud Kati accounts the events that inspired Mansa Musa to go on his pilgrimage. What were some of those events?

According to author Leo Africanus, Mansa Musa's reign had a lasting impact on Timbuktu. Leo Africanus describes Timbuktu under the reign of successor Mansa Suleyman in pages 824-826 of his book, "The History And Description of Africa And of The Notable Things Therein Contained". You can read the passage from his this ancient text featured on Archive.org. The British Museum also produced beautifully designed "Kingdom Of Mali" follow-up activities for both teachers and students. Visit each of these sites to learn more!

Mali and its king Mansa Musa were elevated to near-legendary status, cemented by their inclusion on the 1375 Catalan Atlas created by cartographer Cresques Abraham. View the Catalan Atlas by visiting The Cresques Project website. Panel III will show a close up image of Mansa Musa on the map and a translation of the description of the image.

Traveler Al-Umari wrote about Mansa Musa's elaborate display of gold during his journey to Cairo on his way to Mecca. View his writings in Boston University's Kingdom of Mali Primary Sources. There are also additional sources about the West African Kingdoms at the BU African Studies Center.

Interested in bringing Mansa Musa's story to life in your classroom? Do that with "Mansa Musa Rules!™" , an arts integration workshop about the great Mansa Musa of the 14th century Mali Empire presented by Teaching Artist Jessica Smith from Culture Kingdom Kids. During this fun and interactive program, students will engage in a hands-on historical reenactment that will dramatize exciting highlights from Mansa Musa's story using creative storytelling, music and movement activities. An action-packed program promises to awaken each participant's creativity. It will also enhance their personal connection to one of Africa's most powerful historical figures. For more information, visit Culture Kingdom Kids.

Mansa Musa was a devout Muslim who provided opportunities for the Islamic culture to enriched the Mali Empire by influencing its architecture, religious traditions, schools and trade routes. Learn more by watching: " Crash Course: Mansa Musa and Islam in Africa"

National Geographic produced a series called " Lord Of The Mines " which explores his impact on the gold industry. Examine and analyze the creative imagery provided by the costuming, set design and actor's characterization of Mansa Musa. Determine what impression this video portrays to viewers about Mansa Musa. Then compare it to the impression that the primary sources provided above convey.

Suggested Reading Materials:
Within the pages of these books, you will learn more about Mansa Musa and Medieval West African kingdoms authored by some of the world's top historians.

Burns, Khephra. Mansa Musa. San Diego: Gullivers Books, 2001. Print

Conrad, David. Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Print

Diouf, Sylviane. Kings and Queens of West Africa. Canada: Grolier Publishing, 2000. Print

Levtzion, Nehemia. Ancient Ghana and Mali. London: Methuen, 1973. Print
Special thanks to Teeshavalone Jenkins, Haile Gerima, Dr. Barbara Brown and David Conrad http://ed.ted.com/lessons/who-is-alexander-von-humboldt-george-mehler - dig

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Mansa Musa, one of the wealthiest people who ever lived - Jessica Smith

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Mansa Musa, the 14th century African king of the Mali Empire, is said to have amassed a fortune that possibly made him one of the wealthiest people who ever lived. Jessica Smith tells the story of how Mansa Musa literally put his empire - and himself - on the map.

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For Black History Month, I created a Google Slides Exhibition Hall: 28 Days of Epic Black History. You can make your free editable copy .

When you enter the gallery, you'll find art hanging on the walls. If you click on the images, you'll find them linked directly to a book on about the person/place/event/topic. Note: You must be logged into your Epic account to access the books directly from the links.

For many of the images, you'll also find YouTube icons located underneath. These are linked to videos that supplement the book. All the videos will open full screen without any ads.

There are 28 images (one for each day of February). Since you're making your own copy, it will be fully editable. You can change the images and links and quotes to tailor it to your needs. Please note: I do not own any of the images in this presentation. I am using them for educational purposes only.

You'll find a celebration of Black athletes, musicians, inventors, scientists, explorers, and activists. Students will see glimpses of the civil rights movement, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the origins of Juneteenth. There are moments of Black joy as well as the struggle for equality.

Please remember to always vet books and videos before sharing them with students. You should decide if these resources are appropriate in terms of both content and attentions span for the age group you work with at school. For example, Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre is appropriate for fifth-grade, but you probably wouldn't read this with kindergarten students. Again, you can edit the slides to tailor them to your grade/class.

I hope that this resource helps you highlight and celebrate Black History in February, but that you teach it all year long.

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For Black History Month, I created a Google Slides Exhibition Hall: 28 Days of Epic Black History. You can make your free editable copy . When you enter the gallery, you'll find art hanging on the walls. If you click on the images, you'll find them linked directly to a book on about the person/place/event/topic.

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8 Black Inventors Who Made Life Easier for Us

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8 Black Inventors Who Made Life Easier for Us

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8 Black Inventors Who Made Daily Life Easier | HISTORY

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Black inventors changed the way we live through their brilliant innovations, from the traffic light to the ironing board.

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Ten Black Scientists that Science Teachers Should Know About

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Ten Black Scientists that Science Teachers Should Know About

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Ten Black Scientists that Science Teachers Should Know About | PBS Education

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Your source for teaching inspiration, blogs, and online professional events.

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Notable African Americans from the 18th-century to the present #4

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Poem: Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class

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Poem: Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class

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"Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class" by Clint Smith

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This animation is part of our series, "There's a Poem for That," which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life's biggest feelings. Check out the full series here: http://bit.ly/TEDEdTheresAPoemForThat

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Interested in learning more about Benjamin Banneker and his life? Visit PBS and reads excerpts from his almanac, a summary of his letters to Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson's response to him. The National Archives of the United States has a transcript of Banneker's actual letter to Thomas Jefferson here. Here is a link to the Library of Congress that displays Jefferson's letter in response to Banneker. Here are more resources about Banneker that include actual photos of Banneker's Almanac.

Retrobituaries: Benjamin Banneker, the African-American Mathematician Who May Have Saved Washington, D.C. has some links to awesome resources about Banneker and discusses the impact he had on our country's history.

For more information on Banneker's Almanac, and his place in the history of the United States, visit this Library of Congress site.

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The exceptional life of Benjamin Banneker - Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua

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Born in 1731 to freed slaves on a farm in Baltimore, Benjamin Banneker was obsessed with math and science. And his appetite for knowledge only grew as he taught himself astronomy, mathematics, engineering, and the study of the natural world. Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua details the numerous accomplishments of Benjamin Banneker.

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YA Books to read during Black History Month

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YA Books to read during Black History Month

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Monroe County Public Library, Indiana - mcpl.info

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Celebrate Black History Month by reading young adult books written by contemporary Black YA authors!

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TED Talks to celebrate Black History Month

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TED Talks to celebrate Black History Month

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13 great TED Talks to celebrate Black History Month

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These fascinating talks offer fresh perspectives on black identity, and fascinating insights on how to finally defeat racism.

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National Museum of African American History Collection

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National Museum of African American History Collection

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Access to many of the exhibits from the National Museum of African American History. Consider downloading their app as well (app name: NMAAHC Mobile Stories). Students can interact with exhibits on their phones or iPads.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Search objects from the museum’s online collection and explore specially curated selections.

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Article: Black History Month - Teaching the Complete History

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Article: Black History Month - Teaching the Complete History

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In 2019, LFJ (then Teaching Tolerance) rolled out a series of articles challenging teachers to go beyond overused and whitewashed historical narratives when observing Black History Month. In 2020, we expanded that call by recommending that teachers widen their exploration of Black lives while also providing historical context so students will make meaningful connections to current issues.

It's not uncommon for educators to focus on slavery, segregation and other forms of oppression during Black History Month.

But only teaching a Black history steeped in trauma and struggle provides a very narrow view of Blackness and perpetuates the false notion of Black people's inferiority. This limited teaching of history can actually be violent.

Stephanie P. Jones, founder of Mapping Racial Trauma in Schools and an assistant professor of education at Grinnell College, examines the severity of such approaches in " Ending Curriculum Violence."

Jones' research shows that, too often, "the transatlantic slave trade and its resulting horror within the American slavery system are essentialized as all Black history itself."

She found that the hard histories of slavery, the civil rights movement and other traumatic events in Black history are frequently mistaught or introduced with little context. Curriculum violence occurs when, as too often happens, educators ask students to act out this history or empathize with enslavers' and other oppressors' perspectives.

As a result, students come away with a warped understanding of how racial inequity manifests today. And repeated instances of curriculum violence contribute to a larger traumatic experience at school-experiences that can affect Black students' mental health.

This doesn't mean you should skip teaching hard histories for fear of inflicting curriculum violence. Instead, you can take care to teach the truth and avoid harm in the process. Jones' article offers guidance on how to accomplish that. One way to start right away is to tell the whole story-not just a small part-of Black history. A first step is to commit to decentering racial trauma during Black History Month.

We will share some of our favorite resources focusing on aspects of Black history and culture that aren't centered on violence, trauma and struggle. We hope you'll use them to help your students recognize the many ways in which Black people have contributed to, inspired and created American culture while also leading the way in advocating for civic participation, inclusion and equitable spaces.

Teach the History of Liberation Movements

The fight for Black liberation has always been an integral part of U.S. history, but too often we don't explore that narrative. Black liberation in the United States is much more than a fight to defeat slavery or Jim Crow. It's also exemplified in efforts to reject anti-Blackness: the refusal of Black people's humanity, dignity, agency and voice. People perpetuate anti-Blackness in the degradation of Black aesthetics, denial of Black people's grievances and pain, and the erasure or discrediting of Black culture.

There are numerous ways to tell the story of Black liberation movements. In addition to revolts by enslaved people in the U.S. and beyond, educators can learn and teach more about the everyday and revolutionary ways in which enslaved people fought for liberation. You can start with the episode " Resistance Means More Than Rebellion" on the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcast. And students can watch historian Tera Hunter describe the life and escape of Henry "Box" Brown here.

You can also work with students to examine other efforts and movements in which Black people resisted subjugation. These efforts include the work of the Black Panther Party and the Black Power and "Black Is Beautiful" movements. Students can learn more about Black queer liberation and womanism movements, which provided a template for activism today, such as Black Lives Matter.

Honor Black Civic Engagement

The civil rights movement is perhaps the example of Black activism that is most commonly taught in schools. Students should see that advocacy for Black civic engagement-although often attributed to individual figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-was a collective effort that required the sacrifices of everyday people. For example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was successful because Black communities united and pooled resources for a common cause and attacked segregated busing from multiple angles. This campaign required information sharing, volunteering and political engagement.

From the fierce activism and organizing of Ida B. Wells to the creation of the NAACP, Black people and organizations have a long history of uplifting their communities through civic engagement.

This Black History Month, educators can introduce students to those who aren't always highlighted, such as Francis Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. Show students how their intersectional identities both helped and hindered their causes.

Recognize Intersectional Black Identity

Students must understand that, like other marginalized groups, Black people have identities that intersect, creating complex lived experiences and compounding the effects of oppressive systems.

Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to study the social, economic and political ways in which identity-based systems of oppression and privilege connect, overlap and influence one another.

But recognizing intersectionality doesn't mean educators have to focus only on oppression when acknowledging intersecting identities. Show students that the overlapping of identities helps inspire and influence culture, activism and the consciousness of our society. Intersecting identities lend empathy and an appreciation for all human experiences, as shown in the activism of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

To start, some resources you can share with your students might be those that amplify the perspectives of the Black LGBTQ community, Afro-Latinx people and Black Muslims.

Celebrating Black Literature

Because literature is so central to the ways in which children learn about the world, Black History Month is a great time to recommit yourself to studying and teaching works by Black authors who can offer authentic depictions of what it means to be Black in the U.S. and beyond-as opposed to canonical texts that either ignore these perspectives altogether or tell them from the outside looking in. Works by authors like Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor can provide more accurate pictures of Black life and perspectives, even in the science fiction worlds of Butler's work.

Students can also delve into the biographies of authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni to explore how their activism influenced their work and vice versa.

This exploration doesn't have to be limited to older literature. Examine the works of contemporary writers such as Elizabeth Acevedo's " Hair," which delves into the politics of Black hair. Eve Ewing's " Electric Arches" provides a magical look into Black girlhood while Ta-Nehisi Coates' body of work -from essays to graphic novels-offers a Black male perspective on topics such as history, politics and fatherhood.

This exploration also shouldn't be limited to U.S.-born writers. Help students connect the common threads among Black people across the globe. The works of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Jamaica Kincaid and Wayétu Moore center Black lives throughout the African diaspora in historical narratives.

There is plenty of history to uncover. Studying these four areas of Black life-liberation, civic engagement, intersectional identities and Black literature-can help move classroom discussions past trauma toward enlightenment and empowerment. This doesn't suggest that the realities of racism and racialized violence aren't worthy of discussion. However, students deserve to learn more accurate, balanced and humanizing accounts of Black experiences.

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Black History Month: Teaching the Complete History

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In 2019, LFJ (then Teaching Tolerance) rolled out a series of articles challenging teachers to go beyond overused and whitewashed historical narratives when observing Black History Month. In 2020, we expanded that call by recommending that teachers widen their exploration of Black lives while also providing historical context so students will make meaningful connections to current issues.

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A Brief History of African-American Social Dance

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A Brief History of African-American Social Dance

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5 min video exploring the history of African-American social dance

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A brief history of African-American social dance (in TED-Ed GIFs)

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This is the Bop. The Bop is a type of social dance. Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. Below, Camille A. Brown offers a brief history of African-A…

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Interview with Mary Jenkins - Growing up in the Jim Crow era

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Interview with Mary Jenkins - Growing up in the Jim Crow era

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This contains a short video and transcript of Mary Jenkins, who grew up during the Jim Crow era. There are also discussion questions to go along with her interview.

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Civil Rights History Project: Mary Jenkins

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Mary Jenkins describes growing up in the Jim Crow era and frequently being told, "You can't"-both by a mother terrified of what might happen to her daughter if she stepped out of her expected place, and by a system that had institutionalized segregation as a way of life.

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StoryCorps Audio: "I Was the First Black Student"

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StoryCorps Audio: "I Was the First Black Student"

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This site contains an audio and a text of a man who was the first Black student at LSU. Please listen/read in advance: It does contain a racial slur, so be sure to prepare students and/or turn down the audio during that part.

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StoryCorps: I Was the First Black Student

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Article: Why We Need Black History Month

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Article: Why We Need Black History Month

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Skip to main content

Where do Americans learn that white supremacy is OK?

According to former U.S. Representative Steve King, in history class.

"White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization-how did that language become offensive?" he asked during a January 2019 New York Times interview.

"Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?"

King's comments indicated not only a shocking willingness to express his personal racism but also how far we have to go when it comes to sharing the truths about the founding of the United States and the history of civilizations around the world.

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Skip to main content Where do Americans learn that white supremacy is OK? According to former U.S. Representative Steve King, in history class. "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization-how did that language become offensive?" he asked during a January 2019 New York Times interview.

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Four lesson plans focusing on the life of Harriet Tubman

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Four lesson plans focusing on the life of Harriet Tubman

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Four lesson plans focusing on the life and legacy of Harriet Tubman—as depicted and explored through the arts—which help students understand the emotional struggles Tubman faced as she helped enslaved people escape and travel north along the Underground Railroad.

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Collection of poems around racial justice and equality*

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Collection of poems around racial justice and equality*

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*Please review any poem you may use from the list in your class. Some of them include inappropriate topics for 6-7th graders

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Even though its founding documents profess an egalitarian vision of opportunity and equal treatment of its citizens, rights and liberties deemed inalienable, the United States has struggled to live up to its avowed values of fairness and equality and to extend the privileges of freedom that animated its foundational cause for self-determination and sovereignty after hard-won battles against a progressively tyrannical British monarchy.

Its unapologetic history of white supremacy; genocide of Native Americans fueled by a cultural belief in Manifest Destiny; enslavement of African people; racial segregation and its lingering effects in employment practices, education, housing, medical care, and public facilities; persistence of police murders and other acts of terrorism against ethnic communities and people; confining Japanese Americans and illegal immigrants in internment camps subject to food shortages and substandard sanitation; economic exploitation of and fearmongering among migrant workers; the racial disparity of rates of mass incarceration; palpable class divisions and financial inequality caused by an ever-widening racial wealth gap across ethnic groups; the dismantling of unions and social organizations that laudably fought to bring a sense of dignity to working class and poor people; and hegemonic cultural attitudes and vocal intolerance of new Americans are just a few of the politically documented abuses that have prevented the country from actualizing as a single "nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

An oft-celebrated aspect of its poetry, most audibly evoked in the poems of Walt Whitman, celebrates and idealizes the spirit of American democracy and its possibility, chiefly evidenced in its diversity of people and expansive landscapes. However, another important and equally principled tradition of poems written in the United States has long spoken to that space between the progressive idea of a country that promises equality, freedom, and liberty for its citizens and its long history of political injustice, systemic racism, oppression, and ethnic strife. In this regard, American poetry has served as a measure by which readers become acquainted with the difficulties and suffering of citizenship and how the United States might become a more perfect union. In this regard, because such poems, like the country itself, are born of a spirit of resistance and righteousness, tonally and thematically, they represent in literature the true spirit of what being an American means-they affirm founding values of freedom of speech and assembly in the promotion, pursuit, and expressions of a better tomorrow. In advancing a collective vision of what and who Americans are, these poems bear witness, challenge assumptions, and give substance to the country's most elemental ideals of justice.

The poems gathered here document important historical struggles for dignity and justice; they praise political heroes; they express pride, frustration, and rage. They call for collective action and individual accountability, sometimes loudly yet always compellingly. They promote positive identities and self-esteem and make a claim for the sanctity of all humans. If you have any recommendations for poems to include in this collection, please contact us.

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Poetry and Racial Justice and Equality | Poetry Foundation

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Even though its founding documents profess an egalitarian vision of opportunity and equal treatment of its citizens, rights and liberties deemed inalienable, the United States has struggled to live up to its avowed values of fairness and equality and to extend the privileges of freedom that animated its foundational cause for self-determination and sovereignty after hard-won battles against a progressively tyrannical British monarchy.

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Multi-media collection of important Harlem Renaissance figures.

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List: 20 YA Books You Need to Read - Especially During Black History Month

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List: 20 YA Books You Need to Read - Especially During Black History Month

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50 YA Books You Need to Read—Especially During Black History Month

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It’s time to celebrate Black History Month book nerd style with these 54 YA books! Here are our recommendations for books to read this (and every!) month!

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This could be a great extension to Black History, and getting students to think about their histories and ancestors. Please note that for using in 6-7th grade, some of the language and discussion questions will need to be changed.

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Article: Five Things Not to Do During Black History Month by Zaretta Hammond

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Article: Five Things Not to Do During Black History Month by Zaretta Hammond

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Editor's Note: This blog was first published at www.Ready4Rigor.com on Feb. 5, 2013 and posted here with permission.
It happens every February. Yep, Black History Month. Some folks are asking if we should even have a Black History Month. That's neither here nor there, but there are some things to avoid if this annual commemoration is to have any significance. Here are five guidelines I think we should take special care to follow:

1. Don't create "culturally responsive" lessons by simply changing the names or circumstances in math word problems, as teachers at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Georgia did.

Here's an example of what not to do:

(Remember: Colleagues don't let colleagues create offensive lessons.)

If the goal is to improve students' performance by helping them relate to the task, changing names and circumstances doesn't make a math problem easier to solve.
2. Don't simply focus on famous firsts or popular celebrities.
Instead, take a page out of The Algebra Project's playbook: Use regional culture as a familiar and friendly reference point in understanding mathematical concepts, not racial history.

To make the concept of a number line more accessible, for example, teachers lead urban students on a field trip on a subway. Students later reconstruct their journey, using a map that represents the number line and illustrates quantity, direction, positive and negative numbers, equivalence and other key concepts.

When I was in school, we always talked about Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut in space, and tennis player Arthur Ashe. By the time my children were in school, the big emphasis was on sports figures like Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Michael Jordan. Nowadays, entertainers and rappers are in the black history spotlight. You can bet that we will be hearing the story of Beyoncé's early struggles. And, of course, President Barack Obama has replaced Colin Powell as the most prominent black man in American government.
3. Don't whitewash history (pun intended).
I know we all want to believe we are doing something more sophisticated in our classrooms. But, but by and large, we are still doing some version of what activist and educator Enid Lee calls "heroes and holidays."

Rather than focus on famous firsts, shake it up and use Black History Month as an opportunity to highlight the often-unacknowledged contributions that people of color make every day: bringing urban farming to inner-city food deserts, for example, or parents of color leading education-reform efforts in major cities like Detroit and Los Angeles. You need not look any further than advertising to see how innovative and creative aspects of black youth culture have been leveraged to sell everything from cars to laundry detergent.
4. Don't make the month an African-American "mashup."
Despite our country's movement toward becoming a multicultural, multiracial, multilingual society, we still tell a sanitized version of American history. Traditional historical narratives, written from a particular viewpoint, often eliminate, distort or minimize the circumstances and conditions experienced by people of color in this country.

So flip the script. Use BHM to simply ask: Whose story does our history book tell? What other versions of this American story do we need to include, reframe or magnify? Need some ideas for how to do that? Check out the resources offered by the Zinn Education Project. This initiative is named for historian and activist Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States and A Young People's History of the United States. He dedicated his life to telling the American story often omitted from the mainstream narrative.
5. Don't think you can't talk about black history because you're a white educator.
Kids at our school bring in soul food and make kente mats out of construction paper. We arrange for guest speakers who are role models, and plan a mish-mash of traditionally Afrocentric activities. This is another reminder for us to move beyond the "heroes and holidays" approach to multicultural education and cultural responsiveness.

Rather than simply going for theadditive approach in which African-American themes and perspectives are sprinkled atop the existing curriculum, take this opportunity to restructure your curriculum a bit. Engage students in seeing concepts, issues, themes and problems from different points of view. Pick a focus and go deep with it.

Last week at a retreat, a colleague told me how she and another mutual friend lead a professional development session for a multiracial group of teachers in Michigan. She laughed that they were two white ladies talking with this group about race. Well, isn't it appropriate, I thought, that our white colleagues would be taking the lead in discussions about race? Remember, discussion of anything racialized is not the sacred territory of only people of color. Nor does a discussion about race in America require the presence of a person of color.

I know white educators who are very skilled at talking about race and equality inside the classroom, in the teacher's lounge and in the community. But they wait for permission or feel the need to apologize for stating the obvious: that we live in a racialized society. (Note: There's a difference between a racialized society and a racist society. That's a discussion for another day.)

You do not need to be a person of color to talk about race. But you do need to be comfortable in your own skin, build your knowledge about the topic and be in alliance with educators of color for support and feedback. Remember what happened at Beaver Ridge Elementary. Wonder who their alliances are?

There are a number of white educators to look to for both inspiration and information. I lean on them for insight and understanding, too.
Hammond is an educator and writer passionate about teaching and learning. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area. She's worked as a research analyst, high school and college writing instructor, a literacy consultant, and, for the past 13 years, as a professional developer.
Check out the work of Herb Kohl and his essay " I Won't Learn From You" in his book by the same name. Then there is Tim Wise, who takes racial awareness to a whole other level. I love the work of writing teacher Linda Christensen and the way she creates a classroom culture that makes it OK to racialize language arts topics. Her books- Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word and Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-Imagining the Language Arts Classroom-are both worth reading. Two other good resources are Everyday Anti-Racism: Getting Real About Race in School and Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, both by Mica Pollock.

Now a question for you: How has your teaching of black history changed over time?

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Five Things Not to Do During Black History Month

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Editor's Note: This blog was first published at www.Ready4Rigor.com on Feb. 5, 2013 and posted here with permission. It happens every February. Yep, Black History Month. Some folks are asking if we should even have a Black History Month. That's neither here nor there, but there are some things to avoid if this annual commemoration is to have any significance.

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"What If There Were No Black People" poem and analysis

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"What If There Were No Black People" poem and analysis

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In this poem, the speaker explores how our culture would be lacking-in people, in music, in movements, in contributions-without contributions of African Americans.

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Smithsonian Collection of Learning Labs for Black History Month

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Smithsonian Collection of Learning Labs for Black History Month

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Multi-media collections of many different aspects of Black history.

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Search | Everything | Smithsonian Learning Lab

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Please provide your account's email address and we will e-mail you instructions to reset your password

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This isn't the whole film, but there are a few interactive sites to explore the origins of jazz music.

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Filmmaker Ken Burns tells the story of jazz - the quintessential American art form. The 10-part series follows the growth and development of jazz music from the gritty streets of New Orleans to the Lincoln Gardens on Chicago's south side, where Louis Armstrong first won fame, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to the wide-open clubs of Kansas City, from the elegant Roseland Ballroom in Times Square, where only whites were allowed to dance, to the more egalitarian Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where people of all colors mingled.

Six years in the making, Jazz features 75 interviews, more than 500 pieces of music, 2,400 still photographs and more than 2,000 archival film clips - many rare and never before seen. Third-person voices are provided by Samuel L. Jackson, Delroy Lindo, Derek Jacobi and Harry Connick Jr., among others.

Read A Note from Ken Burns

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Watch Jazz | A Film by Ken Burns | PBS | Ken Burns

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Filmmaker Ken Burns tells the story of jazz - the quintessential American art form. The 10-part series follows the growth and development of jazz music from the gritty streets of New Orleans to the Lincoln Gardens on Chicago's south side, where Louis Armstrong first won fame, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to the wide-open clubs of Kansas City, from the elegant Roseland Ballroom in Times Square, where only whites were allowed to dance, to the more egalitarian Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where people of all colors mingled.

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Collection of hip-hop artist interviews

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Bring on the funk and hear tales of the old school: Fresh Air features interviews with some of the greatest names in hip-hop history. Guests include Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Russell Simmons, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah and Will Smith.

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A whole list of activities and primary documents for students to analyze

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Put the power of primary sources to work in the classroom. Browse ready-to-use lesson plans, student activities, collection guides and research aids.

Access thousands of primary sources and an ever-expanding collection of document-based activities spanning the course of American history created by the National Archives and teachers around the world. Discover the activities, such as Analyzing a Letter from Jackie Robinson: "Fair Play and Justice" , The Impact of Bloody Sunday in Selma , We Shall Overcome: March on Washington , and Examining Where Rosa Parks Sat .

More Activities

Explore the primary sources on DocsTeach

Image credit: Photograph 306-SSM-4C-61-32; Young Woman at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. with a Banner; 8/28/1963; Miscellaneous Subjects, Staff and Stringer Photographs, 1961 - 1974; Records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 1 Hide All

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African American History Month - For Teachers

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Teacher resources for African American History Month. The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.

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Collection of poems by African American authors from the Poetry Foundation

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Celebrating Black History Month | Poetry Foundation

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Poems, articles, and podcasts that explore African American history and culture.

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Lesson Plan: Finding Voice in Langston Hughes' poems

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Lesson Plan: Finding Voice in Langston Hughes' poems

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Activity 1. Defining Voice

On the board, write a working definition of voice that is appropriate for your students' level of preparation and that reflects what they already know. The simplest definition is that a writer's voice reveals his or her personality. A strong contrast might help to make the point: read a passage from an encyclopedia (or perhaps your tax form) and read a passage from one of the poems by Langston Hughes (Activity 2).

As you and your students work through the activities of this lesson, create a list, just below the working definition of voice that you wrote on the board earlier, consisting of additional items and qualities that contribute to a distinctive poetic voice. Use the Guiding Question to help your students make choices about which qualities might belong in a more comprehensive definition of poetic voice. For now it is enough just to list the possibilities; as a culminating activity, students will develop a revised definition of poetic voice that incorporates the discoveries your class made while reading the poetry of Langston Hughes (Activity 7).

Here is a little more background on the subject of voice. Unlike, say, iambic pentameter, which has a fairly constrained meaning, voice has been extended metaphorically far beyond its original sense of the vocal qualities of a particular speaker. According to one dictionary of critical terms, to speak of voice in a poem is to

"...characterize the tonal qualities, attitudes, or even the entire personality of this speaker as it reveals itself directly or indirectly (through sound, choice of diction, and other stylistic devices)...[voice] reminds us that a human being is behind the words of a poem, that he is revealing his individuality by means of the poem, and that this revelation may be the most significant part of what we receive from the poem."

--Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

While you will not want to begin with the definition above, you may find that, having worked through the activities below, your students will be able to come up with an essentially equivalent formulation, for by this stage they will have learned to identify a wide variety of qualities in Hughes's poetry that have made his voice a forceful, distinctive, and memorable one for so many readers.

Activity 2. Variations on a Dream

What do you see? What do you tend to notice in others and in the world around you? What do you tend to remember? When you think of the past, what images stay with you?

Pass out copies of these three poems by Langston Hughes to your students

"Dreams": The text of "Dreams" is available from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets.

"Harlem (2)" ("Dream Deferred"): Although not available on an EDSITEment-reviewed source, this short poem is widely anthologized; you can find a copy on the Internet by doing a search for the words of the title plus "Langston Hughes" (or do a search for the first line "What happens to a dream deferred?").

"Dream Variations": the text of "Dream Variations" is also available at the Academy of American Poets.

Ask students to take notes on any interesting images they notice as the poems are read. Then read all of the poems aloud. Before discussing them, give your students some silent time to read through the poems again on their own, making notes on any interesting images they find in each poem. As a class, discuss the imagery and the emotions expressed in each poem. You might wish to take each of the poems in turn, for each has something new to reveal about how vivid images may be yoked with strong emotions to create memorable poetry.

With the first poem, for example, you could begin by having students identify the poem's two most prominent images: the broken-winged bird and the barren field. Then have students brainstorm all the feelings they associate with these images (for now, just "free associate" and do not censor any possibilities). Discuss how these feelings are linked with the concept and word to which the two images are metaphorically linked: "life." One of the reasons for Hughes's broad appeal is his ability to pack a great deal of meaning in a small space by creating metaphors linking images that suggest a range of widely shared feelings with general concepts such as "life" that might otherwise strike us as vague or abstract. The result is a general idea we can all grasp enlivened by vivid images whose associations we can all share.

You can apply the same approach to your discussion of "Dream Deferred," which links images that elicit feelings of strong physical revulsion (the festering, running sore, for instance) to an otherwise hazy and ephemeral idea (a "dream"). Notice that this poem does not tell you what a "dream deferred" is or what it must become; Hughes merely poses the question, leaves the answer open, although he does so with the unforgettable force that has made his poetic voice so distinctive and memorable.

For journal entry #1, students will respond to the question: What do you see? (What do you tend to notice in others and in the world around you? What do you tend to remember? When you think of the past, what images stay with you?)

All of us notice different sorts of things in the world around us. Some people are quick to notice the clothes others wear and to remember the details for days; other people do not notice and would not remember such details to save their lives. What we see and hear and touch and smell around us--the sensual "pictures" that remain in our memories--are for poets and writers the raw stuff of memorable images and metaphors.

This journal assignment has two parts. First, students should write about a memorable event that happened more than one year ago. In their journal entries, they should emphasize two things: 1) as many physical details they can remember--clothes people wore, the weather, sounds, etc. and 2) their feelings at the time, their emotional responses to the remembered event.

Next, ask students to take an analytical step back from their writing and try to come up with one or two metaphors that might make this event memorable to readers. The metaphors should match one or more details with one or more of the feelings they experienced at the time.

Ask students to share one of their metaphors with the rest of class and, if it's necessary for understanding the metaphor, ask them to briefly summarize their memorable event. (This discussion of emotion and metaphor will be picked up in subsequent discussions in the activities below.)

Return briefly to your working definition of voice in poetry. Review the Guiding Question. In your class discussions of imagery, metaphor, and emotion, or in your students' journal exercises, has anyone discovered any qualities that help to make a poet's voice forceful, distinctive, and memorable? Make a list on the board below your original working definition.

Before moving on to additional poems, you may wish to share with your students Winhold Reiss's portrait of Langston Hughes as a young man; you can find this portrait by doing a search on the EDSITEment-reviewed National Portrait Gallery website. What qualities in the young Hughes has this painter tried to capture? Do these qualities fit with those reflected in the voice that you heard in the three "Dream" poems?

Activity 3. "Theme for English B"

Who are you? (How do others see you? How do you see yourself? How would you like others to see you?)

Before reading and discussing the poem, ask your students to warm up their minds with journal entry #2. The question is essentially the same one that Hughes describes in his poem, "Theme for English B": say something about yourself; answer the deceptively simple question, who are you?. Reassure students that you know this is an extremely open-ended question. If you like, you can qualify this question a bit: How do others see you? How do you see yourself? How would you like others to see you? But the open-endedness of the question is part of the point here, for the purpose of this exercise is to parallel the situation described at the beginning of Hughes's poem, "Theme for English B."

Now share with your students a copy of "Theme for English B," available from the Academy of American Poets. Give them time to read the poem to themselves before reading the poem aloud in class--they will easily recognize the parallel with the journal exercise they have just completed. After reading the poem aloud, ask students to identify which section of the poem is part of the "page" that Hughes writes for his instructor, and which section represents the thoughts in his mind just before he begins to write. What are the differences between that first stanza, representing the poet's thoughts to himself as he contemplates the assignment, and the subsequent stanzas, which express how he presents himself to an audience, in this case his instructor? List some of things that Hughes includes in his self-presentation.

The poem is straightforward and speaks for itself, but reveals a more subtle and sly speaker the more you reread it and think about how Hughes has turned the instructor's question on its head. What does he mean when he says, "I hear you: / hear you, hear me--we two--you, me, talk on this page"? Who is "talking" here? How can Hughes say to his instructor that they are a part of each other? Do we as readers have a part in this conversation?

Your students should readily identify the central theme of this poem: the role that race plays in self-identity and in our relations with others. In Hughes's poem, the relationship of "you" and "me" is charged with race. The speaker in the poem is black, the instructor is white. But think about Hughes's relationship with that unseen audience: readers of his poem. The reader of Hughes's poem may, of course, be of any race, so the relationship between poet and reader--between "me" and "you"--is always shifting with each new reader. Ask your students about their own relationship as readers to Hughes's poem. How does their own race matter in how they read this poem? Do they think it matters at all? Do they think these shifting relationships between reader and poet, between "you" and "me," are intentional? Is this perhaps part of the meaning that Hughes intends?

What new lesson does this poem have to teach us about the poet's voice? Ask students if Hughes's "Theme for English B" gives them any ideas about how they might add to or modify your working definition of voice in poetry. For example, Hughes says that "I guess I'm what / I feel and see and hear": a poet's voice, then, includes aspects of his or her everyday experience; he also says that he "hears" Harlem and New York, indicating that the places where a poet lives or has lived become of who he or she is, part of what makes his or her voice a distinctive one.

This may be a good time to share with your students a little background on Hughes and on the Harlem Renaissance. There is a student-oriented biography of the poet available at America's Story, from the Library of Congress. For additional background see the Preparing to Teach this Lesson section. For background on the Harlem Rennaissance, see the Library of Congress, A Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials, including a list of exhibitions and links to "Today in History" featuring African Americans.

Activity 4. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Where do you come from?

Along with "Mother to Son" and "A Dream Deferred," Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is among his most-frequently anthologized and taught poems. Also his first published poem, it is a small masterpiece of rhythm (another quality you will want to add to your working definition of voice). The best way to appreciate the rhythm of the poem is to hear it read by Hughes himself. If you have access to RealPlayer on the computer, you and your students can listen to the poet reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; both the text and of the poem and the audio clip are available on the EDSITEment resource Academy of American Poets. (There is also a wonderful recording of Hughes reading this and other poems on the cd/book collection, Poetry Speaks. Ed. Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby. Narrated by Charles Osgood. Source books Mediafusion, 2001.)

Begin by talking about the rhythm of this poem. What words and phrases are repeated? What phrases use different words but repeat the same grammatical or syntactical pattern? Ask students to think about why a poet would repeat words and phrases in this way: why not just say something once and be done with it? (Students will find this easier to answer if they have heard Langston Hughes reading his poetry.)

Discuss the perspective of the speaker in the poem. The previous poem we looked at, "Theme for English B," spoke to us as one person, a very specific person at a very specific time--how is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" different? Does he seem to be speaking as one person or as many? How can you tell? If he is speaking for many people, why would he choose to say "I" instead of "we"? What themes connect the two poems? (A hint: in "Theme for English B," Hughes says, "Harlem, I hear you"). How can you tell that, different as they are, the two poems are expressions of the same distinctive and memorable poetic voice? Go back to some of the "Dream" poems you read earlier. Where do they fit in this pattern: are they words spoken by a single person or are they spoken by many people? Is it possible speak for both at the same time?

For journal entry #3, ask students to write in their journals a response to the question "where do you come from?" One approach would be to write from the perspective of a group of their ancestors; if their family came from Ireland, for instance, they could speak from the perspective of people who have left their home and sailed across the Atlantic for America. What do they find in this new world? What have they left behind? They can use Hughes's poem as a model of a voice which, while personal and written from the first-person perspective (he uses "I," not "we"), seems to speak for many people.

You may wish to extend this portion of the lesson by sharing with your students Langston Hughes's interest in and debt to jazz and blues music. For more resources, see the Extending the Lesson section.

At the EDSITEment-reviewed Modern American Poetry, you can find a sampling of critical commentary on the poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; the excerpts here demonstrate the wide range of meanings that readers have found in Hughes's first published poem. The point in sharing these comments by critics is not so much to uncover the "deep meaning" of the poem, but to ask the question: what qualities in this poem, in the voice that we hear in this poem, have encouraged readers to look for and find so much meaning in so few lines? Add these qualities to your list of qualities that make a voice distinctive and memorable.

Activity 5. "Mother to Son"

What obstacles have you overcome in life?

Share with your students the text of "Mother to Son," available from the the Poetry Foundation. The Academy of American Poets has a short essay, "Poems about Sons," which explore the voices of male speakers in reference to their sons. The speaker in Hughes's poem, however, is female. You might wish to address how a mother's view might (or might not) differ from a father's in preparation for students' writing about their own experience in the journal exercise described below.

As you begin your discussion of the poem, remind students of your earlier discussion of imagery and metaphor in the three "Dream" poems. The first poem they looked at compared life to a barren field and a bird with a broken wing. This poem tells us what life is not--it is not a "crystal stair." Let's think about this image a moment. Is this likely one of the things that Hughes saw on a daily basis? Do most people have a crystal stair in their house? Now we know what life is not--what then does the poem tell us that it is? Unlike the first poem we read, "Dream," this poem gives us not one or two images, but a whole set of related images for "life." How are they related? What feelings do students associate with these images? What emotions color the mother's speech to her son? What feelings are conveyed in the contrast between the crystal stair and the set of other images that, as the mother tell us, really characterize life? As you discuss the poem, record any additional items on the board for your definition of voice in poetry.

You may wish to make the distinction between voice and speaker (or "persona"). Compare the speaker in this poem to that in "Theme for English B" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." In the first, the speaker seems to be the poet himself, in the second, speaker seems to be a whole people, or perhaps a whole people as they dwell inside a single man. Here the speaker, or persona, is a literary character--obviously not Hughes himself. How does Hughes create a voice for this character, the "Mother" of the title? In terms of words or phrases, how does the poem reflect the speech of this character? Do you think the mother in the title is necessarily Hughes's mother, or someone else's mother, or perhaps even more than one mother?

For journal entry #4, ask students to respond to the question What obstacles have you overcome in life? What struggles have you faced? As they write about these obstacles, they can also give some thought to what they have learned from their struggles.

As a class, discuss how the difficulties and struggles we face in life can help to shape who we are and how we look at the world. Does anyone have an example of how their perspective was shaped by their struggles? Now return to the poem. Do the mother's words suggest that her perspective on trouble and struggle may differ from her son's? What lines suggest that her own perspective has been directly altered by struggle?

Activity 6. "Merry-Go-Round"

What do you feel strongly about?

We are taught that anger is a bad thing, and certainly there are times when anger is inappropriate. But there are a few things about which we should be angry. Langston Hughes was angry about the racism of his time, institutionalized in the notorious Jim Crow laws that are the subject of his poem, "Merry-Go-Round." Share with your students the text of this poem, available together with an audio/video version of the poem read aloud, on the Favorite Poem Project.

For background material on the Jim Crow laws, see the Library of Congress online exhibit, African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship; given its relevance to the time period in which Hughes was writing, see especially the section, Depression, New Deal, and World War II.

With the guiding question (above) as your focus, discuss the speaker/persona that Hughes develops in this poem; compare the speaker that Hughes develops in this poem, and compare it to the previous poem, "Mother to Son."

In journal entry #5, students respond to the question, What do you feel strongly about? After they have completed this exercise, discuss the uses and abuses of strong feelings. If they were angry, how did students respond? What actions did they take? For the question is always: what shall we do with our anger? Where shall we channel our strongest emotions? What does this poem tell us? (If students are having difficulty, you might want to remind them of "Theme for English B." In that poem, the speaker turns a class assignment on its head, redirecting the question back to the instructor: what of me is part of you? There is a similar intellectual maneuver in "Merry-Go-Around": instead of directly protesting the laws that say black people should ride in the back of trains (a serious matter), Hughes chooses to write about a merry-go-round-which has no back. Why does he make this choice? Notice also that this poem, like "Dream Deferred" and "Theme for English B" poses a question, but does give any definitive answers.

Activity 7. Final Writing Assignment

There are several possibilities for a culminating writing assignment related to Langston Hughes:

Write a short poem that expresses your personal voice. The poem can build upon ideas, images, and themes you explored in your journal, and you can use one or more of Hughes's poems as a model. When you have completed the poem, write out a definition of voice that uses some of the qualities of voice you discussed in class. Be prepared to talk in class about the ways in which your poem expresses qualities of your own voice as a writer.

Write a persuasive essay that includes, perhaps in its introductory paragraph, a short definition of voice in poetry. Write this definition as a statement responding to the guiding question: What qualities make a writer's voice forceful, distinctive, and memorable? Now use this definition as the main point in a persuasive essay about the poetry of Langston Hughes. Use examples from Langston Hughes's poetry to illustrate and support the qualities that you believe create a voice that is forceful, distinctive, and memorable.

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The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You

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Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?

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Another lesson on Selma and voting rights

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"The activity helped me understand the reason why certain people took certain sides and why they acted the way they acted." -Elijah W., high school student
This lesson invites students to step into the long history of the freedom struggle in Selma, introducing them to people, turning points, and issues. The lesson offers students the scaffolding for deeper study and is based on a format that is often used as a pre-reading or pre-film viewing activity. Each student takes on the identity of someone involved in one way or another in the Selma freedom movement.

If used in advance of viewing the film Selma, it can help students recognize more of the people and issues that are referenced.

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Stepping Into Selma - Civil Rights Teaching

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This lesson invites students to step into the long history of the freedom struggle in Selma, introducing them to people, turning points, and issues. If used in advance of viewing the film "Selma", it can help students recognize more of the people and issues that are referenced.

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A multi-media collection of videos, texts, photographs, and more.

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Black History and Culture - Google Arts & Culture

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The past, present, and future of the Black experience in the United States

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Being Heard - Music from Resistance to Empowerment

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Being Heard - Music from Resistance to Empowerment

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You will need to create or log-in to a free Newsela account to access these articles.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Month Resistance and Liberation

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Month Resistance and Liberation

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You will need to create or log-in to a free Newsela account to access these articles.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Month Trail Blazing Women

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Newsela Text Sets: Black History Month Trail Blazing Women

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You will need to create or log-in to a free Newsela account to access these articles.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Short Video: Brown vs. Board of Education

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Short Video: Brown vs. Board of Education

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You will need to create or log-in to a free Newsela account to show students this video.

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Scroll to the bottom of this page to see a list of over 13,000 books featuring Black girls.

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This resource guide was created in direct response to the multiple requests made by educators, parents and students. Like Marley Dias, so many of you have asked for books with black girls as the main characters. And because of you, we have received thousands of books. Here we are sharing with you the first 700 book titles. We have not yet catalogued all the books. As a small organization with only two full-time staff, our resources are limited. Beginning in April, each month we will provide you with updates of new book titles.

This resource includes words of welcome from Marley Dias, Creator of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign. It also includes comments from Dr. Lauren Wells, Chief Education Officer, City of Newark who offers us tips on how we can foster and promote reading and literacy among our children.

As the President and Co-Founder of GrassROOTS Community Foundation, I have added a few words and call to action to the guide. My charge to parents and caregivers is a simple one: listen to your children, encourage them as well as promote their reading and literacy skills. Reading is a pathway to freedom and liberty. As caregivers it is our responsibility to develop the imagination of children so that they can dream, create and structure opportunities for freedom and equity.

We have reviewed the titles and descriptions of books to ensure that they fit the criterion of having a black girl as the main characters. We have also catalogued the books by reading level. This time-consuming task would not be possible without your financial donation to hire some interim part-time staff. We could not do it without all of you who donated, our volunteers and the librarians from West Orange Public Library.

Each month we will update the list and continue to serve as an information repository for Black Girl Books.

If you know of a black girl book, not listed here, please send us a copy so we can add it to our collection. We would like to see this list grow. Our address is:

GrassROOTS Community Foundation
59 Main Street
Suite 323
West Orange, NJ 07052

Financial donations are always welcomed. All donations are tax-deductible.

Thank you.

Welcome to the #1000blackgirlbooks Resource Guide. I started this campaign because I wanted to read more books where black girls are the main characters. With your help we have collected over 11,000 books; many of them are have the same title, but we do have lots of unique ones as well. This guide includes 1000 of those books and more is coming.

Love,

Marley Dias
Founder
#1000BlackGirlBooks

Sadly, in today's society we often lack the imagination to deal with some of the most deeply rooted social issues. Family and work obligations as well as our biases can stunt our imaginations; however, as adults it is our charge to foster the imagination of our youth. Marley Dias has an active sociological imagination. She imagined a world where black girls are the main, not minor, characters in children's books. She thought she was dealing with a personal matter, but she quickly learned from the outpouring response from the public that her personal problem is in fact an engrained social issue. Children's literature in the United States and abroad is homogeneous and exclusionary. Black girls are underrepresented and in many cases missing. Girls of color are almost completely absent relative to the majority culture.

As caregivers of children we must nurture our children's imaginations and equip them with the resources so they can be emboldened to act. The GrassROOTS Community Foundation through Super Camp enhances girls' sociological imagination and teaches them confidence grounded in the knowledge of history and self-hood so that they feel confident enough to feel like they can create change in their communities. Each year GrassROOTS encourages girls to develop a social action project. We choose the words social and action carefully. We want our children to understand themselves as social actors, connected to the world. In addition, we teach our girls that to achieve justice they must ACT. The #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign is Marley's 2015 social action project. As Marley's mom and the President of GrassROOTS Community Foundation, I have learned first hand what can happen when we foster and promote children's love of reading, educate them about their community, and their desire to create social change as well as fan the flames of their sociological imaginations.

Dr. Janice Johnson Dias
President & Co-Founder
GrassROOTS Community Foundation
#investingirls

A love of reading is the most important legacy we can offer to our children and our students. Reading opens windows to new ideas, peoples, places, and experiences. Reading also provides mirrors for students to see themselves and their lives reflected in the characters they meet in books. Reading builds vocabulary and background knowledge, empowering children with the tools needed to express themselves and think about the world around them. Nurturing joyful reading in children primes their brains for lifelong learning and develops important social emotional skills like stamina, reflection, and empathy. As we build readers, we must make reading pleasurable and help children understand that reading is a skill that builds over time.

Here are a few tips for parents and educators to create environments that invite children to confidently embrace and fall in love with stories and books.

Tips for parents:

Model reading. Read, read, read to your child, with your child, or in front your child every day.

Immerse your child in books. Transform your entire home into a reading zone by placing books in every room.

Affirm your child's culture, language, and race by choosing books and stories with characters, places, and experiences that reflect their background.

Awaken your child to new ideas, places, people, or experiences in books and stories by asking them questions and always answering the question they have.

Empower your child by allowing them to choose books to read, whether based on what interests them or on book covers and titles.

Arm your child by always leaving home with books. When your child gets older ask them if they have a book before leaving for school, the doctor, or a long ride.

Cultivate your child's use of language and words. Talk with your child about what is happening in their lives and the world around them.

Build your child's ability to make connections. When you watch television or movies, make connections to characters or ideas in books you have read together.

Expand your child's reading beyond fiction. Children have great curiosity about events taking place in the world, plants, animals, and people. It's never too early to expose them to historical fiction or non-fiction books.

Advocate for curricula, partnerships, books, and resources for classrooms and schools that are culturally relevant and responsive.

Tips for educators:

Model reading. Read, read, read to your students, with your students, or in front your students every day.

Immerse school culture in talk about books. Book talks over the intercom, book clubs, social media chats, and school-wide read alouds are a few ways to do this.

Affirm your students' culture, language, and race by integrating books and stories with characters, places, and experiences that reflect their backgrounds into the curriculum.

Awaken students as participants in their own learning by having them create reading goals for themselves, for example, minutes of reading, chapters read, and reading new genres.

Empower students by allowing them to choose books based on what interests them or on book covers and titles.

Arm your students with the power of their own language and stories by providing them with multiple ways to make personal connections to the texts they read.

Cultivate independent reading by creating comfortable reading spaces throughout schools. Classrooms, cafeterias, libraries, and cozy nooks in hallways are all fair game.

Build classroom libraries of interesting, appropriate, and relevant fiction and non-fiction texts.

Expand your reading beyond fiction. Students have great curiosity about events taking place in the world, plants, animals, and people. Use historical fiction or non-fiction books as tools to capture this interest.

Advocate for curricula, partnerships, books, and resources for classrooms and schools that are culturally relevant and responsive.

Dr. Lauren Wells
Chief Education Officer
City of Newark

Donations are the heart of the campaign. Because we value reciprocity, we donate the books we receive to schools and community members who need them. Children deserve to have windows and mirrors to the world. Please complete the form below.

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This resource guide was created in direct response to the multiple requests made by educators, parents and students. Like Marley Dias, so many of you have asked for books with black girls as the main characters. And because of you, we have received thousands of books.

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Current events lesson: Current Voter Suppression laws and the Civil Rights Movement

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Current events lesson: Current Voter Suppression laws and the Civil Rights Movement

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Have students read this article from Newsela (log-in to adjust reading level) and the above interview with Carol Anderson to compare the movement in the 60s to current events.

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Current events lesson: Current Voter Suppression laws and the Civil Rights Movement

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Current events lesson: Current Voter Suppression laws and the Civil Rights Movement

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Have students read the below article from Newsela (log-in to adjust reading level) and this interview with Carol Anderson to compare the movement in the 60s to current events.

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Carol Anderson is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, where she researches, teaches and writes about race and civil rights in the United States. Her newest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, tells a modern story about who has voting rights, who can access their voting rights-and who makes those decisions.

The title of your newest book is One Person, No Vote. Why did you choose this title? And what do you hope it will evoke in your readers?

We live in a nation where we have these kinds of sound bites, and we think we understand how this nation works. "We hold these truths." "This is a nation of immigrants." "One person, one vote." But the way that voter suppression works is that it absolutely undermines that basic notion of "one person, one vote," and it becomes "one person, no vote." I wanted to hit the familiar but also to hit that discord that's in there so that we can begin to understand what the attack on democracy looks like.

Voter suppression has always disproportionately affected people of color. How does institutional racism manifest itself in the current systems surrounding voting and elections in the United States?

The civil rights movement dealt with institutional violence and institutional racism that African Americans faced on a daily basis, from utero to coffin. Not even from cradle: utero to coffin. That kind of systemic, institutional racism. And one of the tricks that was deployed was to say, "Well, the signs [enforcing segregation] have come down, and now these black people have a Civil Rights Act, and they've got a Voting Rights Act. And so if anything is really not happening, it's on them. It's because they don't have initiative. It's because they're lazy. It is because they don't want to work hard."

I talked about, in the first chapter in One Person, No Vote, how-[in] the Mississippi Plan of 1890-they knew that they had to deal with this thing called the 15th Amendment that said, "the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race, color or previous servitude." So Mississippi's looking at this going, "But we don't want black people to vote." So what they did was, they took the societally imposed characteristics of a group of people and then made those societally imposed characteristics the litmus test-the ticket to the ballot.

You don't fund education, and then you require folks to read chunks of the Constitution. We don't have public transportation because we have refused to invest in public transportation. We shut down polling places. We require IDs and only specific types of IDs.

[My previous book] White Rage dealt with the myths of black pathology because this nation needs the narrative of black pathology in order to justify a series of policies. But what we don't get is the inverse of that. ... The narrative that we get is, "How racist can America be? We elected a black man-twice." And it is kind of self-congratulatory because the we-"We elected a black man twice"-that we means whites. It doesn't mean everybody else. [But] the majority of whites did not vote for Obama.

So there are times when I'm giving my talk on White Rage and I get the question, "What are we to do?" And I say, "These are conversations that whites must have with whites because the work that needs to be done ... is in the white community. Black folks can provide you some of the tools, but you've got to do that heavy lifting."

You write, "The reason the Voting Rights Act worked was the advent of vigorous federal intervention, not because the racism that required the law in the first place had stopped." Can we stop racism, in your opinion, without enforcement? What other options do we have?

Enforcement. So, between 1982 and the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, it came out that the Department of Justice had blocked over 700 proposed changes to voting laws by the jurisdictions-those states that were under the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. And the DOJ blocked [the proposed changes] because they were racially discriminatory. ...

...During radical Reconstruction, federal troops are really there [enforcing voting rights] and they know they got to handle business. And we saw that with the rise of black registration, black voter turnout and black elected officials. With the Compromise of 1877, when federal troops are removed from the South, and Rutherford B. Hayes is like, "Yo, you're on your own. Peace," you start seeing this thing begin to move and shift until we get to massive disfranchisement in 1890, and there was no enforcement. None. And the impact of that was by the time-I think it was 1940-only 3 percent of African Americans were registered to vote in the South.

What is missing in the ways we teach and talk about voting in our country, and what are the best ways to learn about voter suppression?

In K-12, you get kind of an arc that the Founding Fathers crafted this beautiful Constitution, and you can almost hear the harps playing in the background. And then, you get a sense that, "Oh, but something didn't go quite right, so we had to have a little Civil War. Because there was this thing called slavery. And Lincoln freed the slaves." And then we get ... "Go west, young man! From sea to shining sea!"

Struggle is missing. Racism is missing. The battle for citizenship is missing. The steps forward and the steps back, the kinds of racialized opposition to full enfranchisement, the gendered opposition to full enfranchisement. All of that is missing in that arc.

We don't educate about voting. North Carolina, which had been a very progressive government, had high school voter registration. When students were taking their civics class, they were being registered to vote as well. So they got a sense that voting was part of your civic engagement; it was your right as a citizen. When the Republicans came to power in 2010, not only did they close early voting sites and reduce early voting hours and require certain types of voter ID, but they stopped registration in high schools. So voting and registering becomes a task that you do instead of part of your identity. ... And so they don't have a voice-a political voice-and they don't have an economic voice.

You write in the book, "It can never be forgotten that the state that produced the Eugene 'Bull' Connors, the Sheriff Jim Clarks and Judge Roy Moores also created the civil rights warriors who took down and defeated Bull and Jim and now had Roy in their crosshairs." Talk about the people and organizations working to protect the right to vote. What can we learn from them?

We saw our power. Folks knew that work needed to be done, and the state wasn't going to do it. They knew what was at stake. So, watching the NAACP [get] the list of the voters that hadn't voted in 2016 (or voting intermittently) and get all of their members [to] start calling. Just talking-Alabamian to Alabamian-then following up, knocking on doors, continuing the conversation.

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Carol Anderson on Voter Suppression: A Q&A with the Author of 'One Person, No Vote'

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Carol Anderson is a professor of African American Studies at Emory University, where she researches, teaches and writes about race and civil rights in the United States. Her newest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, tells a modern story about who has voting rights, who can access their voting rights-and who makes those decisions.

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The Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History

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The Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History

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Incorporate black history year-round, not just in February. Use the month of February to dig deeper into history and make connections with the past.

Continue Learning. Explore how to provide an in-depth and thorough understanding of black history. Textbooks are notorious for omitting information about the struggles of communities, and what they include is limited, so use the textbook as one of many resources. While exploring multiple resources, allow for opportunities to learn along with your students.

Reinforce to students that "black" history is American history. Make black history relevant to all students.

Relate lessons to other parts of your curriculum, so that focusing on a leader, like Fred Shuttlesworth, expands upon rather than diverts from your curriculum. By the time February comes around, the context of the struggle for civil rights and social justice should be familiar to students if you have already addressed such issues across the curriculum.

Connect issues in the past to current issues to make history relevant to students' lives. For example, ask students to gather information with a focus on what social disparities exist today and how a particular leader has worked to change society.

Include the political and social context of the community's struggle for social justice. For example, talk about Daisy Bates' political affiliations and her political ideologies. You see her bravery not as just a personal act but as coming out of community determination.

Stop your "regular" curriculum, to do a separate lesson on Rosa Parks, on the Civil Rights Act or on Martin Luther King Jr. This trivializes and marginalizes anything you are teaching, making these leaders a token of their culture and ethnicity. Students will get the message that the diversion it is not as important as the "regular" curriculum.

Decontextualize heroes or holidays, separating them from the larger social movement or historical place. Great leaders don't make history all by themselves. For example, if you teach about James Farmer, you must also address the work of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Freedom Rides.

Focus on superficial cultural traits based on stereotypes. It's ok to celebrate black music, but teachers should also explore the political and social contexts that give rise to musical forms like hip hop.

Talk about black history in solely "feel-good" language, or as a thing of the past. This fails to help students examine how racism manifests itself today.

Limit the presentation to lectures and reading. Be sure to allow students an opportunity for discussion and reflection.

Teach with little or inaccurate information. Review resources to make sure they don't promote a Eurocentric perspective, which may misrepresent historic figures and social movements.

Shy away from controversial, ambiguous, or unresolved issues. Share the real-life experiences about racial realities in developmentally appropriate ways.
Adapted from material by Pat Russo of the Curriculum & Instruction Department at SUNY Oswego. (Sept. 2007)

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Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History

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Incorporate black history year-round, not just in February. Use the month of February to dig deeper into history and make connections with the past. Continue Learning. Explore how to provide an in-depth and thorough understanding of black history.

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Webinar for educators about teaching Black History

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Webinar for educators about teaching Black History

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You could probably get PD hours for this hour long webinar if you submit a form through Frontline. Reach out to Megan for help with this, and don't complete it until you get approval :)

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The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is often seen as the kick-off for Black History Month. This webinar will prepare educators to use the approximately 45 days between the King holiday and the end of February to engage all students in recognizing and understanding how Black Americans have moved United States and world history forward. Join Learning for Justice as we share practices and strategies for celebrating the contributions of African Americans, whether they are household names or unsung heroes. Reverend Frederick D. Reese, famed educator and civil rights activist, will join us to share his firsthand experience from the front lines of the civil right movement.​

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This webinar will prepare educators to use the approximately 45 days between the King holiday and the end of February to engage all students in recognizing and understanding how Black Americans have moved United States and world history forward.

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Lesson using Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb"

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Lesson using Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb"

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National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb," written for the 2021 inauguration, presents a great opportunity for educators and students to discuss the ways creative expression can help us think about the meaning of democracy.

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Teach This: "The Hill We Climb" and the 2021 Inauguration

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National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's poem "The Hill We Climb," written for the 2021 inauguration, presents a great opportunity for educators and students to discuss the ways creative expression can help us think about the meaning of democracy.