Tag Archives: readings/research

Cultural Literacy: Mary McLeod Bethune

Posted on March 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

On the first day of Women’s History Month 2021, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Mary McLeod Bethune.

While I would like to think Ms. Bethune requires no introduction, it seems safe to doubt that is the case. This important American heroine was an early and unequivocal champion of gender and racial equality, as well as an educator. In 1904, she started the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Negro Girls. By 1931, her school had grown to such an extent that it became Bethune-Cookman University, now one of the preeminent Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States.

In other words, Mary McLeod Bethune is a world-historical figure. All of this is another way of saying this: to those southern cities taking down statues of white men to fought for (Confederate generals and political leaders), argued for (Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney) or otherwise abetted the practice of slavery in the United States, a nice bronze casting of Mary McLeod Bethune would make an appropriate, indeed just, replacement for any of those vacant plinths. You know?

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.

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The Weekly Text, February 19, 2020, Black History Month 2021 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on George Washington Carver

Posted on February 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text, in this blog’s ongoing observance of Black History Month 2021, is this reading on George Washington Carver along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Today is the final Friday of Black History Month for this year; on Monday, March 1, this blog turns the corner to Women’s History Month.

Professor Carver is a staple of Black History, and usually observations of him tend to emphasize his interest in the peanut and its infinite varieties. While I don’t want to minimize those accomplishments–I for one would be very interested in knowing what Professor Carver’s recipes have added to the gross domestic product of the United States since their inception–I think it’s important to remember that George Washington Carver was a sophisticated agronomist who understood the need to rotate crops in southern fields so that cotton wouldn’t exhaust the topsoil. Alone, this area of his scholarly career makes Professor Carver an early environmentalist.

And all of this he accomplished while on the faculty of Tuskegee University in Alabama, in the heart of the Jim Crow South. If we White Americans are going to he honest with ourselves, we must stipulate that being a smart Black man in Alabama in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries could be dangerous indeed. For Americans of African descent, subservience and deference were the orders of the day in the Jim Crow South. His commitment to educating poor farmers also would have put him in the crosshairs of, say, the Ku Klux Klan.

So let’s all tip our hats to this great man.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: W.E.B. Du Bois

Posted on February 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on W.E.B. Du Bois. He is a world-historical figure about whom, I confess, I know less than I should.

Fortunately, I found my way to the rich public programming at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where I have been attending particularly rich and edifying webinars on Monday afternoons. These are open to the public; if you’re on Twitter, simply follow the Beinecke, which regularly tweets about upcoming events. Otherwise, searching “Mondays at Beinecke” (or clicking on that hyperlink) will take you to a calendar of events at the Library.

In any case, the Beinecke possesses some of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers, which came to the Library by way of one of the major collections at the library, the James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers, which is a treasure trove of materials related to Black History in the United States in the twentieth century.

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.

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Hank Aaron

Posted on February 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Aaron, Hank: (orig. Henry Louis) (1934-2021) U.S. baseball player. Born in Mobile, Alabama, he played briefly in the Negro and minor leagues before joining the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. He would play outfield most of his career. By the time the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1965, he had hit 398 career home runs; in 1974 he hit his 715th, breaking Babe Ruth’s record. He played his final two seasons (1975-76) with the Milwaukee Brewers. His records for career home runs (755), extra-base hits (1,477), and runs batted in (2,297) remain unbroken, and only Ty Cobb and Pete Rose exceeded him in career hits (3,771). He is renowned as one of the greatest hitters of all time.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Cultural Literacy: Burundi

Posted on February 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Central African nation of Burundi. This is another African nation that fell victim to the depredations of colonialism, in its case Germany and then Belgium. Like its neighbor, Rwanda, Burundi’s principal ethnic groups are the Hutus and the Tutsis; also, as in Rwanda, the Tutsis have attacked the Hutus and perpetrated a genocide–known as the Ikiza–against them. And, in 1993, one year before the genocide in Rwanda, there was civil conflict following an attempted coup in Burundi that resulted in the deaths of 25,000 Tutsis.

In other words, this worksheet, which is a full page and as such useful for independent practice, opens the door to an exploration of European colonialism and its legacy in colonized nations.

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.

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The Weekly Text, February 19, 2020, Black History Month 2021 Week III: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Robert Johnson

Posted on February 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text, in this blog’s ongoing observation of Black History Month 2021, is this reading on Robert Johnson with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If your students know anything about Robert Johnson, it is probably the legend that surrounds his acquisition of his breathtaking facility in playing the guitar: to wit, that he made a deal with the devil himself. In exchange for endowing Robert Johnson with preternatural ability in playing the guitar, the devil took ownership of Robert Johnson’s soul. This has been the stuff of popular culture for a long time, and I’ll cite Walter Hill’s 1986 film Crossroads–a title derived from one of Mr. Johnson’s best-known songs, made a rock-and-roll standard by the British trio Cream–as a conspicuous example. The number of guitarists Robert Johnson inspired is as impossible to overstate as the influence of his songs in American popular music over the years.

Put another way, this is probably very high-interest material for some students. If you want to consider the role of Papa Legba in Robert Johnson’s crossroads story, you and your student very likely have the makings of a synthetic research paper. There are, in the final analysis, West African cultural touchstones behind the story of Robert Johnson’s encounter with the devil at the crossroads.

Incidentally, the great music writer Robert Palmer, in his book Deep Blues, reported that Robert Johnson was given an “ice course.” i.e. a glass of poisoned whiskey, by a jealous husband in a rural juke joint. You probably won’t be surprised that there is a lot of speculation on this floating around on the Internet. As the headline to one of these articles rightly puts it, “The only solid fact about Robert Johnson is his music….” Which, in fact, is a pretty good place to start in writing about this towering figure in American culture.

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.

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Richard Allen

Posted on February 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Richard Allen: (1760-1831) U.S. religious leader. He was born to slave parents in Philadelphia, and his family was sold to a Delaware farmer. A Methodist convert at 17, he was licensed to preach five years later. By 1786 he had purchased his freedom and settled in Philadelphia, where he joined St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Racial discrimination prompted him to withdraw in 1787, and he turned an old blacksmith shop into the first black church in the United States. Allen and his followers built the Bethel African Methodist Church, and in 1799 he was ordained as its minister. In 1816 he organized a conference of black leaders to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church, of which he was named the first bishop.”

Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Cultural Literacy: Letter from Birmingham Jail

Posted on February 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Martin Luther King Jr.’s justly famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This is a full-page document, so it is suitable for use as independent practice–or however you need to alter it for your students. This is a brief introduction to the letter and the gravamen of its argument. It should not, indeed cannot, be used as a substitute for the actual text of the Letter.

As you probably know, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” remains one of the great pieces of English rhetoric, as well as an important philosophical statement. It is, in every sense, a world-historical document. It should be taught as such–as well as for its importance to the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

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

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Nella Larsen

Posted on February 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Nella Larsen: (1891-1964) American novelist and short-story writer. Larsen’s reputation as one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance rests upon her two published novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Both are studies of middle-class mulatto women and the politics of the color line. Here work is noted for its economy of expression and psychological depth. Although Larsen was the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim fellowship (1930), her literary career declined shortly afterward due to professional and personal difficulties. Larsen died in obscurity after working as a nurse for more than twenty years in New York City.”

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

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Cultural Literacy: Black Muslims/Nation of Islam

Posted on February 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Black Muslims. The minute I saw the text that serves as the basis for this reading comprehension worksheet, let alone wrote the document, I was uneasy. In fact, I was and remain so uneasy about this worksheet that I rewrote it as a worksheet on the Nation of Islam.

Why was I uneasy? Well, first of all, thanks for asking! For starters, I think “Black Muslims” is an appellation contrived and articulated by White Americans in the 1960s to describe something they didn’t understand, and something, perhaps, that made them anxious. One thing I always tried to teach kids in my classes is that they possess a fundamental right, prerogative, indeed responsibility, to identify themselves–and not leave that important job to someone else. And I don’t know about you, but to my ear, the term “Black Muslims” coming out of the mouths of people who don’t identify as members of the Nation of Islam carries a note of derogation.

But it was an article of popular culture that supplied confirmation of my position on this worksheet–namely Regina King’s superlative new film  One Night in Miami. Have you seen it? It’s based on an actual night–February 25, 1964–when Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke met in a Miami hotel room. Based on the stage play by Kemp Powers, it is a powerful film of exceptionally strong dialogue (kudos to Mr. Powers for the strength of his exposition, which is among the best I have ever heard), stellar performances, and deft direction.

In any case, at one point in the film, as Malcolm X and Sam Cooke engage in a heated argument, Sam Cooke makes a sneering remark about “Black Muslims.” Malcolm X quickly retorts, “The Nation of Islam to you.”

And that, in the final analysis, is why this post contains two documents as well as a healthy dose of skepticism about the phrase “Black Muslims.”

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.

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