Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy has been a neighborhood school for many years and for the past nine years it has been a lower performing school in the district and state of Connecticut. The school in the past has been unable to meet state standardized test requirements. The district of New Haven made the decision in the year 2011 to rank Clemente Leadership Academy a tier three school and has been designated as a turnaround school for the past 3 years. As a turnaround school run by an outside management company, Renaissance School Services, there has been a bit more freedom for teachers to bend the curriculum in order to meet students' needs and engage students' interests. In doing so, one of the curriculum areas that has been less monitored, and thus more flexible, is Social Studies. While some teachers have given less attention to Social Studies as a result, other teachers have used this as an opportunity to create engaging and stimulating social studies projects, lessons, and activities that create an environment for their students where Social Studies is used to access and develop analytical and critical thinking skills that augment student literacy instruction. In a turnaround school, as with any school where students are significantly below grade level in reading, there is a profound focus on literacy instruction. This unit seeks to address lacks in student background knowledge, deficiencies in the New Haven Public Schools' Social Studies curriculum, and to provide variety to students in the development of their literacy skills. My class size is twenty students. Of the twenty students, 60% are African American and are 40% Hispanic. All students receive free lunch. There are three students receiving special education services. Of these twenty students, none of them have any background knowledge that relates to the Jim Crow era.