Black+Boy+teaching+resources

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__Primary Sources to supplement //Black Boy// __

 * 1) Langston Hughes, “The South.” Crisis (1922) **

This source is a poem written in 1922 by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. It is about the Great Migration and moving from the blatantly racist south, to the more accepting, yet still racist, north. This poem conveys the narrator’s sadness about leaving his home, and his subtle hope about moving to the north.

This resource is relevant to Richard Wright’s Black Boy because it deals with the same time period, and both sources discuss the Great Migration. Hughes also discusses the outward racism of the South in his poem, which is displayed numerous times in Black Boy and compares it to the “cold faced north.” This poem’s main usefulness comes about due to it being a strong period piece that will help immerse students in the time period.


 * 2) Plessy v. Ferguson. 163 U.S. 537. (1896) Retrieved from FindLaw Data Base; excerpts here **

This is the court case file for the Supreme Court case of Plessy versus Ferguson. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man who was 1/8 black and 7/8 white was arrested after sitting in a “whites only” train car. The case went all the way up to the supreme court where the decision of the railroad company to have him arrested was upheld for being constitutional under Separate but Equal doctrine.

I think the resource could be very useful in the classroom setting when it comes to this book. When teaching students about Jim Crow segregated south, students have to know about the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and how it affected the legal aspects of segregation. Such ground shaking courtcases like this, as well as the decision to overturn it in the court case Brown v. The Board of Ed of Topeka Kansas are useful resources when it comes to learning about segregation.

__Secondary Resources __
(Juv. LC214.2 .M67 2004; available at Crumb Library, SUNY Potsdam)
 * 1. Morrison, T. (2004). Remember: The Journey to School Integration. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. **

“Toni Morrison has collected a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation” (Amazon.com). Morrison takes the photographs of integrated schools an inserts fictional emotion and dialogue based on the kids going through the separate but equal school years.

Although this book is meant to be read by young children, it’s rich with photographs of the first school integrations and allows students to see the history and emotion of the time period. Every page has a photograph relevant to the topics touched upon in Black Boy from segregation to white supremacy to the thirst for knowledge. Although this book has photographs from the 1950’s after the Brown v. The Board of Ed decision; the story book would be an excellent closure of a unit on segregation that would begin with Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

([|PS3515.U789 A7 1995] ; available at Crumb Library, SUNY Potsdam)
 * 2. Hurston, Z. N. (1995). Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. **

Zora Neale Hurston, like Richard Wright, is a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her writings focused mainly on short stories and African American folklore, but her case was different. Unlike Richard Wright, she didn’t experience discrimination in childhood. Living in an 8 room house on 5 acres of land, her family was successful. Her Mother always encouraged her to explore and not give up on her dreams. This would be a good side along book to go in hand with Black Boy in order to show the differences the lives of the authors.

(<span style="color: #212063; font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS',Arial,Helvetica,serif;">[|PS3515.U274 N6] ; available at Crumb Library, SUNY Potsdam)
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3. Hughes, Langston. Not Without Laughter. New York: Dover, 2008. **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource is a novel written during the time period and was a very influential piece during the Harlem Renaissance. It is about an African American child who aspires to raise himself out of poverty and achieve the kind of greatness that Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Du Bois earned. It also is a semi-autobiographical novel.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource is valuable because it is quite similar to Black Boy in its style. It is also a semi-autobiographical piece set in the same time period. This alternate perspective of the same area would be crucial in being able to better understand the time period. Students will be able to see what the experiences of African Americans were like in this time period, making them more likely to empathize with the situations they were born into.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">4. White, Walter. The Fire in the Flint. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996. **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This book is about a black doctor who was educated in the north, but moves to the south to practice medicine. It deals with racial prejudice in particular the battles between African Americans and the Ku Klux Klan. This is a work of fiction that explores racial issues around the turn of the century, and explores the deep racial divide that was present in society then, and later on in the 20th century.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource is interesting to me because it is a novel featuring a black protagonist, written during the Harlem Renaissance, by a white man. This is an interesting difference than the other sources that are African Americans writing about African Americans. Walter White was highly sensitive to the cause of civil rights, and his authoring of this book, along with being a prominent member of the NAACP helps show that there were white men and women who were willing to help African Americans gain their rights as equal citizens.

__<span style="color: #c98208; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 140%;">Video and Website Resources __
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**1) California Newsreel (2009). The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. []**

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This is a short little video about the starting of the Jim Crow laws in the south. The video refers to Jim Crow South as the “American version of Apartheid”. Right after the civil war ended so did slavery, but the Jim Crow era set race relations back. It’s a short clip but has interviews with civil rights activists and shows segregation and how it was slowly overcome with writing and the court system. It would go well with the Black Boy unit because it can show how African Americans used writing to move forward in the Harlem Renaissance.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2) Joinproject 451. (2010). Inside BLACK BOY with Tarantino Smith. [] **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This video starts off with Tarantino Smith introducing his monologue and explaining that he preformed in the play Black Boy as Richard Wright at different schools. And each student, no matter what they were going through; had some type of hunger. He then goes on to perform a monologue from the book/play.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This is a very important clip because it brings up the biggest theme in Richard Wright’s book, the theme of hunger. In Black Boy, he experiences many types of hunger, whether it is physical, emotional or mental. As a child he and his family go hungry after his father abandons them, he begs his mother for food that she cannot provide to her sons. As a slightly older youth he hungers to learn how to read, and as a young man Richard hungers to read anything and everything he can get his hands on. After a white man he works with lends him a library card it open his world up to all the authors and a never ending thirst for knowledge.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource is an excerpt from a documentary chronicling the life of Richard Wright and his writing career in general. It discusses some aspects of his early life, and how he came to be as a writer. It interviews other writers and people who new Richard growing up. It also has extensive interviews with Wright himself.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3) California Newsreel Documentary **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource is useful because it appeals to different learning styles. It also gives an inside look at the author of the book through personal interviews, and interviews with those who knew him. It is a useful tool because it will put a face behind the words for students, and it will make his personal experiences seem much more real being able to see the man who went through them.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource provides a large number of resources when it comes to teaching Richard Wright’s Black Boy. It provides in depth analysis of themes and chapter by chapter summaries. It also provides lesson plan ideas, assignments, and contextual history that will be very useful when teaching this book. The thematic studies that are provided in this resource are very well thought out and the creator hits the main themes very well.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">4) Black Boy lessons and many resources **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource deals exclusively with Black Boy and the time period associated with the novel. It provides resources that will help students understand the time frame better. The lesson plans that are provided are very good themselves, but they are easily adapted to fit specific groups of students a teacher may have, and to change them for other books later on.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This resource deals with anti-lynching movements in the early 20th century in the American south. It has firsthand accounts and numerous primary sources which will help students understand a little easier what it was like to be an African-American living in the Jim Crow South. It also elaborates a little bit on Black Codes and other African-American legal restrictions through the primary source documents.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">5) Crusade Against Lynching **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This source is very useful because it is full of primary sources that will help students understand the racial tension in the Jim Crow South. The fact that is from the library of congress means that I have full trust in this source. It will help demonstrate the problems that some African Americans faced in the South during this time period.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This website gives a detailed definition of segregation from the Reconstruction era onward. It goes over the Plessy vs. Ferguson case as an important contributor to segregation by making “separate but equal” constitutional. The site goes over the origins of segregation, as well as the overall impact it had on American society in later years, stating “As the primary source from the Cleveland Advocate in 1918 suggests, all-white juries and white judges punished African Americans more severely than whites, even when whites had committed the greater crime (see Primary Source "'Colored' Gets Three Years -- 'White' Gets Thirty Days" [1918]).”
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">6) Teaching: National History Education Clearinghouse. (2010). Jim Crow Segregation: The Difficult and Anti Democratic Work of White Supremacy. [] **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The site is worthwhile to read because it goes into detail about the segregation that Richard Wright was so confused and angry about in his book. He writes about his first time coming across prejudice as a young boy after hearing about a White man beating a black boy and not understanding fully the extent of the issue. He looks down at his fellow African Americans that succumb to the prejudices and segregation without putting up a fight in any way and refuses to accept his condition as a black man living in the American south of the early 1900’s.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">This website is fairly straight forward. It is a short biography about Richard Wright’s life, from birth to death. It describes his life and his family before, during, and after he became a writer.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">7) Bio.True Story. (2013). Richard Wright Biography. [] **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I like the fact that it gives a biography of what happened after he wrote Black Boy. His book ends with him finally accomplishing his dream of leaving the south and moving to the north, but he doesn’t tell his readers anything about living in the north. The final sentence is “With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky with their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.” (Wright, 298) It was good to see what happened to him post – Great Migration.