Introduction

Due to constant curricular changes, increased testing, and the growing list of topics we must cover in our history courses, it has become increasingly difficult to engage students in the kind of lengthy projects that allow them to explore cultural contexts. In the race to learn, understand, and analyze the critical characteristics and major issues of the “periods” of American history, students often do not have time to pay attention to the particular, distinctive, and sometimes peculiar consciousness of past times. Yet, literary expressions are an important vehicle for revealing human reactions to historical events and can provide key insights about the shared consciousness of an era. Because it captures powerful emotions in distilled responses, I have found that poetry is a particularly useful and engaging vehicle for revealing the complexities of a historical moment.

I teach at Wilson Magnet High School, a city high school in Rochester, New York, where the majority of students are classified as “minorities,” although the mixture is much more complex than traditional categories suggest. I first began to use African-American poetry in Humanities, a required senior course in the Academy of Excellence. Humanities is an interdisciplinary course that blends history, literature, art, and philosophy and includes all levels of students, from honors to special education.

According to Gwendolyn Brooks (born 1917), who visited our school in 1988, poetry is “life distilled.” Brooks answered questions about the origins of the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and expressions in her poetry, and many of her answers addressed particular historical issues and circumstances. Our students were extremely interested in the lives she wrote about, as well as in her own artistic life. After her visit, my students used her ideas and work as evidence in their essays and examinations to illustrate the “times” of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Time Frame

The following three exercises on poetry and history are not designed as a single lesson but rather as adjunct activities that may be used at the appropriate historical periods. If desired, they could be used as a two- or three-day lesson, especially if the whole poems are used. I generally use excerpts of the poetry, but have been pleased to find that many of my students insist I give them access to the entire work.

Objectives

Lesson 1. To explore a poem as a historical document and discover how the messages of a poem are rooted in a particular time and place.

Lesson 2. To examine issues that were critical to African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lesson 3. To understand the concept of social and political change over time.

Procedure

I. Poems as Historical Documents

The first exercise introduces the process of using a poem as a historical document and works in conjunction with a current event topic on youth culture. “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, was written in 1960 but resonates with contemporary issues.

1. Have students read the poem, then lead a discussion based on the questions that follow the piece (see Handout 1).
2. After a discussion of the relevant issues of the period, the conditions of urban America and drop-outs, ask students to assess the similarities and differences of conditions in 1960 and today. As an additional assessment option, students can work in groups to create a brief poem about a group of youth and their perspective in the current era.

II. Hope and Despair in the Progressive Era

This exercise follows substantial reading on the period, including relevant historical documents demonstrating that African Americans faced serious violence in lynchings and race riots and experienced the extension of caste segregation and discrimination. The selected poems articulate African-American responses to these conditions. In 1906, Atlanta, Georgia was the site of a race riot against the African American community. The mob, incited by false newspaper reports of an alleged rape, targeted the neighborhood where hard-working African Americans had purchased houses and “uplifted” themselves. W. E. B. DuBois, then a researcher at Atlanta University, lived nearby and sat on his front porch with a rifle as white mobs rampaged several blocks away. The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, as well as other violence, particularly the Springfield, Illinois Riot of 1908, led to the founding of the NAACP.

1. Give students copies of the following poems: “We Wear The Mask” (1896), by Paul Laurence Dunbar; “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), by James Weldon Johnson; and “A Litany at Atlanta” (1906), by W. E. B. DuBois (Handout 2).
2. Direct students to work in groups to discuss and write answers to the questions that appear on Handout 2.
3. Assign students an analytical essay assessing the meaning of the “Progressive Period,” based on the results of their group work.

III. Change Over Time

This exercise follows the textbook section on the 1950s. Students should have already studied Langston Hughes in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and read a few of his poems and essays.

1. Distribute excerpts of poems by Hughes (Handout 3).
2. After the students have read the poems, lead them in a discussion of the questions that accompany the selections.
3. Next, help the class develop a timeline of the period and chart important political, social, economic, and cultural issues for African Americans between 1920 and 1950. Assign each student a brief essay or position paper on the degree of change (or lack of it) during the period. If time permits, show a video on Langston Hughes which is part of the Voices and Visions series and widely available in libraries.

Bibliography

Chapman, Abraham. Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature. New York: New American Library, 1968.

Fleming, Robert E. James Weldon Johnson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

Giovanni, Nikki, ed. Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Huggins, Nathan, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford, 1995.

Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper. Annenberg/CPB, New York: Center for Visual History, 1988. Video recording, 58 Minutes.

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1998.

Miller, E. Ethelbert. In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1994.

Shapiro, Herbert. White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Smallwood, David. Profiles of Great African-Americans. Lincolnwood, Il.: Publications International, 1998.

Strickland, Michael R. African-American Poets. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow Publications, 1996.

Handout 1

We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Pool Players
Seven at the Golden Shovel

We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Discussion Questions:

1. When was this poem written? What evidence directed you to the date you chose?
2. Where is the Golden Shovel? What kind of environment is it in?
3. How would you describe the age, appearance, and gender of the speakers?
4. Why do they think they are going to die? Why don’t they do anything about it?
5. If this poem were written today, who would write it? What conditions would they describe?

Handout 2

The Mask (1896)
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask.

Lift Every Voice and Sing (1900)
(Excerpt)
by James Weldon Johnson

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has
taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has
brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

A Litany at Atlanta (1906)
(Excerpt)
by W. E. B. DuBois

A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang and crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee. And all this was to sate the greed of greedy men who hide behind the veil of vengeance!

Bend us Thine ear, O Lord!

In the pale, still morning we looked upon the deed. We stopped our ears, and held our leaping hands, but they—did they not wag their heads and leer and cry with bloody jaws: Cease from Crime! The word was mockery for thus they train a hundred crimes while we do cure one.

Turn again our captivity, O Lord!

Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God, it was an humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him: Work and Rise. He worked. Did this man sin? Nay, but some one told how some one had said another did—one whom he had never seen nor known. Yet for that man’s crime this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil.

Hear us, O heavenly Father!

Discussion Questions:

1. How would you characterize Paul Laurence Dunbar’s reflections on African American life?
2. What particular conditions and situations do you think he had in mind when he wrote this poem?
3. Why do you think James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice” is called the Negro National Anthem?
4. After reviewing the facts of the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, examine the particular issues on which W. E. B. DuBois focuses in these stanzas.
5. Why do you think that he selected them?
6. What argument does he indirectly make against Booker T. Washington’s leadership?
7. Why did DuBois choose to write a litany?
8. What does this poetry reveal about the lives of African Americans during the so-called Progressive Era?

Handout 3
The Weary Blues (1925)
by Langston Hughes

Because of prohibitive permissions fees, the OAH Magazine of History is unable to print a copy of this poem. A copy of it appears in Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), on page 50. It is also available on the World Wide Web through the Langston Hughes page of the Academy of American Poets, <http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/lhughfst.htm>.

Montage of a Dream Deferred
(Excerpt)
by Langston Hughes

Harlem (1951)

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Discussion Questions:

1. What does the first poem tell us about Harlem in the 1920s and jazz culture?
2. Assess Hughes’s judgment of that culture.
3. Compare and contrast the two poems.
4. Speculate on some possible explanations for the differences. What has happened in Harlem in the intervening years?
5. What has happened in Harlem since the 1950s? How would Hughes have responded to these events?

Doris M. Meadows teaches humanities at Wilson Magnet High School, in Rochester, New York.