Created by the historian Carter G. Woodson and the minister Jesse E. Moorland, Black History Month began as Negro History Week, first celebrated in 1926 on the second week of February; a meaningful week to its founders as it corresponded with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. In the 1960s, in response to the Civil Rights Movement and active college campuses, Negro History Week morphed into Black History Month. And in 1976 Gerald Ford became the first president to official recognize this observance, a tradition that every president has continued each year. Canada also observes Black History Month in February and in the United Kingdom it occurs in October.
In the U.S. this year's theme is African Americans and the Civil War, which seeks to honor "the efforts of people of African descent to destroy slavery and inaugurate universal freedom in the United Sates." The books highlighted in this feature fit this year's theme in particular: Heart and Soul, which has a chapter on black soldiers in the Civil War, and Walking Home to Rosie Lee, which takes place during the Reconstruction Era, when freed slaves are looking for their family members.
The potential for diversity within this unit of study is astounding. While often books will focus on famous African Americans or significant historical events, many featured here are fictional narratives of families and everyday life for slaves or those living in the Civil Rights era. We want to offer you the tools and resources to create powerful programs in your classroom or library; try searching CLCD for all Coretta Scott King award books, which include direct links to curriculum tools. Also available on our site are features about African American authors and illustrators such as Walter Dean Myers, Jerry Pinkney, Floyd Cooper, Leo Dillon, Patricia McKissack, and Sharon Draper.
For more information about Black History Month visit:
The Great Migration: Journey to the North
Eloise Greenfield
Illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist
Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African Americans left the poverty and soul-crushing bigotry of the south to move to northern cities. Eloise Greenfield's family was part of this "Great Migration" and she documents, in free verse, the vastly mixed emotions of leaving a cruel land that is nonetheless the place of family and memories, and the fear and anticipation of going to a new place–a Promised Land–where the expectation of prosperity and the lack of fear beckon. Greenfield writes eloquently and emotionally, revealing the phases of each person's journey: the news of leaving, the sad goodbyes, the long trip, the questions about the choice to leave, and the reunion of families up north. Each poem is assigned "speakers," so it is a natural that this book will be used as a performance piece for choral readings and readers' theater. Illustrations by Jan Spivey Gilchrist are evocative, showing in collage the emotional tearing of leaving home and the piecing together of new lives. A particularly reflective illustration shows a woman on a train, appearing to be asleep but also prayerful while the young girl next to her shoots her eyes warily out the train windows. All in all, this is a perfect blend of illustration and poetry to document an historical journey that is part of so many American families' experience. 2011, Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers, Ages 3 to 10, $16.99. Reviewer: Lois Rubin Gross (Children's Literature).
ISBN: 9780061259210
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