Welcome Grade 6's to the Black History centre's activity!
During the next few days the class will work to complete the four centres and explore significant issues around black history.
The class will work in groups and rotate through the centres, working to complete one centre each period. Your task will be to explore the resources provided at the centre as well as using this blog as a resource to research the issue. You will use the graphic organizer at the centre to record the information that you have collected. At the end of the period you will hand in the completed graphic organizer. The centres will be part of a larger project that we will discuss later this week!
Issue: Slavery Learning goal: Examine the issue of slavery and record your research and ideas. Task:Explore the issue of slavery by consulting the resources listed below. In what ways did people work together in the fight against slavery? Use the graphic organizer provided to record your research notes and your response.
Reflect on the guiding questions and record your responses
by using the resources (books, websites, and fact sheets) that are provided at
the centre
Resources Books:
"Henry's Box" by Ellen Levine
"Freedom Train" by Glen Downey
"Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom" by Carole Boston Weatherford(also use for centre D)
Issue: Segregation Learning Goal: Examine the issue of segregation and record your research and ideas. Task: Reflect on the guiding questions and record your response by using the resources (books, websites, and fact sheets) that are provided at the centre.
Resources Books: "White Water" by Michael S. Bandy and Eric Stein "Freedom Summer" by Deborah Wiles "The Other Side" by Jacqueline Woodson Websites: History.com
Topic: Male Leaders of Black History Learning Goal: Examine important male leaders of black history and record your research and ideas. Task: Chose one leader to focus on and using the graphic organizer to record your responses. Use the resources (books, websites, and fact sheets) that are provided at the centre for your research.
Books:
"Let They Play" by Margot Theis Raven
Lincoln Alexander
The Honourable Lincoln M. Alexander was born in 1922 in Toronto. He served with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, between 1942 and 1945. He was educated at Hamilton’s McMaster University where he graduated in Arts, and Toronto’s Osgoode Hall School of Law where he passed the bar examination in 1965. Mr. Alexander was appointed a Queen’s Counsel and became a partner in a Hamilton law firm from 1963 to 1979. He was the first black person to become a Member of Parliament in 1968 and served in the House of Commons until 1980. He was also federal Minister of Labour in 1979–1980.
In 1985, Lincoln Alexander was appointed Ontario’s 24th Lieutenant Governor, the first member of a visible minority to serve as the Queen’s representative in Canada. During his term in office, which ended in 1991, youth and education were hallmarks of his mandate. He then accepted a position as Chancellor of the University of Guelph. In 1996, he was chair of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and was also made Honorary Commissioner for the International Year of Older Persons Ontario celebrations.
The Honourable Lincoln Alexander was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada and to the Order of Ontario in 1992, and in June 2006, he was named the “Greatest Hamiltonian of All Time.”
Baseball was a White man's game for 100 years. That changed forever in 1946 when the Montreal Royals signed Jackie Robinson, the first professional Black baseball player in the major leagues.
The Royals, of the International League, was the AAA farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers. President and owner of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey, chose Montreal as the test site for the bold move, saying that he thought of Robinson as a ball player first and that it was a point of fairness.
News that the team had signed Robinson was met by a storm of controversy and on tour he was subjected to threats and jeers. Critics expressed doubt, saying Robinson was too muscular to be a good hitter. Robinson played his first game for the Royals on April 18, 1946 in Jersey City, NJ, and played the kind of game that would make him legendary, driving in four runs with four hits, including a three-run homer, and stealing two bases. The Royals won 14-1.
Robinson proved on the field and off that Black players were as deserving of the major leagues as anyone. He helped the Royals win the "Little World Series" in the single year he played for the team, after which he was promoted to the Dodgers. He retired from the game in 1957. Jackie Robinson died in 1972. http://blackhistorycanada.ca/arts.php?themeid=22&id=1
Daniel Hill
Daniel G. Hill, human rights specialist, historian, and public servant, was prominent in the movement to overturn racial discrimination in Canada. He came to this country for graduate studies but committed himself to the quest for justice.
As an activist in the 1950s, Hill used public awareness as a tool to combat prejudice. With a PhD in sociology from the University of Toronto and a decade of experience with social causes, he became the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1962, a position he held until 1971. Under his management the commission evolved innovative tactics, widely copied in Canada and other countries. In 1971 he became the first full-time chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and in 1973 established a consulting firm in human rights with an international clientele.
In 1978, Daniel Hill, Donna Hill, Wilson Brooks and other educators co-founded the Ontario Black History Society. It became the first major public organization in Canada focused on the history of people of African descent in the country. He headed the organization for six years.
As Provincial Ombudsman from 1984 to 1989, Hill strove to make that office reflect the "new Ontario" with a forceful outreach program towards traditionally excluded groups and in particular to Canada's Aboriginal people. Following his retirement he became a member of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
Hill's publications on human rights and Black history include Human Rights in Canada: A Focus on Racism (1977, 1986) and The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada(1981). http://blackhistorycanada.ca/arts.php?themeid=22&id=6 Resources Websites Black History Canada
Topic: Women Leaders of Black History Learning Goal: Examine important female leaders of black history and record your research and ideas. Task: Chose one leader to focus on and using the graphic organizer to record your responses. Use the resources (books, websites, and fact sheets) that are provided at the centre for your research.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave from Maryland, became known as the “Moses” of her people and the “conductor” who led hundreds of slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad. In 1850, when the far-reaching United States Fugitive Law was passed, she guided fugitive slaves further north into Canada. When angry slave owners posted rewards for her capture, she continued her work despite great personal risk.
St. Catharines, Ontario (a town close to the border with the United States) was on the route and offered employment opportunities, making it a common destination for the former fugitives, including Harriet Tubman, who lived there from 1851 to 1857. Many of the people she rescued were relatives of those already in St. Catharines including her own parents, brothers and sisters and their families.
Later, Harriet Tubman became a leader in the Abolitionist movement. During the Civil war she worked as a nurse and served as a spy for the Union forces in South Carolina.
Viola Davis Desmond (1914–1965) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was an African-Canadian who ran her own beauty parlor and beauty college in Halifax. On November 8, 1946, while waiting for her car to be repaired, she decided to go see a movie in the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow. She refused to sit in the balcony, which was designated exclusively for Blacks. Instead, she sat on the ground floor, which was for Whites only. She was forcibly removed and arrested.
Viola was found guilty of not paying the one-cent difference in tax on the balcony ticket. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail and paid a $26 fine. The trial mainly focused on the issue of tax evasion and not on the discriminatory practices of the theatre. Dissatisfied with the verdict, the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, with Viola’s help, took the case to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. The conviction was upheld.
Eventually, Viola Desmond settled in New York where she died.
More recently, on April 15, 2010, the province of Nova Scotia granted an official apology and a free pardon to Viola. Lieutenant-Governor Mayann Francis, the first black person to serve as the Queen’s representative in the province of Nova Scotia, presided over a ceremony in Halifax and exercised the Royal Prerogative of Mercy to grant a free pardon to her. Viola’s 83-year-old sister, Wanda Robson, was there to accept the apology. Premier Darrell Dexter also apologized to Viola’s family and all black Nova Scotians for the racism she was subjected to in an incident he called unjust.
Michaëlle Jean, social activist, journalist, documentary filmmaker, governor general (b at Port-au-Prince, Haiti 6 Sept 1957). Jean's early years were spent in a middle-class neighbourhood in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, where her father was principal and teacher of philosophy at an elite, Protestant preparatory school. She was educated at home because her parents, Roger and Luce, did not want her to attend school, where she would have to swear allegiance to dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. In 1965, her father was arrested and tortured. In 1967 he fled to Canada; his wife and two daughters joined him the next year Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary arrived in Canada at the time of the Underground Railroad to teach the children of arriving refugees and distribute anti-slavery materials. She was a woman of many talents. Mary Ann Shadd Cary earned her law degree at the end of the American Civil War and worked as a lawyer, teacher, lecturer, suffragist and publisher.
She was the first woman in Canada to become a publisher, starting the Provincial Freeman in 1853. Resources
Books: "Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged" by Richard Rudnicki and Jody Nyasha Warner Websites:
