Considering that humanity is believed to have emanated out of Africa, it would seem a pleasant thought to view the people of Earth as a six-billion member extended family. Or, as Sagan suggested, made of stardust having exploded like fireworks from the beginning of time. Yet for much of the world and unfortunately, also for America, such is not the case. Perhaps a good example of this kind of incongruity a family of man separated by ethnic bias and bigotry can be further demonstrated in the closing argument of To Kill a Mockingbird’s main character, Atticus Finch, in his defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. Therein he quotes Thomas Jefferson’s ideal that all men are created equal as stated in The Declaration of Independence:
In this year of grace, 1935, we’re beginning to hear more and more references to Thomas Jefferson’s phrase about all men being created equal. But we know that all men are not created equal in the sense that some men are smarter than others, some have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money, some ladies make better cakes, some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope But there’s one way in which all men are created equal. There’s one human institution that makes the pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein. That institution, gentlemen, is a court of law. In our courts all men are created equal. I’m no idealist to believe so firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system – that’s no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. But a court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I’m confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you’ve heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty!
With regard to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, wherein two chapters (pp. 122-128; 185-193) he provides the first major treatise on scientific racism in this country, the outcome of the guilty verdict in To Kill A Mockingbird is not so surprising. Although Jefferson deserves the accolades of being labeled the quintessential Renaissance man a statesman and former president who doubled the land size of the U.S. when he made the Louisiana Purchase; the founder of the University of Virginia; clearly a facile writer and one of the preeminent architects of his day his weary criticisms of enslaved Africans and preposterous assumptions of their mental deficiencies and social inferiority, clearly label him a racist. While Jefferson repeatedly states that slavery must end in America, he continues to decry those he would see set free. He even goes so far as to criticize them for not being very good slaves! . . . among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists . . . Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction (p. 191) (Little did Jefferson know at the time, that one day Picasso would credit early African sculpture as a source of his inspiration.) Since these kinds of statements are mind-bogglingly incongruous with the eloquence of his writing in The Declaration of Independence, it makes one wonder whether Jefferson had a vested interest (apart from any racist proclivity) in somehow proving that Africans were less than human. If all men are created equal, then prominent plantation` owners stood a lot to lose when the overwhelming majority of their no-cost/low-overhead labor force left the fields to set up shop and compete with them.
By 1935, seventy-five years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished human slavery and sixty-five years after the Fifteenth Amendment granted African Americans the right to vote, the fictional attorney in Harper Lee’s novel loses a case with an airtight defense due to racism. A few years earlier in 1931, the real-life case of the Scottsboro Boys trial begins, attracting national attention and making liberal northerners aware of gross injustices in the rural southern judicial system. In Scottsboro, Alabama, on March 31, 1931, nine young black men were charged with the rape of two white girls. They were all convicted by an all-white jury and eight of them were sentenced to death. A Scottsboro Committee was formed by northern liberals and the U.S. Supreme Court declared mistrials in 1932 and 1935. However, the defendants were eventually convicted and sentenced to terms up to ninety-nine years. (American Images on File, The Black Experience, p. 4.47.)
PICTORIAL PRESENTATIONS: In Part Two: What is Justice? students will often refer to American Images on File, The Black Experience, a Media, Inc., 1990 publication, which is a collection of approximately 600 (8” X 10”) captioned photographs of prominent African Americans and events in history (bound in a loose-leaf ring binder). The book also includes a Black History time line of events spanning almost five centuries. In using the book for pictorial presentations, various pictures will be selected in order to cover a particular period of time, e.g., The Reconstruction spanning a time frame from 1867 to 1877. Photo prints (pictures) will be handed out to students, which they will look over as they study captions for each print they have been given. After a few minutes for review, students will take turns presenting their pictures (in chronological order). In this kind of presentation, we will often allow time for brief discussions about the people and events represented in the timeline.
Slavery & Discrimination in The Land of The Free
The kingdoms of Ghana, Benin, Mali, Ashanti, and the Songhai were early African societies (c. 300 to the mid 1600s) that featured highly organized governments, military divisions, and profitable trade relations with European and Asian nations. These kingdoms existed on what came to be called The Gold Coast, which became the primary area for the capture and sale of Africans into slavery.
Slavery was a practice long held in the ancient world as well as in feudal Europe. The word slave itself comes from Slav, after the pagan Slavs that Western (Christian) Europeans felt entitled to enslave. Today, slavery is still practiced in some parts of the world as a result of debt bondage. Slavery was also a practice among many African tribes to hold prisoners of war in bondage. However, as Ronald Segal points out in his book, The Black Diaspora, the acquisition of people to a house, district, or village was of senior importance. (This triad system of three interlocking social groups formed the basic foundations from which kingdoms would arise in central Africa; it was introduced by Bantu-speaking farmers from the Benue Valley in Nigeria.) The head of a house became more powerful the more he could attract followers by offering gifts. People, not goods, were the prize, and the goods acquired through production or trade were invested in acquiring the allegiance or dependence of more(people . . . powerful provincial lords required correspondingly large gifts to secure their allegiance . . . those arriving as captives or as refugees from drought and famine required no further gifts . . . since they were already being given their lives’ (The Black Diaspora, p. 12). Segal goes on to say that when the Atlantic trade offered imported high volume goods on easy credit terms goods that seemingly competed with the acquisition of dependents for prestige goods became the prize, not people. Such trade offered district chiefs a fast track to power. But since the suppliers of the imported goods increasingly demanded people (slaves) in exchange, the chiefs forfeited many of those dependents that had helped to create their power in the first place.
FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA PICTORIAL P’RESENTATION: Students will share in a pictorial presentation from American Historical Images on File, The Black Experience (pp. 1.03-2.55; 3.00-3.05). Roughly twenty pictures will be selected to depict the beginnings of slavery in America and will include such prominent features as: The arrival of the earliest slave ships in the New World; the first blacks to arrive in Jamestown who became indentured servants; the Triangle Trade route and its middle passage; Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre; Francois Dominique Toussant L’Ouvertures massive slave uprising in Haiti (which later inspired Americans Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey as a model for their rebellions); Joseph Cinqu and the Amistad revolt; Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad; the Dred Scott decision; the Emancipation Proclamation and The Civil War; the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers; draft riots in New York; the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing human slavery; General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox .
After the presentation, students will engage in the Tableau exercises to create a living timeline (as mentioned in the Early Migrations & Explorations section of Part One: Why America?). The focus here will be on the courage, strength, and intelligence of our early African ancestors in America, who stood up to oppression in spite of dire odds. In so doing, they led African Americans to become the conscience of America and the frontrunners of social and political change in this country.
RECONSTRUCTION, AND SEGREGATION PICTORIAL PRESENTATION: Students will share in pictorial presentation from American Historical Images on File, The Black Experience (pp. 3.04-3.27). After the Civil War, African Americans had a reprieve from discrimination.ù The beginnings of Reconstruction brought widespread change in voting and education laws, thus giving blacks access to advantages previously denied them. Many blacks held elected office. New schools for black education sprang up in the North and South. These changes brought about a growing black middle class. While social life remained segregated for blacks and whites during the Reconstruction period, many states moved toward integration by passing laws guaranteeing blacks equal access to public transportation and accommodations. Government and politics were almost fully integrated throughout the South. Blacks served in Congress and the state legislatures, and sat on juries, school boards, and city councils. Black men served as mayors, judges, sheriffrs, policemen and magistrates. By 1867, 700,000 African Americans voted for the first time in Northern-mandated elections (held in each Southern state to decide whether to rewrite the state constitution). Earlier in that same year, on March 2nd, The First Reconstruction Act the first of four acts designed to protect the civil rights of African Americans divided the ten unreconstructed states in the South into five military zones, which were run by armed commanders. These commanders registered qualified voters (especially black men) who were to elect delegates to state constitutional conventions. Blacks and whites worked together for the first time to draft state constitutions in accordance with the guidelines of the First Reconstruction Act. These included mandatory black suffrage and the passage of the Fourteenth amendment granting citizenship to African Americans.
In the course of almost 350 years of slavery, war, and racial hatred, the Reconstruction was not to last. By 1877, Reconstruction governments fell in South Carolina and Louisiana, marking the end of this era, although black disenfranchisement Jim Crow laws would not come until the 1890s and blacks had voted for nearly a quarter of a century.
THE AMENDMENT PROCESS: Students will refer to their social studies text books to review the process for making amendments to the Constitution (pp. 262). They will then assume the characters of senators and representatives living in the late 1800s (some from the South and some from the North). They will improvise arguments for and against giving African Americans the right to vote (which actually occurred in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th Amendment). Then they will present their arguments to the class as if they were presenting to Congress. As in all our presentation work, the class will have the opportunity to ask questions and make comments.
Heading for a New Deal
Referring to their social studies text, Exploring American History (pp. 551-553) as well as American Images on File, The Black Experience (pp. 4.08-4.27), students will be given a presentation covering historical events that led up to the kind of discrimination depicted in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois foretold the future of race relations in America as the problem of the twentieth century. Almost one hundred years later, the color line he spoke of may have faded and blurred, but it has yet to be fully erased. In that expanse of time, inroads to civil rights and human equality would be made by such organizations as The Niagara Movement (1905), which led to the formation of the The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1910). George Edmund Haynes and Ruth Standish Baldwin would cofound the Urban League in New York to help needy Black Americans and train black social workers in 1911. This organization would expand into the 1920s to become the National Urban League. Yet as African Americans strove for their fair share of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they would consistently be hit with countermeasures aimed at them by either white supremacist groups or Eurocentric imperialistic attitudes.
In the 1910s, 840 lynchings had occurred in America and the NAACP carried out a political and legal campaign to institute a federal antilynching law. In 1915, the New Ku Klux Klan, founded in Georgia by ex-minister William J. Simmons, enlisted professional promoters throughout the North and South. These efforts helped to increase its membership to approximately four to five million by the mid-1920s. (By 1930, its membership declined to an estimated thirty thousand.) 367,000 blacks had served the United States during World War I, mostly in all-black regiments, and a hundred thousand black soldiers became some of the most highly decorated in the war after assisting in the liberation of France. Conversely, in the red summer of 1919, twenty-five race riots broke out in American cities as a result of a growing resentment in the North towards Black American soldiers returning from the war as well as an increase in lynchings in the South. In 1920, ratification of the Twentieth Amendment gave women the right to vote. But the 1920s also saw the escalation of Jim Crow laws separating blacks from whites in housing, employment, education, sports, and the military; laws that forced them to ride in separate train cars and in the back section of publics buses, attend black cinemas, and be buried in segregated cemeteries.
In 1929, the stock market crashed. Because many people could no longer afford to buy the goods that were being produced in America, factories cut back on production and laid off workers, which in turn increased the number of people unable to afford buying goods. Banks failed due to unpaid loans, which prohibited them from making further loans and as a result, many businesses went bankrupt. Thus began the Great Depression in which blacks were hit the hardest. In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, approximately one in four workers were unemployed. By 1933, President Roosevelt had implemented several New Deal programs to stay the effects of the depression and to prevent another one from happening again. These included: regulating banks to protect people’s money; hiring the jobless; establishing public works programs; paying farmers to raise fewer crops; establishing guidelines for industry; ensuring job safety; regulating the stock market to prevent another crash; establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority; establishing labor unions to bargain for better conditions and wages; passing the Social Security Act by Congress. While these programs introduced federal support for needy citizens, most of their agencies proved to be discriminatory in that they barred blacks from receiving help.
Order in the Court
The aforementioned historical accounts will serve as a background for analyzing the play, To Kill a Mockingbird. This play will introduce students not only to contemporary theatre, but to the American judicial system as it is represented in drama, as well as to issues of bigotry, segregation, socioeconomic status, and integrity. In the course of working with this play, students will also be introduced to script structure.
FILM CLIP: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: The Academy Award winning film of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, will be presented to students in selected sections. The first segment that will be viewed depicts the home and neighborhood of the Finch family in the sleepy southern town of Maycomb, Alabama. The year is 1935. Atticus Finch is a middle-aged defense attorney and the widowed father of two children, Mary Louis (nicknamed Scout) and Jeremy (nicknamed Jem). In this first scene we are introduced to these three characters as well as their housekeeper and surrogate mother, Calpurnia, and their neighbor, Miss Maudie. Scout tells Miss Maudie about the air rifles Atticus had given both she and Jem. He had warned them never to shoot at mockingbirds. Miss Maudie quite agrees stating that Mockingbirds just make music . . . they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out. This line, from which the title of Harper Lee’s book is drawn, foreshadows the threat to innocence to come in the play. We learn that Scout’s father has become the target of ridicule for defending Tom Robinson, a Negro who is being tried for the rape and assault of Mayella Ewell, a white woman. As Bob Ewell (Mayella’s father) and his daughter pass by, Miss Maudie comments that they live off the county (welfare) near a small Negro settlement, and that the only thing that Bob Ewell feels he can be proud of is the fact that he’s white. By the end of the segment, Scout asks Atticus why he just doesn’t give up. His reply: Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.
COURTROOM SCENE: The play, To Kill A Mockingbird, adapted by Harper Lee from her novel, mainly addresses the trial of Tom Robinson. Students will enter the classroom, which will be set up in courtroom fashion. They will be assigned to sit in certain areas and will be given scripts. We will recap the story from the film clip that we have seen in preparation for our readthrough. Characters will be assigned at this point and I will give a brief description of each one’s role (as well as their basic function in the courtroom, i.e., judge, juror, witness, bailiff, attorney). There will be intermittent discussion during the reading with regard to its implied historical content as well as its thematic content.
The courtroom scene begins with Miss Maudie’s opening monologue informing us of the public excitement that has mounted over this trial. There are picnic parties in the courthouse square and the streets have become overcrowded with mules and wagons parked under every tree. As Scout and Jem arrive late to court (against the wishes of their father), Reverend Sykes, the local black minister, suggests: You could come with me if you’d care to sit on the colored side of the balcony, which they do.
During the course of the reading, students will become aware that bigotry, hatred and fear have brought Tom Robinson to trial, not evidence. In Bob Ewell’s testimony, he states: Jedge, I’ve asked this county for fifteen years to clean out that nigger nest down yonder. They’re dangerous to live around. Sides devaluin’ my property. Mayella’s life is also revealed in her testimony. We learn that she is the oldest of seven children for whom she has acted as a mother most of her life. She is lonely, has no friends, and is abused by her father, who is often drunk.
As the scene progresses, students will be asked to predict certain outcomes, such as: Why does Atticus make a point about which side of Mayella’s face had been bruised? Why does he ask Bob Ewell to write his name on a piece of paper? Why does he upset Mayella, the alleged rape victim, by asking questions about her father and about her relationship with Tom Robinson?
FILM CLIP: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, continued: The outcome of Tom Robinson’s trial will be shown in the final scene from the movie. In Atticus closing statement, he points out the obvious issues of the case: No evidence had been presented against Tom Robinson; Mayella was obviously attacked by a left-handed person and Tom’s left hand doesn’t function at all; Bob Ewell, an abusive father whom Mayella fears, is left-handed. Atticus goes on to express his sincere sympathy for Mayella Ewell. While she is not guilty of a crime, she has committed an offense that society will not accept – she’s white and she tempted a Negro. . . No code mattered to her before she broke it but it came crashing down on her afterwards! . . . So a quiet, respectable Negro man, who had the unmitigated temerity to feel sorry for a white woman, is on trial for his life.
At the end of the trial, Tom Robinson is found guilty. Scout asks Atticus how the jury could find Robinson guilty, to which Atticus replies: I don’t know how. But they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. And when they do, it seems like only the children weep.
ANATOMY OF A SCRIPT: After viewing clips from To Kill A Mockingbird, and completing the courtroom scene readthrough of the play, students will review the elements of a plot in general and how these apply to this play specifically. They will be told that anatomy means structure or how anything can be broken down into all its parts. The word anatomy usually has to do with living things, such as human beings their skeletons, veins and in1ternal organs, etc., but it can also be used to describe how something is put together. Like a human being, a script has a kind of skeleton that we call a plot, the bones of the play. If the bones are strong enough and well organized, the body of the play should hold up nicely. If they are weak or fractured, the play will fall apart. The plot in most stories or plays has three main parts: the beginning, the middle and the end.
We will then explore the anatomy of the script for To Kill a Mockingbird with regard to the following questions about its plot:
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UNDERSTANDING THE PLOT
BEGINNING (Exposition)
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WHAT is the setting?
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WHERE is the setting?
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WHEN does the story take place?
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WHO are the main characters?
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WHO are the supporting characters?
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WHEN does the story begin to take off? (point of attack)
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WHAT problem or challenge is presented? (inciting incident)
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WHAT« is the reader/audience expected to wonder about? (major dramatic question)
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MIDDLE (progressing action)
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WHAT happens in the story to make it interesting? (complications)
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Stories can have lots of complications. Each complication can also have its own beginning, middle and end. Complications often happen when someone in the story discovers something new.
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WHAT new and unexpected thing happens that turns or changes the direction that the story has been going in? (turning point, crisis, peripetia)
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WHAT dramatic thing happens as a result of the turning point? (climax)
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END (Denouement, resolution)
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WHAT happens after the climax? How do things work out?
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Real Estate & The Home of The Brave
Ironically given the world’s violent history of sundry factions warring against each other or the imperialism of one group at the expense of another, we are genetically one species or race: homo sapiens, humans. As people we share a DNA blueprint for life so similar that it defies segregation into a few racial groups. That same basic blueprint is elaborated in an endless variety of biologically and culturally distinctive individuals and peoples. Yet, while cultural diversity has greatly enriched us in many ways, it has also fostered sectarian, fundamentalist, nationalist and racial hatreds throughout the world. America’s melting pot, Walt Whitman’s teeming Nation of nations, has boiled over on more than a few occasions as We the People have attempted to commit ethnocide against the aboriginal peoples of this land, enslaved Africans, excluded Chinese, indentured Europeans, turned starving Irish away from our ports, forced Mexican Americans to return to Mexico during the Great Depression, imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps, ignored persecuted European Jews, etc.
A Dream Deferred
While Roosevelt’s New Deal was taking hold in America, Adolf Hitler was gaining power in Europe where economic and political troubles spurred the formation of the Nationalist Socialist, or Nazi, party. Three years after Hitler became the dictator of Germany, Jesse Owens upset his firmly held racist theories by breaking world records in track and winning four gold medals at the Munich Olympic games in 1936. Yet at home, the American dream for those Americans of African decent was still being deferred. In 1937, just one year after Owens outstanding victory, an antilynching law failed to be passed by the Senate once again. By 1941, the U.S. had entered World War II. A year later, the Air Force established a training academy for black pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama. That same year, A. Philip Randolph threatened to march on Washington with 100,000 supporters in order to protest segregation and inequality. President Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practice Committee designed to stop discrimination in war production industries and government employment. But U.S. armed forces would remain segregated for seven years before another president, Harry Truman, would issue Executive Order 9981. While black men protested We Won’t Fight in a Jim Crow Army on the American homefront, many black men fought for the American dream and its promise of liberty abroad. The Tuskegee airmen went on to serve in Europe with the 99th Pursuit Squadron, an all-black fighter unit, which flew more than three thousand missions over Europe and was responsible for downing three hundred German planes. By the end of World War II, one million African Americans had served, including Dorie Miller, who won a medal for valor at Pearl Harbor. (American Images on File, The Black Experience, pp. 4.52-4.75.)
INTO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT PICTORIAL PRESENTATION: Students will share in pictorial presentation from American Historical Images on File, The Black Experience (pp. 4.83; 5.00-5.06) that will highlight several events at the beginning of the civil rights movement including the 1950 Sweatt v. Painter decision that a new segregated black law school could not offer an education equal to the University of Texas law school; the Tuskegee Institute report that 1952 was the first year since 1882 in which no one had been lynched in the U.S.; the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Washington D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve blacks; the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. That same year, the first White Citizens Council was organized in Indianola, Mississippi to resist integration. In 1955, fourteen-year old Emmett Till was lynched in Money, Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Also in 1955, the U.S. banned segregation in public recreational facilities and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After her arrest, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott and buses were eventually integrated in December, 1956. In 1956 as well, Autherine Lucy was admitted to the University of Alabama, and confronted with riots. She was later expelled for criticizing the university’s lack of support during the incident. In 1957 The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was named president, while in Little Rock, U.S. soldiers escorted nine black children to school after the Arkansas National Guard had been called to keep them out.
In this tug-o-war political climate, Lorraine Hansberry grew up to become at age 29, the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the only black dramatist hitherto to win the Best Play of the Year Award of the New York Drama Critics. In 1959 A Raisin in the Sun opened and became the first play by an African American woman to reach a Broadway stage. The play had its origins in the playwright’s own childhood experiences in 1930s Chicago where, in defiance of the restrictive covenants that confined blacks to the ghetto, her family moved into a hostile white neighborhood (Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, p. 157). At the age of eight, Hansberry’s father moved his family into a white neighborhood and shortly thereafter was evicted by the Illinois courts. He, along with other NAACP lawyers, fought the case and won. Hansberry v. Lee became an historic Supreme Court decision. But as Lorraine Hansberry later wrote, the cost, in emotional turmoil . . . led to my father’s early death as a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked as ever (pp. 157-158).
FILM CLIP - “A RAISIN IN THE SUN”: Students will view the opening scene of A Raisin in the Sun, which introduces the Younger family (featuring Ruby Dee as Ruth, Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee, Diana Sands as Beneatha, and Claudia McNeil as Lena, Mama). In this scene Mama is about to receive an insurance check from her late husband’s policy in the amount of ten thousand dollars. This veritable gold mine that befalls the Younger family offers promise of new beginnings. For Mama and Ruth, it means a new home that will see them out of their cramped and impoverished apartment. For Beneatha, it bequeaths a bright future in the realization of her schooling to become a doctor. For Walter Lee, it offers initiation into manhood as he plans to invest the money into a liquor store venture and become his own boss.
After viewing this opening segment (roughly thirty minutes into the movie), students will focus on characterization as the playwright’s way of showing how each person in a play is unique. The playwright does this in three ways: 1) through dialogue (what the characters say to one another); 2) descriptions that are given in the script; and 3) stage directions that tell how the characters feel. (Sometimes stage directions tell how the character should move on stage). We will also review each character that appears in the clip as to his or her function (main, supporting, or minor character); social, psychological, and moral attitude; how each is typified and individualized; and whether or not each character is sympathetic or nonsympathetic.
“A RAISIN IN THE SUN” READTHROUGH: Students will share in a readthrough of Act Two of A Raisin in the Sun (pp. 64 - 112). Since the cast of characters will be less than the number of students in the class, we will shift roles every ten pages or so to give everyone a chance to read. Prior to the reading, students will warm up with voice exercises, which include: relaxation stretching; deep breathing; saving breath (holding a sound), enunciating vowel sounds and projecting from the diaphragm; and tongue twisters. Throughout the readthrough, we will focus on character motivation in relation to the time period in which the play takes place by reviewing such questions as: Why does Ruth contemplate having an abortion? Why is Beneatha interested in African culture? Why does Mama give Walter Lee charge of most of the money? Why does she want to move into a white neighborhood? Why does Karl Linder, head of The Welcoming Committee try to buy the Youngers off from moving into his neighborhood. Why does Joseph Asagai, Beneatha’s African friend, criticize Beneatha and look down on Walter Lee? Why does Walter Lee look down on Joseph Asagai? Why does Mama take pity on W,alter Lee after he loses the money?
FILM CLIP - “A RAISIN IN THE SUN”: Students will view the third act of A Raisin in the Sun, which in the last scene, finds the Younger family moving into their new house. We will then review the Langston Hughes poem from which the title of the play is drawn.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
POWER TO THE PEOPLE PICTORIAL PRESENTATION. After reading and discussing the poem, students will be asked what dream has been deferred? In the discussion that follows, we will refer to their social studies text, Exploring American History (pp. 616-621) and American Historical Images on File, The Black Experience (pp. 5.09-5.17) with respect to the events that led up to the March on Washington in 1963 and Dr. King’s famous “I have a dream speech.
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