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\"An introduction to Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their eyes were watching God for high school students, which includes biographical background on the author, explanations of various literary devices and techniques, and literary criticism for the novice reader\"--Provided by publisher.

Mary McLeod Bethune was a significant figure in American political history. She devoted her life to advancing equal social, economic, and political rights for blacks. She distinguished herself by creating lasting institutions that trained black women for visible and expanding public leadership roles. Few have been as effective in the development of women's leadership for group advancement. Despite her accomplishments, the means, techniques, and actions Bethune employed in fighting for equality have been widely misinterpreted. Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism seeks to remedy the misconceptions surrounding this important political figure. Joyce A. Hanson shows that the choices Bethune made often appear contradictory, unless one understands that she was a transitional figure with one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth. Bethune, who lived from 1875 to 1955, struggled to reconcile her nineteenth-century notions of women's moral superiority with the changing political realities of the twentieth century. She used two conceptually distinct levels of activism—one nonconfrontational and designed to slowly undermine systemic racism, the other openly confrontational and designed to challenge the most overt discrimination—in her efforts to achieve equality. Hanson uses a wide range of never- or little-used primary sources and adds a significant dimension to the historical discussion of black women's organizations by such scholars as Elsa Barkley Brown, Sharon Harley, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. The book extends the current debate about black women's political activism in recent work by Stephanie Shaw, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Examining the historical evolution of African American women's activism in the critical period between 1920 and 1950, a time previously characterized as \"doldrums\" for both feminist and civil rights activity, Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women's Political Activism is important for understanding the centrality of black women to the political fight for social, economic, and racial justice.

An overview of how athletes from various excluded groups have succeeded in the world of sports, leading the path for others to follow.

Margaret Walker (1915-1998) has been described as \"the most famous person nobody knows.\" This is a shocking oversight of an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, educator, and activist as well as friend and mentor to many prominent African American writers.Song of My Lifereintroduces Margaret Walker to readers by telling her story, one that many can relate to as she overcame certain obstacles related to race, gender, and poverty. Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama, to two parents who prized education above all else. Obtaining that education was not easy for either her parents or herself, but Walker went on to earn both her master's and doctorate. from the University of Iowa. Walker's journey to become a nationally known writer and educator is an incredible story of hard work and perseverance. Her years as a public figure connected her to Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Alex Haley, and a host of other important literary and historical figures. This biography opens with her family and those who inspired her--her parents, her grandmother, her most important teachers and mentors--all significant influences on her reading and writing life. Chapters trace her path over the course of the twentieth century as she travels to Chicago and becomes a member of the South Side Writers' Group with Richard Wright. Then she is accepted into the newly created Masters of Fine Arts Program at the University of Iowa. Back in the South, she pursued and achieved her dream of becoming a writer and college educator as well as wife and mother. Walker struggled to support herself, her sister, and later her husband and children, but she overcame financial hardships, prejudice, and gender bias and achieved great success. She penned the acclaimed novelJubilee, received numerous lifetime achievement awards, and was a beloved faculty member for three decades at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.

A brief biography of the woman whose years of working for civil rights led her to refuse to give up her seat to a white person, setting off the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and who became known as \"the mother of the civil rights movement.\"

The Common Core State Standards mean major changes for language arts teachers, particularly the emphasis on \"informational text.\" How do we shift attention toward informational texts without taking away from the teaching of literature? The key is informational texts deeply connected to the literary texts you are teaching. Preparing informational texts for classroom use, however, requires time and effort. Using Informational Text to Teach Literature is designed to help. In this second volume (the first volume is on To Kill a Mockingbird), we offer informational texts connected to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Readings range in genre (commencement address, historical and cultural analysis, government report, socioeconomic research study, and Supreme Court decision) and topic (housing discrimination past and present, abortion, the racial and cultural politics of hair, socioeconomic mobility and inequality, the violence associated with housing desegregation, and the struggle against the legacy of systemic racism). Each informational text is part of a student-friendly unit, with reading strategies and vocabulary, writing, and discussion activities. Teachers need to incorporate nonfiction in ways that enhance their teaching of literature.The Using Informational Text to Teach Literature series is an invaluable supportive tool.

Introduces the life of civil rights activist Rosa Parks.

In May 2020, mass media outlets widely reported the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY. Two months later, in July 2020, some news outlets also reported the story of Grace, a fifteen-year-old Black girl in Michigan who was incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic for not completing her online schoolwork. These two incidents are connected: violence against Black girls in schools and classrooms is inextricably linked to the anti-Black state violence that Black women and girls face in society and in their homes. The violence that Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Korryn Gaines, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and many more have experienced results from the same interlocking systems of oppression that marginalize the suffering of Black girls in schools. However, there is a lack of exploration about how these systems - schools, criminal justice, juvenile justice, law enforcement, and media - operate together and simultaneously shape and enact violence against Black women and girls.Assault and violence against Black women and girls that result in murder are masked forms of Black death. Information about their deaths is rarely shared across mass media platforms. Brittney Cooper argues that there is much less outrage surrounding Black death when it is Black women and girls who are murdered. She suggests that one reason is that they are often killed in their homes rather than in public spaces and therefore there is less public recognition. Because their murders often occur in containment and confinement, Black women and girls' narratives become hidden, covered up, and written off in ways that deny their victimization and justify the violence they face. I have come to understand these kinds of \"erasures\" as endemic to the structure of this anti-Black world, which only sees us when we are \"dead and dying.\" Indeed, we would not know about Breonna Taylor's life and that she was an \"essential\" worker if she had not been killed. A recent 20/20 documentary segment about her murder shows how Breonna Taylor was at first considered a suspect in her own murder case for months, which diminished the availability of accurate information about her death. Criminal legal systems, law enforcement, and mass media outlets mask the violence against Black women and girls when they withhold or obfuscate information about their deaths in order to refrain from impugning their murderers as well as to position the murdered women and girls as non-human and therefore deserving of violence.The current moment has also sparked a heightened awareness of the ways Black women and girls are harmed by anti-Black violence through various oppressive structures. Recent literature suggests that Black girls experience higher rates of exclusionary discipline (suspensions and expulsions), have more frequent interactions with law enforcement in schools resulting in school-related arrests, and face verbal as well as physical violence from security officers, school staff, and administrators, starting as early as preschool. It is critically important to address how police violence against Black women and girls is a type of \"masked\" violence and social death that young Black girls experience in schools. While more recent discourses suggest Black girls' experiences with law enforcement and the physical violence in schools warrant our attention, so do the ways they disproportionately experience quotidian assaults that are often overlooked. Drawing on my study of middle-school Black girls in predominantly white suburban schools, I specifically examine the mundane, everyday forms of anti-Blackness, or \"anti-Black girl violence,\" to address the specificity of school violence Black girls face. Seeing school practices through the lens of anti-Black-girl violence, I argue that schools perpetuate and maintain anti-Blackness against young Black girls through \"reformed\" school policies and practices enacted by staff, teachers, and administrators in specific ways that mask Black girls' suffering, thus creating an environment in which their lives, their feelings, and their pain do not matter.

Presents the life of the Alabama teenager who played an integral role in the Montgomery bus strike, once by refusing to give up a bus seat, and again, by becoming a plaintiff in the landmark civil rights case against the bus company.

Latinas in the US juvenile legal system face unique challenges due to their specific location in gender and cultural hierarchies within societies that privilege males and White ethnic European Americans. In addition to growing up in urban communities besieged by poverty, patriarchy, and racism, often originating from nations hindered by war and lack of infrastructure, Latina girls in the juvenile court system contend with two other challenges: language barriers and difficulties with acculturation. However, noticing young women's interactions in detention allowed a more nuanced understanding of these factors. Even as they faced difficulties specific to being Latina, young women displayed strengths arising from being bilingual and transcultural. Drawing from qualitative research with 41 Latina teenagers in secure juvenile facilities, this article details how young Latina women's interactions while in lock-up turn so-called adversities into advantages, even as they were adjudicated delinquent in US juvenile correctional facilities.