Introduction
The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of free elementary education among all classes in the South. It not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware, Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. 1
Opened in the early 1870's, funded by the Freedmen's Bureau, and first known as the Richmond Colored Normal School, Armstrong High School (named after Samuel Armstrong) was the first public school for African American students in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Almost 140 years later - and 50 years after Brown versus Board of Education - Armstrong is still an almost exclusively African American School (over 99%). Armstrong serves the East End and parts of the South Side of Richmond, and struggles with many of the issues that high poverty urban public schools across the country face: high failure rates, poor attendance, lack of resources, violence, teen pregnancy and dropping out. Nonetheless, in this challenging context there is a drive among many of the educators and students to pursue knowledge as the pathway to liberation.
I open with this quote from W. E. B. Dubois and these facts about my school because I feel that they are a relevant introduction to the topic of this curriculum unit. The primary purpose of this unit is to create an historical and theoretical framework in the classroom that can be used by the students to understand African American Literature as a potential resolution to the fundamental contradiction between the rhetoric of democratic ideals and the realities of racial injustice. The texts for this unit will include some excerpts from the primary documents of our democratic republic (the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers), a number of arguments and historical accounts from both black and white perspectives about racial injustice in the 18 th and 19 th century, and a wide variety of early 20 th century African American writing (both essay prose and poetry) that speaks to this issue. It is also important to me that inasmuch as this unit focuses on themes of injustice, it ultimately resolves in hope. Unfortunately, 140 years after the opening of Armstrong, injustice still pervades the lives of our students. With that in mind, I want this unit to culminate with a student publication project that involves taking action on the issues of injustice in their community.
I will begin this unit plan by laying out a theoretical and historical foundation that is based on the research I have completed on this topic. The ideas outlined in this foundation and the order in which they are presented closely align to the five main objectives and classroom activities that I present in the second part of the unit plan. Finally, I will present a list of relevant resources for students and teachers.
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