The Primary Source

Thanks to a "like" from   Gigi Nelson , I was reminded of a link I shared in 2021 about an African American Perspectives collection at the Library of Congress. In that post, I inserted a poetic preface to a speech given in 1917 by a Los Angeles high school senior named Myrtle Anderson titled "A Plea for Justice." The preface starts with these words

Before her white-skinned class she stood,

A stamp of perfect womanhood.

No man has ever shown more grit

Or made a speech more bold or fit.

And it ends with these words:

Were I the thunder and could sing,

Throughout the earth my song would ring.

Of this sweet Ethiopian maid,

Who faced her class, and unafraid.

Connecting the Dots

Only yesterday, I read a Washington Post article about the largely unreported experiences of 2024 Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, in her high school in Montreal during the 1970s - a time of great political unrest in that part of Canada. (Gift link: https://wapo.st/3YjSi8e.) Although the political upheaval of that period emanated from arguments over language (French vs. English), the cultural and economic underpinnings of the conflict in many ways resembled the racial, caste, and class politics of that same period in the United States. 

As one classmate who was interviewed for the article said, "All of a sudden she [Kamala Harris] was a minority within a minority within a minority." 

I think for any teacher wanting to guide open and free discussions about the impact of race and culture on the development of future leaders, it would be fascinating to combine the primary source from 1917 with the article from today. Too political? I don't really think so, but I'm no longer in the classroom, so I'd love to read more opinions in the comments. 

By the way, the information in the article about the discrimination faced by Kamala Harris' mother, a scientist and a woman and a minority, could take class discussions in all sorts of interesting directions.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/lcrbmrp.t8054/?sp=7 

  9 - 12    Social Studies/History    Civil Rights    Civic Engagement    Political Candidates  

From American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840

I've been reading Heather Cox Richardson's "How the South Won the Civil War" and I highly recommend it. I was struck by the observation she made that post Civil War blacks were equated with communist.

Recalling that Marx's "Das Kapital" came out in 1867, she went on to write "These growing northern fears about a radicalized lower class meshed easily with southern racism. The Paris Commune had organized in 1871, the year after the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed black men the right to vote. White men in South Carolina took advantage of this confluence and began to attack the idea of black voting not on racial grounds-although all the men involved had been vocal in their dislike of African Americans-but on the grounds that it gave poor men control over the states' government, and that they were using that majority power to redistribute wealth.'

I thought I'd use Chronicling America to see if I could find contemporary articles using search "negro" + "Communist" (within 10 words of each other). I found quite a few articles and thought I might make for the start of an interesting lesson.

I've included a few articles and a lesson idea:
Divide the students into small groups and assign each group one of the newspaper clippings from the 1870s that argued the connection between Black rights / suffrage and communism.
Ask each group to read and analyze their assigned clipping, and answer the following questions:
- What is the main argument or claim of the article?
- What evidence or reasoning does the article use to support its argument or claim?
- What is the tone or perspective of the article? Is it biased or objective? How can you tell?
- How does the article relate Black rights / suffrage to communism? What is the logic or assumption behind this connection?
- How does the article reflect the fear of the white landowners in the South? What are they afraid of losing or changing?
- After each group has completed their analysis, ask them to share their findings and insights with the rest of the class. Encourage the students to compare and contrast the different articles and their arguments, and to identify any similarities or differences in their approaches or perspectives.

As a follow-up activity, ask the students to research and discuss some contemporary views that promote the same assertion that voting rights for all will lead to redistribution of wealth from the upper to lower classes. For example, they can look at some recent debates or controversies over voter suppression, gerrymandering, campaign finance, or tax policies. They can also examine some current examples or movements that advocate for social or economic justice, such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, or the Green New Deal. Ask the students to consider the following questions:
- How do these contemporary views echo or challenge the views expressed in the newspaper clippings from the 1870s?
- What are the historical and social contexts that shape these views? How have they changed or remained the same over time?
- What are the implications or consequences of these views for the political and economic system of the United States? How do they affect the rights and opportunities of different groups of people?

The daily gazette (Wilmington, Del.), June 10, 1879

The daily gazette (Wilmington, Del.), August 4, 1876

Bellows Falls times (Bellows Falls, Vt.), March 5, 1875

The daily Gazette (Wilmington, Del.), October 25, 1877

CodeSwitch, a podcast from NPR, just aired an amazing program with the audio recordings of the women who led the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began with Claudette Colvin's arrest and became a full-on movement with Rosa Park's arrest.

It's worth having your students listen to the entire 36 minute episode.  

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1197954608/the-women-who-masterminded-the-montgomery-bus-boycott

What did you hear that surprised you?

Were there things that happened prior to Rosa Parks' refusing to move that you had never heard before?

Why do you think women were so integral to the boycott?

How was Martin Luther King, Jr important to the boycott? 

Look at contemporary resources -- how has Montgomery, Alabama changed since 1956? How has it resisted change?

Library Resources on the Boycott

The Bus Boycott: Rosa Parks Papers

Looking Back on the Bus Boycott blog post

Instructions to carpool drivers and passengers

Newspapers across the nation talking about the Boycott

Where Rosa Parks Waited for the Bus

Rita Dove and "On the Bus with Rosa Parks"

Beyond the Bus -- video

Museum Resources

Standing Up by Sitting Down E-learning

The Rosa Parks Bus

381 Days

Alabama Civil Rights Trail

  3 - 5    6 - 8    9 - 12    13+    Social Studies/History    Black History    Montogmey Bus Boycott    Civil Rights  

An interesting story in The NY Times  Here’s a free gift link to the article

”Thomas Smallwood was a busy man in the summer of 1842. Born into slavery outside Washington, D.C., in 1801, he had largely educated himself and bought his own freedom 11 years before. By day, he ran a shoemaking business from the little house he shared with his wife and four children a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. By night, he was organizing daring, dangerous escapes from slavery — not by ones and twos but by the wagonload — from Washington, Baltimore and the surrounding counties.

Yet somehow he found time every week or two to write a new dispatch for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany, N.Y., a stop for many of those he was sending north. Written at considerable risk, his letters mercilessly mocked enslavers and celebrated those fleeing from them, using everyone’s real names — except for his own, which he hid behind a pseudonym. And one day early that August he took up his pen and made literary history, becoming the first to use a phrase that would resound through the subsequent decades of slavery and to the present day: underground railroad.…”  Here’s a free gift link to read the rest of the article

The indictment of President Trump brings The Enforcement Act of 1870, a post Civil War Act by the Grant Administration, into the news.  What research paths might students follow in the Library of Congress to understand this Act?  I’ve found the Ulysses S. Grant Papers and also quite a few references in Chronicling America written around that date - really interesting.

Outside the Library, The National Park Service and the Senate also have solid articles.  What else have you found and what would be your approach to teaching about this Act?

  Ku Klux Klan    Ulysses S. Grant    Voting rights    Enforcement Act 1870    Indictment  

In 1904, the city of St. Louis hosted a grand exposition to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase and showcase the achievements of American civilization.

Note: LOC has a large collection of photos from the Exposition here

The Louisiana Purchase International Exposition, or the St. Louis World's Fair, attracted nearly 20 million visitors from around the world, who marveled at the wonders of technology, art, agriculture, and industry displayed in more than 1,500 buildings across 1,200 acres of land.

But among the dazzling attractions, there was also a dark and disturbing spectacle: the human zoo. The fair organizers arranged for more than 2,000 indigenous people from various regions and countries to be brought to the fairgrounds and exhibited in "living displays" that purported to demonstrate their cultures, lifestyles, and levels of development.

These displays were often based on racist and imperialist assumptions that placed white Americans at the top of a hierarchy of civilization and justified their domination over other peoples.

The Philippine Reservation

One of the largest and most popular exhibits was the Philippine Reservation, which occupied 47 acres and housed over 1,000 native Filipinos from different ethnic groups. The reservation was designed to showcase the benefits of American colonial rule in the Philippines, which had been acquired by the United States after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

The Filipinos were forced to live in replicas of their villages, wear their traditional costumes, perform their dances and rituals, and even slaughter and eat dogs as part of their daily routine.

They were also subjected to various tests and measurements by anthropologists and scientists who sought to classify them according to racial categories and physical traits.

Advertisement for human exhibits from the Philippine Islands at the World's Fair, St. Louis, 1904 ~ Source - Wikimedia

The reservation also featured a mock battle between Filipino insurgents and American soldiers, which reenacted the ongoing Philippine-American War that had claimed thousands of lives. The battle was staged to portray the Filipinos as savage rebels who needed to be pacified by the superior American forces.

The fairgoers were encouraged to cheer for the Americans and boo for the Filipinos, who were often injured or killed during the performance.

The Anthropology Department

Another section of the fair that displayed human beings as objects of curiosity and study was the Anthropology Department, which was located near the Art Palace. The department was headed by W.J. McGee, a prominent ethnologist who believed that human races could be ranked according to their intelligence, morality, and progress.

He arranged for several groups of indigenous people from different continents to be exhibited in reconstructed environments that reflected their supposed stages of evolution.

“Home life of the bearded Ainus of northern Japan” ~ Source- Library of Congress

Among these groups were the Patagonians from Argentina, the Ainu from Japan, the Igorot from the Philippines, the Apache from Arizona, the Arapaho from Wyoming, and the Pygmies from Africa.

They were expected to demonstrate their skills, crafts, games, and ceremonies for the amusement of the spectators, who often treated them with contempt or pity. Some of them were also subjected to physical examinations and psychological tests by McGee and his colleagues, who collected data on their cranial capacity, reaction time, memory, and emotions.

The Pike

The Pike was the name given to the amusement area of the fair, where visitors could find rides, games, shows, food stalls, and souvenirs. It was also where some of the most sensational and exploitative human exhibits were located.

One of them was called "Darkest Africa," which featured about 100 Africans from various tribes who were displayed in a simulated jungle setting. They were surrounded by exotic animals such as lions, elephants, giraffes, and crocodiles, which added to the illusion of a wild and primitive land.

“Negro dwarfs from the interior of Africa” ~ Source - Library of Congress

Another exhibit on the Pike was called "The Streets of Cairo," which featured about 200 Arabs and Egyptians who performed dances, music, acrobatics, snake-charming, and other acts that appealed to the orientalist fantasies of the Western audience.

The most famous attraction of this exhibit was Little Egypt, a belly dancer who caused a sensation with her provocative moves and costumes. She was rumored to have invented the hoochie-coochie dance, which became a popular craze in America.

Hindu acrobats, in mysterious Asia on the Pike - Source - Library of Congress

The Legacy

The human zoo of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis was not an isolated phenomenon. It was part of a larger trend of exhibiting non-white people as curiosities and specimens in fairs, museums, circuses, zoos, and other venues throughout Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These exhibits reflected and reinforced the racist and imperialist ideologies that justified colonialism, slavery, genocide, segregation, and discrimination against millions of people around the world.

Often posts in our TPS Teachers Network send me to the Library after more information.  Such is the case with   Mary Johnson ’s Album on Jump Ropes!  With this image I added some Teaching Notes (having little to do with jump ropes!).  Please “jump in” with your comments and approaches.

  Chicago    Black Belt    Civil Rights    The Great Migration  

While doing some research in Chronicling America, I stumbled on this rather shocking article from "The Anaconda Standard" (Anaconda, Mont.) November 19, 1899. Reprinted from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal.

The article asserts that the black race in the United States is on the path to extinction due to a steady decrease in their population compared to the white population. 

It details a variety of racist themes of the era - clearly putting the cause of the decline on the inferiority of Black Americans.

If you are looking for a source to teach either the history of racial segregation or the history of racial prejudice and stereotypes - this is it.

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84036012/1899-11-19/ed-1/seq-8/

Axios did a deep dive on the subject here: The rush to save fading Black history

It opens with:
Hundreds of sites important to Black history are at risk of disappearing as buildings sit abandoned, forgotten, or dismissed amid urban renewal and climate change.

Why it matters: The sites tell stories about abolition, civil rights, and Black entertainment.

Details: Axios Local reporters from around the country this Black History Month searched their cities for sites linked to the story of Black Americans and assessed the status of those sites.

And then gets into a variety of links to local reports from across the county

You might also like this post I did Segregated America’s TripAdvisor

I’m a fan of celebrating and recognizing national Heritage Months. Highlighting heritage months broadens the scope of student knowledge, adds to the picture of our past and provides an understanding of the richness and historical influences of our diverse cultures.

As we “March on” to Women’s History Month, students can take what they learned during February’s Black History Month and can continue to share by creating and publishing epub digital books.

As a sampler of ways teachers can engage students in the creation books, I used some of the Library of Congress primary source information on W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paris Exhibition. You can access my sampler, The Resilient Faces of Black History in the Apple Book Store (free) or you can download the pdf copy here in Google Drive.

Impactful learning is creative. Hopefully my sampler models ways teachers can engage students in the creation of books with historic portraits or collages as we celebrate the resilience that is part of Black History.

Please share any examples of creative projects your learners have participated in.

  Black History    W.E.B. Du Bois