Tag Archives: lgbtq history

James Baldwin on Integration

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

The Fire Next Time (1963)

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

The Fire Next Time (1963)

“A two-part essay by American writer James Baldwin. Variously employing biblical allusions, the rhapsodic rhetorical style of the black pulpit, as well as his own personal ‘witness’ Baldwin admonishes America to ‘end the racial nightmare.’ The first essay, ‘My Dungeon Shook,’ is a letter to his nephew James, on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In ‘Down at the Cross,’ Baldwin describes growing up in Harlem, his experiences with the Nation of Islam, and offers a warning and a plea for white and black American to work together.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

James Baldwin on the Shock of Recognition

“Around the age of 5, 6, or 7…. It comes off as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”

James Baldwin, Speech at Cambridge Union, Cambridge, England, 17 February 1965

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

The Weekly Text, February 9, 2018, Black History Month 2018 Week II: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on James Baldwin

Have you seen director Raoul Peck’s documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro yet? If not, I cannot recommend this film highly enough. I have always been a film buff, so I have greatly appreciated the arrival, in the last ten or fifteen years, of a bumper crop of engaged, talented documentarians. Indeed, most evenings I watch a documentary of some sort, so I like to think I know something about the form. If “I Am Not Your Negro” doesn’t represent formal perfection, then I don’t know what does.

Also, obviously, it showcases one of the most important public intellectuals and writers of my lifetime. I’ll simply say that The Fire Next Time was one of those books that radically altered the way I perceive the world, and I am grateful to it for that.

This week’s Text is a reading on James Baldwin with a comprehension sheet to accompany it. You might also find useful (and you can get lots more of these from the generous people at Education World) this Everyday Edit on the U.S.-Africa Capital Connection.

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.

The Weekly Text, August 25, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using Prepositions with Pronouns in the Objective Case

Last spring, while teaching my unit on prepositions, I found I needed to revise and strengthen this lesson plan on using prepositions with pronouns in the objective case; as long as I had it out, I duplicated and set it aside for a future text, and that future has arrived, so here it is as a Weekly Text.

To teach this lesson you’ll need the two do-now exercises (and, as I’ve written here before, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World generously give them away), the first of which is an Everyday Edit on Charles Drew; the second, another Everyday Edit, this one on the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, you may need if classroom exigencies extend this lesson into a second day. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using prepositions with the objective case of pronouns. Your students and you will probably find useful this learning support to accompany the worksheet.

I design my worksheets, as you’ll see explained in the About Weekly Texts on the home page banner, so that I can insert students’ names in them as both subject and object noun. This worksheet is, in terms of these insertions, complicated sufficiently that I’ve decided to include in this post this finished copy, ready for classroom use, of the worksheet to demonstrate how to fill the asterisks with subject and object nouns in the worksheet itself. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet which serves as the answer key as well.

That’s it. I hope this lesson is useful to you, and not marred by its prolixity.

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.

James Baldwin on Education as a Consciousness Raising Process

(Aside: Have you seen I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about James Baldwin’s abandoned book, Remember This House? It’s a fine film, richly deserving of all the fulsome praise it has garnered. I highly recommend it.)

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

James Baldwin “The Negro Child—His Self Image” in The Saturday Review (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

The Perils of Adolescence

“The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.”

Quentin Crisp

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

Rotten Reviews: Giovanni’s Room

“No matter of careful recording of detail or of poetic heightening of feeling can supply what is absent here–the understanding which is vital whether a character in fiction merely takes a walk or commits incest….”

Commonweal

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.