Teaching African-American History: A Preliminary Reading List and Schedule
After reviewing some of the suggestions for readings in post-1865 African-American history and looking through a few syllabi, I’ve come up with a tentative reading list and schedule. Thoughts and critiques are most welcome and desperately needed….
Week 1: Intro to class. Students write short essay on how they have experienced race. Discuss concept of race as construct, etc.
Weeks 2-3: Reconstruction and survey. Reading: Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Week 4: Lynching. Reading: something from Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Students will also reflect on photos of lynching from Without Sanctuary.
Week 5: Turn-of-the-century strategy. Reading: DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, combined with an essay by Booker T. Washington.
Weeks 6-7: Living in or Leaving the South. Reading: All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. Video: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration
Weeks 8-9: The Civil Rights Movement in the South, in the North, and close to home. Readings: case-study essays on civil rights activism in three different locations (trying to give students connection) and a critical assessment of the movement.
Weeks 10-11: Black Power and the Black Panthers. Reading: Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
Weeks 12-13: Black culture, black politics, black society: blacksploitation, R&B/Soul/Hip-Hop/Rap, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, Rodney King. Readings: dunno yet. Essays, but I’m not sure what.
Weeks 14-15: Post-Racial America [italicized, loaded question mark]. Reading: Obama’s Dreams From My Father
Is the Reconstruction section going to be the place where slavery gets discussed? Seems like a tall order. (A perennial problem I guess; how do you deal with everything that happened Before We Begin?)
“A Taste of Power” seems like a smart choice.
For 12-13 I’d think about comparing the kernel of Jackson’s 1988 Dem convention speech, “Keep Hope Alive,” with — well, you won’t have to spell it out to anyone who was alive last year. Maybe that’s a discussion for the last two weeks. In the classroom you might be able to take all this someplace surprising where the blogs and media seldom/never manage to go.
Rob
August 21, 2009 at 7:56 am
Rob,
Yeah, I’ve got to stuff slavery into the Reconstruction section. Them’s the breaks, I guess, but the idea is that students will have taken (or will take) the pre-1865 course to get more on slavery. But I’m glad you brought it up; I’ll need to craft my lectures and discussion questions to get students thinking about the legacy of slavery.
I like your idea re: Jackson’s convention speeches. I’ve put both his 84 and 88 speeches on the syllabus towards the end of the course, and I’ll bring them up again after we read _Dreams From My Father_.
Thanks!
Geschichte Grad
August 24, 2009 at 8:39 am