Letter of Introduction, Content Objectives and Teaching Strategies
Dear Readers and Fellow Teachers,
Welcome to an open attempt to enact meaningful and needed change through a curriculum unit inspired by the Yale National Initiative's 2012 summer seminar, Narratives of Citizenship and Race Since Emancipation led by Jonathan Holloway. This unit centers on three primary goals: 1) to awaken students to the persistence of racism and inequality in America, 2) to better understand American history and historical texts through the lenses of African-American experiences and 3) to challenge students to write letters, from narratives to expositions, with the intention of developing their voices and helping them know who they are and what it means to be a citizen, in order to become the change they wish to see in their selves, their families and in their communities.
This is no easy task but education for all people, an education that teaches each individual how to fully function and cooperated in an interdependent society and world, is essential if change is to happen. Beverly Daniel Tatum, in discussing ways to alleviate racism and bring about more equality in her book, "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" offers a place to start. She suggests that the problem is too few people are taught how to address issues of social injustice because they are not taught to critically think or to carefully observe and consider our present situations; however, "we can learn the history we were not taught, we can watch the documentaries we never saw in school, and we can read about the lives of change agents, past and present. We can discover another way." 1 She further encourages that we are "surrounded by a 'cloud of witnesses' who will give us courage if we let them," and finishes with the challenge that, "we cannot continue to be silent. We must begin to speak, knowing that words alone are insufficient... that meaningful dialogue can lead to effective action. Change is possible." 2 If we do not speak up, she says, "we pay a price for our silence." 3 Link TV produced a song and music video, The Price of Silence, for Amnesty International that encourages the same message. In it, one of the artists that participates, Hugh Masekela, raps, "If you're not jealous of your freedom / You're going to find yourself in serfdom / If you're not jealous of your liberty / You're going to find yourself in slavery, / Fight for your rights!" 4
The way to break the silence is to teach students to ask questions, again, as they did when they were children. This is especially important with literary and non-fiction texts. Lionel Trilling, a teacher, literary critic and author, points out in his book, Beyond Culture, "The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive." 5 Neil Postman, however, author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, shows the terrible reality of what happens too often in our schools, "children enter school as question marks and leave as periods."
As a secondary teacher I see this phenomenon each year, where students, parents, teachers, administrators and politicians seem to value grades and test scores more than the human beings in the classrooms. Considering all the pressure to prepare our students for test taking and for the work force, it is no wonder that we unwittingly discourage questioning and rather expect students to know and recite certain answers. Consider the commentary by Mike Rose, author of Lives on the Boundary and Possible Lives, where he reflects on the reason he wrote another book, Why School?:
If we abstract out of education policy a profile of the American student in our time
it would be this: a young person being prepared for the world of work, measured
regularly, trained to demonstrate on a particular kind of test a particular kind of
knowledge. This is not Jefferson's citizen-in-the-making. 6
Is it our task as teachers to prepare students to be obedient workers or is it better to show them how to become civic oriented custodians of democracy who continue throughout their life to passionately pursue education? I believe the latter and thus I encourage my students to ask questions, to challenge assumptions and to work towards discovery of truths in their own lives, with their families and in partnership with their communities.
This process of asking questions is fundamental to creating life-long learners and vigilant custodians of democracy, vital attributes of civic oriented people. Socrates claimed that "...the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." His sentiment is echoed in Bob Teague's poem to his son, Adam, in Letters to a Black Boy, one of the primary texts for this unit:
Question the mysteries that you
do not understand
Question the answers that
quickly come to hand
Question your teachers, yourself
and what you see
Question him, question her
Question me 7
The idea of questioning oneself and society is challenging for many people because it requires a serious look into what one believes and how one goes about living their life, and of course we all run the risk of discovering things about ourselves that we might not like so much. Nonetheless, it is necessary if we are to truly create a democratic government and society that aims to instill in its practices liberty and justice for all. "Unchallenged personal, cultural, and institutional racism," writes Tatum, "results in the loss of human potential, lowered productivity, and a rising tide of fear and violence in our society." 8 With these latter elements on the increase, liberty and justice inevitably are diminished. Thus, with my students, I will regularly remind them of the power of questioning as a means to enhance their education and enact change.
Awareness of Racism and Inequality in America
In order to achieve the first goal of this unit, which is "to awaken students to the persistence of racism and inequality in America," I plan to use excerpts from several non-fiction texts that address these issues. The first is Behind the Dream, Clarence B. Jones's account of his involvement in the March on Washington in 1963 and his help with writing the "I Have a Dream" speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered so movingly. In it, Jones and his coauthor, Stuart Connelly, question, "What does the concept of equal opportunity to participate in society to the maximum of one's potential without regard to race or ethnicity assume?" Their response:
It assumes that, all other things being equal, African Americans should have access to the same opportunities that whites and other groups have in our country. But that's been the problem; this "all other things being equal" is the 800-pound gorilla in the room of race relations in America. Because our country has not truly leveled the playing field at all. 9
So, how will questioning one's society lead to creating a leveled playing field? I believe part of the answer is in Tim Wise's Dear White America, a book in the format of an open letter to white people that is "less about people and more about mindsets... less about white people and more about whiteness as a social and institutional force—a social category created for the purpose of enshrining a racially divided polity." 10 He speaks directly to a general white audience in which he counters the white, racist notion that African-Americans, generally speaking, should work harder to improve their conditions in America:
just because a person should work hard and behave responsibly, that does not mean the rest of us have no obligation to ensure a fair and just society within which that first person will be trying to better his or her station. Personal responsibility and collective responsibility are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are each contributory to the whole. 11
His point is that we must all work towards liberty and justice for all, but more so that white people must "ensure a fair and just society." In other words, address the 800-pound gorilla in the room. How do we do that? Again, Beverly Daniel Tatum:
We need to continually break the silence about racism whenever we can... But talk
does not mean idle chatter. It means meaningful, productive dialogue to raise
consciousness and lead to effective action and social change. 12
The way I intend to break the silence about racism with my students is through a discussion of Fahrenheit 451, the book that I will teach before this unit. It contains themes that are parallel to the struggle to awaken people to the behavior of its governments and societies. Its protagonist, Guy Montag, much like my own students, slowly awakens to the ills of his society. Strangely, though, and what will serve as my starting point for breaking the silence, is that Fahrenheit 451 contains no characters of color and is conspicuously made up of an all white society, especially for a book published in America in 1953 during the Civil Rights Movement in America. I will ask such questions as how would the book be different were it to include people of color? Why might the author have included only white characters? Are there ramifications for leaving out so many people of color?
One last book that will serve to guide my students and I to discoveries of modern racism and inequality, via excerpts, is Michelle Alexander's alarming, The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her thoroughly documented argument is that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." 13 That is, with the War on Drugs, black men and communities of color have been targeted and decimated, and ultimately controlled by our U.S. criminal justice system, causing millions of black people to remain under a "second-class status." 14 Alexander provides numerous, real stories about black citizens who have unjustly suffered under this system. In chapter three, Alexander begins by placing the readers in the shoes of Emma Faye Stewart, a victim of the War on Drugs, a war she argues is the New Jim Crow system. She challenges us to imagine being Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single mother of two who was likely arrested for being black in a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas. 15 She was innocent of all charges but eventually, after a month in jail with no one to take care of her children, plead guilty under pressure from her court-appointed attorney. Michelle Alexander continues the narrative of Ms. Stewart in second person to great effect:
...you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are... branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. 16
The narrative continues: the defendants of the drug sweep who did not plead guilty eventually saw their cases dismissed by a judge; the entire sweep started from the lies of a single informant; "You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children." 17 Alexander's inclusion of real people, targets and victims of systemic exclusion with roots that go deep in American history, give names and faces to the statistics and vast evidences that support her claims.
Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly, in Behind the Dream, sum up other causes of continued inequality and injustice. Because America is, for the most part, a capitalist society, "each individual's market power is key to how he is treated. There remains an enormous division between the races when it comes to median income, home ownership, education, life expectancy, the incarceration rate, drug use, and death rate." 18 With more and more black youth being incarcerated, and with schools failing to speak out about the inequalities that perpetuate these conditions and circumstances, everyone's civil liberties are compromised, but blacks and other non-white people continue to suffer the most.
An Understanding of the African-American experiences towards Citizenship
To create a better understanding for my students of American history, as well as narrative and historical texts, we will examine experiences of African-American people who struggled and fought for rights and equality much like Montag begins to do in Fahrenheit 451. The themes in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel are similar to those in the writings of Frederick Douglass and fugitive slaves, especially Douglass's "Letter from the Editor," published in the New National Era on June 13, 1872, in which Douglass ponders the motives of the arsonist(s) who burned down his "old home in Rochester, New York": "It is the sprit of hate, the spirit of murder, the spirit which would burn a family in their beds. I may be wrong, but I fear that the sentiment which repelled me at Congress Hall burnt my house." 19
It is a related sentiment in Fahrenheit 451, although not one based on skin color or culture, that likewise burns down the homes of literate and freethinking people, or anyone who strives to be, simply because the houses contain books. Frederick Douglass knew too well the sentiment that sought to keep him illiterate. In fact, he risked his life by learning to read, which he recounts in his first biography, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. What led him to do this can be found in an open letter he wrote to his former owner, Captain Thomas Auld, on the tenth anniversary of his self-emancipation from slavery, published in both the North Star and The Liberator in 1848, in which he illustrates the power of questioning, the root of his "determination to run away":
Why am I a slave? and with this question my youthful mind was troubled for many days, pressing upon me more heavily at times than others. When I saw the slave- driver whip a slave woman, cut the blood out of her neck, and heard her piteous cries, I went away into the corner of the fence, wept and pondered over the mystery. 20
Later in the letter, in recounting his struggle towards freedom, he meets with William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, who "put it into my head that I might make myself serviceable to the cause of the slave by devoting a portion of my time to telling my own sorrows, and those of other slaves which had come under my observation." 21 In this manner, I will put it into my students heads that their own narratives of awakening, like Douglass's and Montag's, can inspire others to become more attuned to continued injustices in our communities and in America at large.
I will continue to challenge my students with questions of freedom and who has it, if anyone, and why and what it means, and can we really escape into it. The challenge for my students is to question the degree of freedom that Frederick Douglass and fugitive slaves had in comparison with that of Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451. I want to be sure not to take for granted in our discussions the freedoms that so many still do without today such as the rights for happiness that Guy pursues. His collaborator, Professor Faber, espouses that they are the right to "quality information" in books, "leisure to digest it" and "the right to carry out actions based on what we learn." 22
Frederick Douglass, along with four million other slaves, knew well that they actually did not have the right to read. In fact, statutes were common among the slave states. In one, passed by the state of North Carolina in 1830:
any free person, who shall hereafter teach, or attempt to teach, any slave within the State to read or write... shall be liable to indictment... and upon conviction, shall... be fined not less than one hundred dollars, nor more than two hundred dollars, or imprisoned. 23
This was the punishment for a white man or woman. For a slave caught teaching another slave, punishment was thirty-nine lashes on the back. As the editors of Let Nobody Turn Us Around point out in their introduction to this particular document, "Slavemasters understood that their social control of the slaves could not be based solely on physical coercion. Knowledge was power..." 24 I want my students to question and grasp this truth, and consider what they dismiss if and when they dismiss a book.
At this point, I will introduce to my students Earnest J. Gaines's subtle but brilliant short story, "The Sky is Gray," which is the central literary text for this unit. It is taken from his collection of five stories, Bloodline, and is about a young boy, James, who travels with his mother, Octavia, from their sharecropper home "down the river" to the rural, segregated town of Bayonne, Louisiana, in order to have his toothache treated by the second-rate, white dentist. James, challenged by many incidents in the story that parallel the long journey and fight for equality by African-Americans and others, is deemed a man by his mother at the story's conclusion, creating the painful irony in which his mother recognizes him as a man while his government fails to recognize or honor him, and other black folk for that matter, as a citizen. This becomes clearer when juxtaposed with the debate that takes place, halfway through the story, in the waiting room of the dentist's office: a young student, in response to a claim that grass is green "because the [white] people say it's green," says "those same people say we're citizens of these United States" and "citizens have certain rights... name me one right that you have. One right, granted by the Constitution, that you can exercise in Bayonne." 25 Thus, the reader better understands the student's charge to "Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything." 26
My purpose for teaching this story is to provide a singular face, voice and person to the struggle for equality and justice in America. Doing so, I believe, will help my students realize the gravity of the matter and how its potential devastation could, and did, affect millions of people in very personal and public ways. More importantly, though, "The Sky is Gray" demonstrates the maturity and bravery of a young boy who becomes prepared to face unrelenting racial and economic barriers with the aid of the stern love he receives from his mother. His journey is somewhat autobiographical as the story's author Earnest J. Gaines grew up on a sharecropper plantation in Louisiana and later escaped poverty by writing, and eventually becoming one of America's great writers. In fact, many of his short stories and novels have similar settings with likewise rich and varied characters who face, and often overcome, exceptional circumstances.
My plan for teaching "The Sky is Gray" is for me to model an introductory exposition, in the form of a letter to my students, the first of its thirteen sections. Afterwards, groups of three students will take turns teaching the next eleven sections, and then the entire class will work through a discussion of the final section. An example exposition from the first section is the very first sentence, "Go'n be coming in a few minutes." 27 Further reading contextualizes the subject to be the bus that will take James and his mother, Octavia, into town; however, additional knowledge of Jim Crow laws and segragation, plus inferences from the readings, reveal that the subject becomes the abstract idea of freedom and the hopeful notion of real citizenship for African-Americans. Thus, the bus with its Jim Crow rules of segregation begins to connote the entire history of the Movement for equality and justice, from Emancipation on up to the future March on Washington and beyond.
In order to provide clear and direct context for this unit, and its central literary text, "The Sky is Gray," I will show to my students the PBS documentary, Slavery by Another Name, produced and directed by Sam Pollard and based upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon. From the book, we will read the introduction and parts of the epilogue, as well as a few, brief passages from the main text. In particular, we will examine a passage that refers to letters from Ezekiel Archey, "a prisoner able and willing to complain of conditions" in the mines, to Reginald H. Dawson, "a nominally sympathetic Alabama official in charge of guarding the welfare of lease prisoners." 28
Both documentary and book are thorough and illustrative expositions of the shift from slavery into peonage under the guise of convict leasing, sharecropping and use of chain gangs that perpetuated the subjugation and abuse of newly freed slaves and their descendants until World War II. Because PBS.org has exceptional curriculum and interactive pages at their site (http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/), I include only this brief summary of the documentary here.
Additional contextualization for my students, and this unit, comes from W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Salvation of American Negroes Lies in Socialism," an excerpt from "The Negro and Socialism," intended here to bookend the history of the struggle for freedom up to its publication in 1958, five years before the seminal March on Washington in 1963. In it, Du Bois exposes the essence of colonial imperialism: "It was industry organized on a world scale, and holding most of mankind in such economic subjection as would return the largest profit to the owners of wealth." 29 A strikingly fitting point for today's Occupy Wall Street and Education Movements.
The primary supplement to "The Sky is Gray" is what I find to be an overlooked gem, Bob Teague's candid and frank, series of open letters to his son Adam, Letters to a Black Boy. It contains the poem at the beginning of this unit about questioning everything. Many, if not all, of the letters reaffirm the intensity of James's experiences, and the experiences of black people in America. The letters read as if James's father could have written them. Unfortunately, his father was drafted into World War II, never to be seen again, a circumstance that is, yet again, symptomatic of the African American effort to simply be American and to have the right to serve one's country, the rights to which white soldiers were granted. Teague's letters also serve, as one back cover endorsement hopes, to "help white readers to bridge the understanding gap that keeps too many people from knowing what it means to be black in a racist society." 30 A selections of Bob Teague's letters, read by him, is also available on vinyl but difficult to come by. Yet, it is worth hearing the actual voice of the author reading his work, to hear his tone and inflections and all that they convey.
In addition to Letters to a Black Boy, I will also include as many selections of readings from two anthologies, Let Nobody Turn Us Around and Letters from Black America, to the degree that students can handle and that time permits. Expositions for several of them are embedded in the subsequent letters; however, for a complete list of works I anticipate using with "The Sky is Gray" and Letters to a Black Boy, see the annotated reading list for students in a letter at the end of this unit. Important to mention here, though, are four texts from Let Nobody Turn Us Around that are key for "The Sky is Gray" and Letters to a Black Boy. First is A. Philip Randolph's Call to the March, July 1, 1941, which is both timely to James's walk to Bayonne and to the student's overt condemnation of the hypocrisy in White Americans calling African Americans citizens. The first demand listed on the Program of the March on Washington Movement reads:
We demand, in the interest of national unity, the abrogation of every law which makes a distinction in treatment between citizens based on religion, creed, color, or national origin. This means an end to Jim Crow in education, in housing , in transportation and in every other social, economic, and political privilege; and especially, we demand, in the capital of the nation, an end to all segregation in public places and in public institutions. 31
A second text is an excerpt from an address delivered in 1956 by Roy Wilkins to the NAACP Southeast Regional Convention in which he gladly explains for the benefit of Montgomery whites who "claim not to be able to understand 'their' Negroes" that "'their' Negroes are sick and tired of segregation, of the daily insults and mistreatment and daily humiliations." 32 He further recapitulates to his actual audience what African Americans have always sought since Emancipation, which parallels the need made evident and voiced by the student sitting in the dentist office in "The Sky is Gray":
And what do we ask when we say the time is here? We ask the acknowledgement of our status as citizens. We ask the rights and privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. We ask equality with other citizens under the law. 33
A third text is the open letter from eight of the Scottsboro Boys, who were fraudulently accused of rape and subsequently imprisoned and tortured. Their letter was originally published in The Negro Worker 2, no.5 (May 1932), and in it, they appeal to the "Toilers of the World":
What we guilty of? Nothing but being out of a job. Nothing but looking for work. Our kinfolk was starving for food. We wanted to help them out. So we hopped a freight—just like any one of you workers might a done—to go down to Mobile to hunt work. We was taken off the train by a mob and framed up on rape charges. 34
It is important to distinguish in their letter, I believe, the communist influence and the suspicious tone towards the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In one sentence that accounts for why they have been sentenced to "burn up on the electric chair," the first emphasis is on their status as "workers," and then that "the color of our skin is black." The reality was likely the opposite, especially in light of revelations about convict leasing in Slavery by Another Name. They would more likely have been sentenced to burn for the color of their skin but otherwise put to work for their cheap labor. In a second sentence, additional motives for their letter becomes more clear, which were likely encouraged by the International Labor Defense and that used their predicament as a means to unite workers, with seemingly less concern about their treatment as black boys and men:
"We don't put no faith in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They give some of us boys eats to go against the other boys who talked for the I. L. D. But we wouldn't split. Nohow. We know our friends and our enemies." 35
The fourth, and perhaps the most vital to "The Sky is Gray," is James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time, My Dungeon Shook, Letter to My Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." 36 Baldwin's nephew is approximately fourteen years old while James is eight at the telling of his story. Their youth unites them under James Baldwin's adult wisdom. His stern love for his nephew matches Octavia's stern love for her son, James. In his letter, Baldwin warns his nephew James of the terrible truth, "you were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity." It is the same society that sought to keep James, of "The Sky is Gray," under similar circumstances of low expectations. Fortunately, both young men were challenged to question everything and to fight for their own rights in pursuit of excellence in their lives. James Baldwin encourages his nephew, "Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go." 37 His vital wisdom, to "know whence you came," provides a reason to question everything, for knowing one's history allows one to know one's self and to be confident in one's ability to overcome great difficulties and become a man or woman on one's own terms. This is especially important since the two boys, both named James, will have to learn to cope with white hate and racism. Baldwin warns his nephew, "Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear." 38
One supplemental text that will both provide historical context of African-American experiences in American and prepare students to write narrative and expository letters is Letters from Black America, edited by Pamela Newkirk. It contains actual, historical letters written by activists and private citizens. I will cull most of them from the following thematic sections of Newkirk's anthology: Family, Politics and Social Justice, Education and the Art of Scholarship, War, Art and Culture, and Across the Diaspora. A few letters from Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin's letter to his nephew are discussed above. Others we will examine include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and personal letters from W.E.B. Du Bois to his daughter, Yolande Du Bois, that encourage her in her pursuit of education and life while away at school. Students will read through those that I suggest for them and, hopefully, more.
Three more books that I want my students to explore, and from which I will likely extract quotes for the daily, journal writing that my students and I will do, are Pauli Murray & Caroline Ware – forty years of letters in black & white, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and Remember Me to Harlem – The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, edited by Emily Bernard. These are longer collections of correspondences between three sets of friends. [Fortunately, the editor of the latter collection, Emily Bernard, is a friend and high school classmate. My students will have the pleasure of meeting her via modern technology].
Writing Letters to Develop Voice and Change Legacies
To me, and I believe for my students as well, the act of writing letters will be most vital and life changing because it is the one that is directly challenging to them in regards to writing and becoming civil servants. To learn about history, as James Baldwin wrote to his nephew, is absolutely necessary, but it is the direct action of people in the present moment that can provide the needed change. No matter our culture or gender or age or skin color, we must take direct action today and everyday, wherever and regardless of where injustice is present. Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly make this point clear, "other people's problems are really the whole world's problems. And if we suffer and struggle as individuals, not units of people sorted by race or income or anything else so arbitrary, we can find solutions as individuals." 39
In this mindset, my students and I will explore our selves, our families and communities, and the greater world to discover histories in order to write purposeful and thorough narratives, and then to condense those narratives into crafted letters of exposition with specific purposes for specific people. Generally speaking, those people will be family members, classmates, characters, authors and politicians, and the purposes will be to transform painful histories into new and healthy legacies.
All people receive legacies from their ancestors, and all Americans are responsible for making democracy work. It cannot be democracy if society and government serve only one set of people while neglecting another. All people must have equal access to justice and freedom, and education and help to make them possible. It is "all of us or none," to use the phrase from the organization of the same name in Oakland, California, just across the Bay from our school. that is actively fighting for the rights of others disenfranchised by the incarceration systems that Michelle Alexander writes about in The New Jim Crow. 40
It is my hope that my students will embrace this organization and others like it by actively writing to them and, perhaps, getting involved by donating clothing or food, or even writing to politicians on their behalf. Of course, part of this process will center on writing expository letters that, for example, share their hopes and ask, "how can we help?" Other great grass roots movements and organizations are on the PBS.org site for Slavery by Another Name and the www.freetheslaves.net site whose goal is "to end slavery in our lifetime," with Desmond M. Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus from Cape Town, South Africa, serving on its Board as International Advisor. We will also explore Michelle Alexander's site, www.newjimcrow.com/action.html, for additional organizations to potentially interact with and support.
A general plan for writing these letters will include vigorous discussions of who we are as cultural groups and individuals, with special emphasis on the individual because understanding of who one is directly affects one's own perception of how they fit into family and society, and who they are and what they can and, perhaps, should do as a citizen. Thus, we will explore what it means to be a citizen and how citizenship is a necessary part of democracy.
The forms of the letters, themselves, will fluctuate from narrative to exposition as students. For example, students will first write a narrative of their life as a draft. Then, I will instruct them on how to extract from that narrative necessary details of their life to be included in expository letters to their parents or older relatives from whom they can request more information about their ancestral histories and even civic activities in which they might have participated. Afterwards, the students will revise their narratives into letters to classmates or more family members, and even to the character, James, from "The Sky is Gray." They can even write return letters from James or other characters as another exercise in narrative and expository writing. After this round of letters, the process will begin again but this time with living authors and politicians, or organizations and foundations, as recipients. A further explanation of the form of expository letter I will teach to my students can be found, below, in the sample letters that I have written to them.
The idea to make letter writing the central activity of this unit first came to me while reading Behind the Dream, the first book I began reading in preparation for this unit. I had glanced at the jacket biography of Clarence B. Jones and saw that he is currently scholar-in-residence and visiting professor at Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Then it hit me, too, that he lives in Palo Alto, thirty minutes from where I live and teach, and immediately my imagination created an imaginary letter to him, asking if he would come speak at my school. And then, I thought, I will have my students write letters. It will be an empowering experience for them to become change agents first in their own lives and then with the lives of others. The imagination is powerful but work brings results. I will write my letter to Clarence Jones and send it. Regardless if he responds, I am already changed, and now I am becoming the teacher I never imagined I could be, though I always wanted it. My letter to him will serve as a model letter for my students, and his words to us will serve to inspire my students as they did me and here close my letter to you:
Ideas are the change agents of our world, and words are the building blocks of those ideas. Their DNA. In effect, I believe not only that words can change destinies but that they are the fundamental path to do so. Not fists, guns, tanks, or bombs. Words. 41
May we all create new and better legacies for our students through our words.
Thank you for reading.
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