ENGLISH II HONORS OCTOBER 4 th

1. ENGLISH II HONORSOCTOBER 4th Please drop off any late work from September on my desk before class starts. Get out your notes from yesterday.

2. REMINDERS • If you have a document from the College/Career Fair, drop it on my desk before you leave for ex. cred. • Bring Black Boy forever (starting Monday). • Don’t loose participation points by forgetting it! • Does everyone have Black Boy? • We will finish taking notes on Black Boy History in a moment. • Keep all notes for this class in a separate section.

3. STANDARDS Literary Response and Analysis 3.12: Analyze the way in which a work of literature is related to the themes and issues of its historical period. (Historical approach)

4. (I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO GET BACK…) • 1915: Ku Klux Klan is revived. • They preach hate against Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. • The Klan gains control of governments of Texas, Oklahoma, Oregon and Indiana.

5. (IF ONLY DOC WERE HERE!) • 1917: U.S. enters World War I; more than 200,000 black soldiers serve. • At war, blacks are treated much better in Europe. (Britain abolished slavery 40 years before the U.S.) • Some Blacks choose to stay in Europe; others come back to U.S. after experiencing better treatment. • They want to know why serving their country doesn’t earn equal treatment. • 1917: War and cotton crop failures start a “Great Migration” of blacks to the urban North. • Richard’s family is affected by this.

6. 1919-1929: THE HARLEM RENAISANCE • 1919: Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay writes a poem that tells blacks to take control of their lives and speak out. • A black literature movement began called The Harlem Renaissance • novelists, poets and essayists wrote about the black experience. • expressed racial pride AND outrage at social injustices.

7. “If We Must Die” If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! Source: Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” in Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922).

8. A FLOWERING OF BLACK LITERATURE BEGINS! • Goals of H.R.: • voice pride in heritage • use writing to fight social injustice. • 1929: the Harlem Renaissance ends as Black writers can no longer make money on their work.

9. THEN RICHARD COMES ALONG… • Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Wright begins his own writing. • “I wanted to build a bridge of words between me and the world outside, the world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal.” (Wright 384).

10. LET’S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK… • “Jim Crow” = laws and manners that mandated segregation in the American South from 1877-1960.

11. MINSTRELSY • “Minstrels Shows” were spectacles created by Whites, for Whites to mock and laugh at representations of Blacks. • Blacks were represented by whites as singing, dancing, grinning fools. • The stereotype included the ideas that blacks were lazy, stupid, uncivilized and unworthy of integration. • (Why was this stereotype created?) • Jim Crow laws, which oppressed blacks, were wrongly justified by such stereotypes.

12. MORE ABOUT JIM CROW • Jim Crow laws took away rights of blacks • People who supported these laws believed • blacks were inferior to whites • the two races should be kept separate

13. JIM CROW Blacks were not supposed to… …hint that a white person was lying …demonstrate superior intelligence …cuss at whites …laugh at whites …comment on the appearance of white females (males)

14. LAWS BY WHICH BLACKS WERE KEPT FROM VOTING: Blacks could vote, if they could prove that they did not break the following rules/regulations: • Grandfather clauses: you couldn’t vote unless your ancestors before the Civil War could. • European-American Primaries: Only Democrats could vote and only European-Americans could be democrats. • Literacy Tests: you could only vote if you passed a test that revealed your ability to read and write. • Poll Taxes: fees charged to poor Blacks. • Why are these rules unfair?

15. THINGS START LOOKING UP… • Early abolitionists first questioned racism through photography that showed how similar blacks and whites could be.

16. IMPROVEMENT CONTINUES • Blacks worked hard and made progress through the court system due to lawyers like Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP. • Late 50’s and early 60’s: people of different races stand up to end segregation.

17. CIVIL RIGHTS

18. ESSAY REVIEW • As mentioned on the rubric, I graded on the following areas: • Tone (were you focused on proving one point?) • Organization (did you follow the essay format?) • Development (did you give enough textual evidence, or quotes, from the book to support your statements?) • Prompt (did you answer what you were asked to answer on the prompt?) • Writing (was your style of writing good?) • includes sentences, vocabulary, sense of audience, and editing skills

19. ESSAY REVIEW • Here’s what MOST people did well on: • Organization • Most people did a good job of following the essay format that I gave. • Finding good evidence • Most people gave quotes that had good diction, detail and imagery • Writing • Decent writing with good words, sentences structures, editing, etc.

20. ESSAY REVIEW • Here’s what MOST people did NOT do well on: • Focus (most people did not stick to proving ONE main thing in their essay) • After each quote, explain HOW that quote proves the TONE mentioned in your thesis sentence) • Explaining evidence (most people were not clear in explaining HOW the quotes of diction and imagery actually PROVED the mother’s tone)