Celebrating Black History Month All Year Long Through Literacy, Media, and Arts
Introduction
Carter G. Woodson is credited as the founder of Black History Month. In 1976, the celebration moved from a week-long event to the month-long practice we know today. However, Woodson’s intention was never that the celebration be finite. Instead, he viewed this period as the culminating events of a full year of regular study and celebration.
At Mizzou Academy, we celebrate the didactic power of story, literature, and arts. Our 2024 Black History Month Teaching Guide includes recommended reading, strong connections to the arts, lesson plans and activities for continued engagement all year long.
Each year, our school forms a team to put together an annual resource of readings and activities aligned with the Black History Month theme. In 2024, the theme is art as a platform for social justice. The National Museum of African American History and Culture Links to an external site.writes that, “African American artists — poets, writers, visual artists, and dancers — have historically served as change agents through their crafts.”
Our conversations this month (February) focused on sculpture, story, poetry, painting, and quilting, and music. Lisa DeCastro, our Elementary Coordinator, shared about taking her sons to the Kehinde Wiley exhibit in San Francisco. Lou Jobst, Language Arts Lead, spoke at the power of teaching Langston Hughes. Kathryn Fishman-Weaver, our Executive Director, shared about a transformative moment meeting Nikki Giovanni in her twenties.
As Giovanni, the great American poet writes, “If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.” Our 2024 Celebrating Black History Month project team agrees, and adds that we would also sing to each other. To kick off our school-wide African American Read-In, Language Arts faculty member, Lou Jobst picked up his guitar and performed an acoustic rendition of Langston Hughes’, “The Weary Blues.”
Whether it’s hip hop, blues, or jazz, as you ramp up for continued celebration and study, queue up your inspiration music. We tended back to classic standards this month like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and B.B King. However, we also shared that we had Ben Harper, Tracy Chapman, and, of course, Beyonce playing in our cars as we drove to and from school meetings.
Music matters. Connection matters. The arts matter. Our history matters. Black history matters. We hope the recommendations and activities in this guide inspire you and your students to learn, lead, create, read, sing, laugh, and celebrate.
BOOKS THAT MATTER TO US AS TEACHERS, LEARNERS, AND HUMAN BEINGS
Publishers Descriptions listed below
Elementary and Early Childhood
I am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James
The confident Black narrator of this book is proud of everything that makes him who he is. He's got big plans, and no doubt he'll see them through--as he's creative, adventurous, smart, funny, and a good friend. Sometimes he falls, but he always gets back up. And other times he's afraid, because he's so often misunderstood and called what he is not. So slow down and really look and listen, when somebody tells you--and shows you--who they are. There are superheroes in our midst!
My Hair is a Garden by Cozbi A. Cabrera
After a day of being taunted by classmates about her unruly hair, Mackenzie can't take any more and she seeks guidance from her wise and comforting neighbor, Miss Tillie. Using the beautiful garden in the backyard as a metaphor, Miss Tillie shows Mackenzie that maintaining healthy hair is not a chore nor is it something to fear. Most importantly, Mackenzie learns that natural black hair is beautiful.
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe
Jean-Michel Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocketed to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art world had ever seen. But before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games and in the words that we speak, and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own introduce young readers to the powerful message that art doesn't always have to be neat or clean--and definitely not inside the lines--to be beautiful.
A Sweet Smell of Roses by Angela Johnson
There’s a sweet, sweet smell in the air as two young girls sneak out of their house, down the street, and across town to where men and women are gathered, ready to march for freedom and justice. Inspired by countless children who took a stand, two Coretta Scott King honorees offer a heart-lifting glimpse of children’s role in the civil rights movement.
Middle Grade
Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by Jason Reynolds
Jason Reynolds conjures ten tales (one per block) about what happens after the dismissal bell rings, and brilliantly weaves them into one wickedly funny, piercingly poignant look at the detours we face on the walk home, and in life.
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacquelyn Woodson
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
High School and Adult
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
From the moment of its publication in 1952, Invisible Man generated the impact of a cultural tidal wave. Here was a pioneering work of African-American fiction that addressed not only the social, but the psychic and metaphysical, components of racism: the visibility of a large portion of this country’s populace and the origins of that invisibility in one people’s willed blindness and another’s habit of self-concealment.
But Ellison had created far more than a commentary on race. He had attempted to decipher the cruel and beautiful paradox that is America, a country founded on high ideals and cold-blooded betrayals. And he sent his naive hero plunging through almost every stratum of this divided society, from an ivy-covered college in the deep South to the streets of Harlem, from a sharecropper’s shack to the floor of a hellish paint factory, from a millionaire’s cocktail party to a communist rally, from church jubilees to street riots. Along the way, Ellison’s narrator encounters the full range of strategies that African-Americans have used in their struggle for survival and dignity–as well as all the scams, alibis, and naked brutalities that whites have used to keep them in their place.
In his prose, Ellison managed to encompass the entirety of the American language–black and white, high-brow and low-down, musical, religious, and jivey–and reshape it to his own ends. In Invisible Man he created one of those rare works that is a world unto itself, a book that illuminates our own in ways that are at once hilarious and devastating.
Nikel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.
The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not-Quite Poems - Nikki Giovanni
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American culture and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni’s poetry has touched millions of readers worldwide, focusing a sharp eye on politics, racial inequality, violence, gender, social justice and African-American life. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well.
Beyond February: Teaching Black History Any Day, Every Day, and All Year Long, K–3 by Dawnavyn James
Dawnavyn James believes Black history shouldn't be relegated to the month of February. In her groundbreaking book, Beyond February: Teaching Black History Any Day, Every Day, and All Year Long, K-3, she provides a practical guide for elementary educators who seek to teach history in truthful and meaningful ways that help young students understand the past, the present, and the world around them.
Drawing on her experiences as a classroom teacher and a Black history researcher, James illustrates the big and small ways that we can center Black history in our everyday teaching and learning practices across the curriculum using read-alouds, music, historical documents, art, and so much more.
All Ages
Bold Words from Black Women by Dr. Tamar Pizzoli
This incredible volume honors fifty modern women, presented with their own words, who have dared to raise their voices and persevere through hardship and injustice to become revolutionaries and dreamers, artists and creators.
Featuring women like musical powerhouse Beyoncé Knowles; tennis star Serena Williams; Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; and activist Angela Davis, this stylish book is perfect for any reader who is seeking grace, courage, strength, and self-love.
Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic by Connie Choi
Filled with reproductions of Kehinde Wiley’s bold, colorful, and monumental work, this book encompasses the artist’s various series of paintings as well as his sculptural work—which boldly explore ideas about race, power, and tradition. Celebrated for his classically styled paintings that depict African American men in heroic poses, Kehinde Wiley is among the expanding ranks of prominent black artists—such as Sanford Biggers, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—who are reworking art history and questioning its depictions of people of color. Co-published with the Brooklyn Museum of Art for the major touring retrospective, this volume surveys Wiley’s career from 2001 to the present. It includes early portraits of the men Wiley observed on Harlem’s streets, and which laid the foundation for his acclaimed reworkings of Old Master paintings by Titian, van Dyke, Manet, and others, in which he replaces historical subjects with young African American men in contemporary attire: puffy jackets, sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps. Also included is a generous selection from Wiley’s ongoing World Stage project; several of his enormous Down paintings; striking male portrait busts in bronze; and examples from the artist’s new series of stained glass windows. Accompanying the illustrations are essays that introduce readers to the arc of Wiley’s career, its critical reception, and ongoing evolution.
Lesson Plans and Activities for Further Engagement and Learning
Elementary
Artist Spotlight: Alma Thomas
Elementary Lesson | Submitted by Lisa DeCastro
Meet the Superhero: Stunt Boy In the Meantime
Elementary Lesson for grades 3-5 | Submitted by Lisa DeCastro
Secondary
“Beautiful, also, are the Souls of My People”
Grades 7-10 | Submitted by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver
Story Quilts: An illustrated Personal Narrative
Grades 7-12 | Submitted by Sherry Denney
The Power of Song:” A Brand New Day” from The Wiz
Grades 9-12 | Submitted by Lisa DeCastro
Compiled with love, hope, and song by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver, Lisa DeCastro, Sherry Denney, and Lou Jobst