OK, for week one of Black History Month 2020, here is a reading on Alex Haley along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
Things Fall Apart ch.1 (1958)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Harper Lee and Flannery O’Conner notwithstanding, I confess to this prejudice: I have always thought of the Deep South, from the earliest age I was able to understand it as a place and a culture, as a deeply backward place. It wasn’t a coincidence that white nationalists chose Charlottesville, Virginia, as the place to hold their “Unite the Right” rally, nor is it a coincidence that the the Neo-Confederate movement finds adherents in this region of the United States.
I assume I needn’t belabor the the fact that Americans of African descent have suffered the worst oppression and indignity in the Deep South. For that reason, I include this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Deep South in this year’s observation of Black History Month. I think if we as a nation are to face our history without delusion, we have to admit that the mentality that used the color of a person’s skin to commodify him or her is alive and well in this country–especially in the Deep South.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Who was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in literature? Gwendolyn Brooks, in 1950, for Annie Allen.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Moving right along, here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Booker T. Washington for Black History Month 2020. If you’d like more worksheets like this one, head on over to Education World, where the good people who operate give away a year’s supply of them.
You will find typos in this document–that’s the point of it. Copyedit and repair faults!
“Consider the history of labor in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss’s daughter.”
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Wrapping up for today, here is an independent practice worksheet on the African slave trade. I find myself struggling to post this catalogue of indignities that Americans of African descent have endured. I’m down to the last few of them, and I begin to see why I have hesitated to post them over the years.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Charles Waddell Chestnutt: “(1858-1932) American novelist. Chestnutt, sometimes referred to as the first black American novelist, was a teacher, newspaperman, and lawyer. His first story, ‘The Goophered Grapevine,’ appeared in The Atlantic in 1887. His first book, The Conjure Woman (1899), centered on Uncle Julius McAdoo, a character with similarities to Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. His later books dealt with race prejudice, the best known being The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). In 1928, Chestnutt received the Spingarn gold medal for his pioneer work in depicting the struggles of African Americans.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Thurgood Marshall. If you want more of these, check with the eleemosynary spirits at Education World, who give away a year’s supply of them at their site.
My usual caution and entreaty on typos doesn’t apply here: there are a number of spelling, grammar and punctuation errors on each of these worksheets; the task is to fix them.
“Things Fall Apart: The first novel (1958) by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (born Albert Chinualumogo, 1930). Its theme is the mutual incomprehension between Ibo tribal communities and white officials in the 1890s. The title comes from the poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1921) by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research
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