Black History Assembly - Revised

LIsa Goldschein Dance

Intro: An Overview of 200 Years of African American History

Frederick Douglass was born on a plantation in Maryland around 1818. He died 77 years later in his home at Cedar Hill, high above Washington, DC.

 As a slave on a landlocked Maryland plantation, Frederick Douglass would look longingly toward Chesapeake Bay and its sailing ships. For Douglass the ships represented everything that had been denied him by slavery, and in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written in 1845, he describes how he would "pour out my soul's complaint. . . to the moving multitude of ships":

"You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! ... It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave.”

And he didn’t. He taught himself to read and write, and traveled In his journey from captive slave to internationally renowned activist, writer, and orator, Douglass changed how Americans thought about race, slavery, and American democracy.

Transitional Music with Dance: 

“Wade in the Water” - Sweet Honey in the Rock (start: 0.27 -)

Slide - Harriet Tubman 

 Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad Conductors. Harriet Tubman set out, guided only by the north star,  for the “Promised Land”, the North, where she found work, saved her money, and returned to the South again and again, leading slaves out of bondage.

During a ten year span Harriet made nineteen trips down south to escort at least seventy slaves, and perhaps many more, to freedom.

Harriet Tubman carried a pistol in case anyone got “cold feet”. She never had to use it. 

During the Civil War, Harriet Tubman worked as a spy for the Union. And after the war, she lived out the rest of her long life in Auburn, New York. 

Music Transition: “Follow the Drinking Gourd” with dance 

Slide - Sojourner Truth: 

Introduction by Akili: 

Born into slavery in 1797, Isabella Baumfree, who later changed her name to Sojourner Truth, would become one of the most powerful advocates for human rights in the nineteenth century. Like other slaves, she experienced the miseries of being sold and was cruelly beaten and mistreated. 

In 1827, after her master failed to honor his promise to free her, Isabella ran away, or, as she later informed her master, “I did not run away, I walked away by daylight….” 

After experiencing a religious conversion, Isabella became an itinerant preacher and in 1843 changed her name to Sojourner Truth. During this period she became involved in the growing antislavery movement, and by the 1850s she was involved in the woman’s rights movement as well. At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered what is now recognized as one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history, “Ain’t I a Woman?” She continued to speak out for the rights of African Americans and women during and after the Civil War. Sojourner Truth died in Michigan, in 1883.

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.

Music Transition: 

“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”

Slide - George Washington Carver 

Akili reads: 

Two of our greatest educators and scientists were African Americans. One was George Washington Carver, who was born a slave. The driving force in Carver’s life was education. He left home at an early age, working odd jobs across the Mid-west to pay for school. Eventually, he achieved a master’s degree in agriculture, and through brilliance and determination, became a leading scientist in botany who created revolutionary methods of agriculture. It is the peanut, however, which most people link with George Washing Carver. Through his research the lowly peanut was transformed into hundreds of different products, including gasoline and of course, peanut butter.

Slide - Booker T. Washington 

On April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington was born a slave on the 207 acre farm of James Burroughs. After the Civil War, the young Booker T. Washington began his journey of learning to read and write. 

Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and he voiced the needs and desires of those slaves and their descendants. Washington believed the true emancipation of blacks would occur through education and entrepreneurship. He was appointed the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute, a school of higher education for African-Americans, and the far-sighted educator hired George Washington Carver as a botany professor at his school.

Slide - W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois 

Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African-American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Music Transition - Take the A Train

Video - The Harlem Renaissance http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/harlem-renaissance/videos

Slide - Langston Hughes

Akili: Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Slide – Duke Ellington

Music – Sophisticated Lady (plays underneath)

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was the most prolific composer of the twentieth century, and is considered by many to be America’s greatest composer, bandleader, and recording artist.  The Duke Ellington Orchestra, noted for their elegant and brilliant blend of jazz, big band, and swing, became the house band from 1927 to 1932, at the Cotton Club in Harlem,

Slide – The Cotton Club in Harlem


which featured the best African American musicians and entertainers during the 20’s and the 30’s. The brilliance of the musicians  combined with Ellington’s genius made the Duke Ellington Orchestra the premier band in America for generations.

Music - Sophisticated Lady

Slide – Tuskegee Airmen

Until the late 1930’s, African American men were not allowed to be pilots in the U.S. military. But in 1940, under pressure from black activists, other political groups, the press, and President Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. Army Air Corp reversed its policy and began accepting black flight program applicants. The new flight recruits were determined to create a legacy of excellence that would wipe out any lingering doubts about their abilities. During World War 2, the Airmen completed thousands of missions, destroying enemy aircraft, and installations, and in the process demonstrated their courage and competence, and earned the respect of their fellow pilots, and military leaders. But in reality, the Tuskegee Airmen fought and won two battles, one against fascism, the other against racism. Having fought America’s enemies abroad, the Tuskegee Airmen returned to the United States, to join the struggle to win equality at home.

Slide – Bebop

Music –  Night in Tunisia by John Coltrane

The radical inequities of the music industry in the 1940’s allowed white musicians  to make a comfortable living playing music, while denying the same opportunities to black musicians. It became increasing clear to the brilliantly talented, creative black musicians who were playing in swing bands that the music world was not working for them, so they took to the back rooms of bars, private homes for informal jam sessions where they could play for themselves. In these last night jam sessions, the musicians created a new musical world with their own code, their own language and dress, which was meant to shut out those who couldn’t keep up with the wildly complex harmonies, and breathtaking rhythmic structure, all played at the impossibly fast speed of sound.  From these private all night jam sessions was born “Bebop”, music so complex and intricate, and played at such impossible speeds that none but a few could master it.  The ones who could, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, forever altered the face of jazz by creating Bebop, an entirely African-American music, the music of giants.

Music -  A Love Supreme 

Rosa Parks started a revolution by sitting down. Tired after working all day as a department store seamstress, Rosa Parks was sitting in the black or "colored" section of a crowded Birmingham, Alabama bus one day in 1955, when the bus driver demanded she give up her seat to a white man. When she refused, she was arrested, thrown in jail, and fined. Tired of having to sit in the back of the bus, tired of having to give up their seats when they were tired, old, sick, or disabled so that a white person could sit down, a Baptist minister by the name of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, organized a boycott of the Birmingham bus service.  Their demands were simple - black passengers should be treated respect! The boycott was supposed to start on Friday, December 5th. The organizers were hopeful that at least fifty percent of the black population would participate in the boycott. They were stunned when ninety percent of the black bus riders chose to walk, to ride bikes, to carpool rather than ride the bus. The boycott continued for a year while the legal battle over integrating buses were waged in the courts. In November, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the black bus riders. Buses in Alabama and across the country were desegregated 381 days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. The year long boycott cost the Alabama bus service millions of dollars in lost revenue. By refusing to stand up, Rosa Parks changed how blacks were treated.

Music 

Slide - Martin Luther King 

Martin Luther King was a galvanizing force in the African Americans' fight for civil rights. Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, writer, orator, leader, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King achieved recognition for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and his own Christian beliefs.  

Dr. King, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, organized the boycott of Birmingham, Alabama bus service, forcing the bus company to change its treatment of African-Americans, and giving courage to African Americans across the nation, to demand their rights to equity under the law. In the brief span of his life, Dr. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the  struggle in 1962 to desegregate housing, organized marches to Washington to demand civil rights, organized the Selma to Montgomery march for African Americans’ right to vote, and took his mission for civil rights up North to Chicago to continue his fight to desegregate housing. In the final years of his life he expanded his focus to include poverty,  and to protest the Viet Nam Conflict.  He won a Nobel Peace Prize for his seismic impact as a peace activist, writer and orator. The Reverend Dr. King was planning a national occupation of Washington D.C. to be called the Poor People's Campaign when he was assassinated on April 4th,1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Slide: Martin Luther King 

Dissolve to: 

Slide: The Black Panthers 

Music: 

In the turbulent 1960’s, change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored - cities were burning, Viet Nam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights.  A new revolutionary culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at the vanguard of that change. 

In the beginning the Black Panther Movement was more committed to social programs to help impoverished, disenfranchised communities. One of its most important and successful programs was providing breakfast to the community’s children. At one point, the men and women of the Black Panthers were feeding 20, 000 children breakfast per week. By the early 1970’s, women comprised two thirds of the Black Panther  Movement, and occupied important positions in every level of the organization. 

However, the Black Panthers began to derail when the movement became increasingly radicalized which lead to more violent conflicts with the police.  The leadership became more fragmented, when some, like Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, were incarcerated, and others, like Elridge Cleaver fled to Africa. 

Music 

Slide: Malcolm X

When Malcolm Little was four years old, his father, a social activist and a minister, was found murdered, and quite possibly murdered by a group of white supremacists. Later, Malcolm Little’s mother suffered a mental breakdown, and was institutionalized, effectively leaving all eight of her children orphans.  At the age of twenty, Malcolm Little was sentenced to prison for larceny where three important life changes occurred: Malcolm  Little became a voracious reader, devouring books on history, politics, race, and religion. As a result of his new awareness of race and history, Malcolm Little became Malcolm X, rejecting his surname as a slave name,  symbolic of the loss of his ancestral name, his history, and his culture.  The third major event was Malcolm X’s conversion to Islam and becoming a member of the Nation of Islam, an organization founded by Elijah Mohammad for African American muslims. After his release from prison, Malcolm X became of the most influential leaders in the Nation of Islam, and was the driving force in many of its successful social services including its free drug rehabilitation program. 

Disillusioned by the behavior of Elijah Mohammad, his spiritual leader, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and traveled to Africa and the middle east to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the pledge of every muslim to visit the most holy site in Islam. There Malcolm X experienced the fourth major event of his life - the sight of all people, from white skinned, blue-eyed blonds to dark skinned Africans, embracing, sharing drink, sharing food, in an act of loving brotherhood. 

This experience profoundly altered his views on race, racism, and the world. Malcolm X returned to the United States with a new message and founded the Muslim Mosque to promote that new message - to reject racism, and to promote both racial harmony and black empowerment.

While in New York on a speaking engagement, Malcolm X was assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam. His autobiography, published shortly after his death, has become one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th Century.  

Slide – Nina Simone

Music: Four Women by Nina Simone 

Poem By Kayla Lee

DVD - Jimi Hendrix 

Music: Star Spangled Banner 

Jimi Hendrix is considered by many to be the greatest rock and blues guitarist who ever lived. His playing forever revolutionized the music of rock, blues and guitar technique, and his innovative, explosive combination of fuzz,  feedback, and controlled distortion ushered in a new musical format. Born on November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington, Jimi Hendrix, born Johnny Allen Hendrix, but later renamed  James Marshall Hendrix by his father, was a self taught guitarist who could not read music. His father, noticing that Jimi, as a kid,  ruined a broom by trying to play it like a guitar, gave him a one string ukelele; later, when Jimi was sixteen, his dad replaced the one string ukulele with a five dollar guitar. Jimi quickly taught himself how to play the five dollar guitar, and gigged around with other musicians,  but it wasn’t until Jimi Hendrix moved to London in 1966, where the British musicians, who knew, loved, and were greatly influenced by Black American Blues, heard him play that Hendrix finally found appreciation for his brilliance. Back in the United States, in 1967, he galvanized the audience at the Monterey Pop Festival when he played “Wild Thing”, shooting to international fame and forever changing how rock and blues guitar would be played. Just four years later, in 1971, at the age of twenty-seven, Jimi Hendrix died in London. 

Slide - Nina Simone  

Music - Feeling Good

Classically trained pianist from South Carolina, who studied at Juilliard, Nina Simone was brilliant, tormented, and passionate. Simone took up the flame of activism and became the voice of the Civil Rights Movement, creating songs like “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” in response to the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham which killed  four little black girls. She collaborated with her dear friend, the great poet Langston Hughes for the civil rights song, “Black Lash Blues” and remained staunch in her beliefs that as an artist, one is bound to create change. Nina Simone once said, “An artist’s duty, as far as I am concerned, is to reflect the times.” 

Slide - Tupac

Music - “Dear Mama”

Tupac was born Lesane Parish Crooks in 1971, in New York to Black Panther activists. As a child, Tupac had no contact with his father and was raised by his mother,  Afeni Shakur, who educated him in radical politics. His name was eventually changed to Tupac Shakur and he became a rap legend noted for violent and explicit lyrics about life on the streets.  However, his work was also noted for exploration of political and social issues, and for truthful portrayals of growing up amid violence, and hardships.  A legend in the world of film, hip-hop, and rap, Tupac has sold more than 75 million albums world wide and is one of the most successful music artists in history.

Video - Alvin Ailey and Judith Jameson 

Music - Revelations

Alvin Ailey was born in rural Texas, and abandoned by his father when he was a year old.  His mother took him to Los Angeles where he was exposed to the world of dance. Eventually, Alvin Ailey  made his way to New York where he continued his training in dance, while performing with dance troupes, and on Broadway. In 1958, he started his own dance company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre to carry out his vision of enriching modern American dance and preserving the unique African American cultural heritage.  Alvin Ailey dedicated his life to bringing dance and cultural awareness to underserved communities across the world. 

Judith Jamison has been described as an African Queen, and Alvin Ailey’s Empress, and it has been said there was always something of the divine about Ms. Jamison’s performances. Long legged, and lean, Judith Jamison was Ailey’s muse, and he created some of his greatest dance pieces for her, including “Cry” which was “dedicated to black women everywhere, especially to our mothers.”  Upon his retirement, Alvin Ailey appointed Judith Jamison his successor as artistic director, who stabilized the company’s finances, continued world wide tours, continued its ambitious educational outreach program for underserved communities, and through her own choreography, continued the prestige of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. 

Dance: Emani and Sam 

Slide: Maya Angelou

Dr. Maya Angelou was a towering icon in American literature exploring feminist and African American struggles in her poetry and in her books, including I know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 

Still I Rise

Music - 

Slide - Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is an African American writer who authored eleven books, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, for which she won the Pulitzer. She also won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in recognition of the profound impact her many books have had. The Nobel Peace Prize citation reads: “Toni Morrison: who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

Short Excerpt from Beloved: 

 Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Video 

Barak Obama 

Alexy and Angie

Malcolm X
The Black Panthers

Jimi Hendrix

Alvin Ailey -
Judith Jamison

Barbara Jordan/Thurgood Marshall
Tupac
Maya Angelou - Still, I Rise (Jasmine)
Toni Morrison
Spike Lee
Oprah Winfrey
Neil Degrasse Tyson
Obama
Closing "Glory"