These
public
and
private
histories are told through the medium of paintings, photographs, sketches, poems, rap, short stories, storybooks, songs, murals, videos, drama, dance, and even quilts. My unit will explore several of these mediums, and in one or two cases students will compare how more than one medium tells the same story. For example, in this unit, students will compare how three different authors narrate and illustrate, in children's books and a children's video, the story of Harriet Tubman, leading slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Students will listen to a cut from Cornell West's
hip
CD
Sketches of My Culture
in which West and his collaborators extol the civil rights struggle of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X in a tune aptly titled 3M's. They will look at Jacob Lawrence's hair-raising painting,
Confrontation at the Bridge
, of a defining moment in the Civil Rights Movement when, in Selma, Alabama, black and white civil rights activists were met with fierce police dogs and state police as they attempted a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery. Students will compare this painting to photographs on the Internet of this same confrontation. Crossing the bridge is also documented in the video
Eyes On the Prize
.
