After our day exploring responses to the Jim Crow era by looking at Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois creatively with the use of Haiku, today we worked to put additional information on the table to further inform how we may evaluate ways in which to respond. First we brought our attention back to the present day with a discussion of Eric Garner and the New York grand jury's failure to press charges against the police officer involved. We then read and talked about this ARTICLE and how the information from our webquests and documents might have influenced the author. After a segue into the topic of lynching, we looked at Without Sanctuary, a short film with images of lynchings put to the music of Billie Holliday as she sings Strange Fruit. A different version of the images can be found HERE (although it has narration rather than the music). The song can be found HERE. After responding to the images in our notebooks, we worked to answer some questions by reading excerpts from Hellhounds an essay by Leon Litwack.
We spent the last part of class thinking about the first part of Native Son. In groups, we were assigned one section of Book One to consider and filled out this CHART corresponding to that section. We'll continue our look at Book One on Monday.
