The purpose of the unit is to assist educators as they take a closer look at their curricula. Through this unit educators will look at the content and educational practices, curricula and resources that perpetuated an incorrect dominant narrative which in turn separated and divided. The major focus of this unit will be on the communities of blacks that were established across North America from 1916 to as late as 1970. During the Great Migration, which is known as. The Black Migration or the Great Northward Migration was characterized by the mass movement or relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest, and West from about 1910 to 1970. Many of these people of color made choices to try to find better economic opportunities in the midst of Jim Crow and unsaid sets of restrictions. Blacks left to set up extraordinarily successful black communities -- “Black Wall Street,” also known as Greenwood or The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. According to the cnbc.com article “Black Wall Street’: The history of the wealthy Black community and the massacre perpetrated there 100 years ago,” the event is described as a “tragic event perpetrated on Black Wall Street that has been described as ‘the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.’”
My district’s eighth-grade curriculum is centered around the United States up through the Civil Rights era. This unit will use the tools of narratives, art, pictures, and other artifacts to demonstrate how educators and students can research and tell the stories of their thriving local community as well as discovering the story of Greenwood in Tulsa and other communities and events that have been left out of history.
Throughout this unit there will be many opportunities to intersperse and bring out parts of history that will allow Black, Brown and those considered “Other” to find themselves and their events in our classrooms, but most importantly exposing teachers to ways that they can fully flush out their curriculum. This unit would allow teachers to intersect narratives and resources and interrupt the widely accepted and flawed Social Studies Curriculum, outdated social studies textbooks still used in in many classrooms. Some classrooms do not have textbooks, but do not access digital technology and may be run by people who “know” history and have taught the course for 10-20 years. The Social Studies classroom has become a time capsule—never pried open to exchange the artifacts on the shelves—remaining frozen in time and existing apart from the world that encapsulates it.