Background Information
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, my students' home, was only one center of the African American experience. While many slaves began their lives in America here, or later escaped to the city to find life as freedmen and women, without too many gaps throughout Philadelphia's history, its large population of black Americans has had a significant national role in the freedom movement. Currently the fifth largest city in America, Philadelphia has shaped American culture, in its roots as the nation's political capital, as an industrial center after Emancipation and into the 20th century, and through the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. Along with Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, Atlanta, Charleston, and other cities, Philadelphia established a strong and influential branch of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s-70's. Of that last period, Philadelphia's current poet laureate Sonia Sanchez wrote:
who's gonna make all
that beautiful blk/rhetoric
mean something.
like
i mean
who's gonna take
the words
blk/is/beautiful
and make more of it
than blk/capitalism.
u dig?
who's gonna give our young
blk/people new heroes
(Sonia Sanchez in "blk/rhetoric," from Generations, p.14)
So we find ourselves in the present day looking back for heroes and heroines even as we inevitably inch forward looking for the leaders of tomorrow. A new flock of birds is ready to sing, whether in West Philadelphia where I work, or documented in the collected pages of every writer seeking to make her voice heard. Writing has been a balm to my students in Philadelphia just as it has been a cathartic vehicle for black women of the past, and they have not felt limited to poetry, autobiography, or prose. May they all find guidance from poets such as G.C. Oden in her poem "Carousel":
This is the way of grief:
spinning in the rhythm of memories
that will not let you up
or down,
but keeps you grinding through
a granite air.
(Haydn, p.181)
A course of this kind can help to inform the writing of young Americans, both male and female, and give them a sense of how black men and women, despite their oppression, have used writing to respond personally and in so doing improve the political lives of everyone.
Like the writing course it serves, this unit is comprehensive. Not only does my course meet as frequently as any other class, we accomplish all the goals expressed in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts. A day does not go by that we do not produce some form of poetry, and yet there is plenty of time for reflection and gathering our thoughts to improve upon the work being done. We read poems as well as poetics, memoir as well as drama, and encourage visits from the vast network of connections in Philadelphia's local professional writing world. I believe in order to be a good poet, one must be a good writer in all genres, and to be a good writer one must be a good thinker. The course is a chance to get "one's house in order". More than anything, students' good writing leans towards creating meaning out of life and what we see around us, be it funny, scary, nerve-wracking, intense, demanding, heavy or light. In Maya Angelou's 1978 anthem "Still I Rise" she begins
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise . . .
(Maya Angelou, "I'll Rise" in Norton Anthology, p.2039)
May my students rise as well: in ability to write, read, speak, think, and feel.
The most remarkable part of our experience in a writing class is that we find we are not alone. A unit of this kind can be used to create a similar community: How, out of the chaos of their times, did black Americans find words could give voice to their personal emotions, and simultaneously focus the goals of a movement on political change? Words are acts, and the actions of writers during the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power era changed the way we all live in the world today.
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