Introduction
They were women then
My mama's generation
Husky of voice - Stout of step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down doors
(from Alice Walker's "Women," in Norton, p.2378)
Behind every woman is herself
Patricia Hunt (my mom)
Many of my students' lives are led by women; for some, their leadership is personal, showing by example how to overcome challenges, how to be emotionally strong and how to be personally resourceful. For others, women's leadership stems from political activism, in how they have led the fight against injustice within our society. Many of my students, nagged by a sense that their lives are distinct from others' in some very specific ways, have only to explore the basics of history to see quite clearly that their experiences are significantly influenced by being black, and for about half of them because they are female as well. They are not the slaves that more than likely their ancestors were, but their personal condition is affected by those historical facts, and the personal is for them fundamentally political.
How can writing merge the personal and the political? My focus in this curriculum unit is on my students: young, black, and more often than not, female as well. This description does not intend to oversimplify the individual experiences of any of my past, current, or future students, but most of them are seniors when I see them, and at this moment there are more young, black women of college ready age now than at any time in the history of the world. Each is poised to enter the adult world and eager to learn the ways in which she can assume leadership of her own life and of the world in which she is becoming a citizen. In Angela Davis's words, the opportunity for young women can determine a tremendous amount. She says, "The success or failure of a revolution can almost always be gauged by the degree to which the status of women is altered ina radical, progressive direction." (Marable & Mullings, p.461) Put more personally by the poet Alice Walker in 1979:
My struggle was always against
an inner darkness: I carry within myself
the only known keys
to my death-to unlock life, or close it shut
forever.
(Walker, in Norton, p.2379)
According to Davis, this struggle is built and reinforced by "anachronistic bourgeois family structures and also the oppressive character of women's role in American society in general." (Marable & Mullings, p.461) I believe in order to overcome the political we must look deep into the personal, and work from the inside out. As writer Toni Cade Bambara puts it: "if your house ain't in order, you ain't in order" (http://radfag.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/getting-our-houses-in-order-learning-from-political-contradiction/).
This unit will weave the history of the African American experience during the Black Power era into its poetic heritage through primary texts, films, and poetry in order to understand the period preceding the commercial development of hip hop, and paralleling the youth of my students' own parents. In other words, I will not attempt to teach something my students are still living, that is their own story to tell. Instead, this curriculum unit will teach what came before, in their parents' era, and through the historical thread from the 1960's to 70's, as in this haiku poem by Sonia Sanchez:
summer has sped a/
cross this philadelphia land/
scape warrior style.
(Sanchez, p.84)
Just as Sanchez describes, many other black people have gazed upon the city and their own lives, looking at the war in our society in speech, poetry, and memoir, as well as activism. The 1960's-70's were a particularly turbulent time in our country's history in that many cities exploded in rioting and urban violence, and yet both the arts and activism of the time became unified. We will explore women and men's reflective work in the Black Power era. This period included the Black Arts Movement, The Black Panthers, the rise and demise of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and lead up to the current era characterized by Hip Hop.
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