Web Corner
Celebrate Black History Month on the Web
Feb 3, 2005 1:00 AM
“We should emphasize not Negro history, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.”
— Carter Woodson (1875-1950) on founding Negro History Week, 1926
Black History Month is a time normally dedicated to the investigation of the intellectual, social and cultural history of African-Americans that goes back to the earliest discovery of our country. Much of what we know today survived despite slavery, oppression and racism primarily because of the initial efforts of Dr. Carter Woodson, who almost single-handedly wrote black Americans into American history.
But despite Woodson’s efforts, it has been difficult to break the pattern of treating black history as a separate subject that somehow is outside of the timeline of the general history of our nation. For instance, the timeline of the civil rights movement is complex and should not exclude the major historical, social and cultural context of the time. For those of you who believe in that notion, the Internet will become your most valuable resource.
A quick Google search (www.google.com) for “Black History Month” (use the quotation marks) will bring up more than 1 million results. If you use only “black history” you’ll get more that 2 million returns.
I tried five different search engines and they all basically returned the same top 10 results. Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), however, first returned a lot of commercial sites with many items related to black history offered for sale.
One comprehensive site was Information Please (www.infoplease.com), a part of Pearson Education that owns Prentice Hall and other education-related publishers. Information Please began as a radio show in 1938 and went on to publish almanacs and now is also publishing reliable and entertaining information on the Web. The Web site includes some time-honored almanac features like “This Day in History” and “Today’s Birthday.”
The same kind of dedication to facts and history is applied to the topic of Black History Month (www.infoplease.com/spot/
bhm1.html). Take a look at the timelines for civil rights, affirmative action and slavery in America. There is also an article regarding the 1963 March on Washington and a disturbing piece on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
There are articles about the Negro Baseball League, African-American literature, black scientists and inventors and another on blacks in the military.
Holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa and even a listing of the top 50 colleges for black students are included. There are lists of biographies of 500 notable African-Americans and a whole section devoted to demographics, economics and education. InfoPlease is certainly a first stop for anyone looking for materials and resources for teaching about black American history.
A deeper look into African-American heritage is found in Thomson Gale (www.galegroup.com), another major publishing organization that owns MacMillan Reference USA and Charles Scribner & Sons, that addresses all types of information needs including homework help.
The first thing you’ll notice is the depth and breadth of the timeline of “Events in African-American History.” There is also a list of activities and many up-to-date biographies.
I highly recommend Slavery in America (www.slaveryinamerica.org) from New York Life. Just click on the Roads to
Freedom Interactive Exhibition, and you’ll see why.
This multimedia exhibit is easy to run and has the power of both images and sounds. The Image Gallery has some wonderful photographs and other images that bring you face-to-face with history and the people that made it all happen.
The lesson plans also explore new and interesting ways to explore the topic. For instance, “Slavery through the Eyes of Artists” looks like a great exploration of the subject through the paintings of Steele Burden. The lessons include a list of standards that the unit addresses. The lessons are contributed by educators around the nation so they have an air of authenticity.
Slavery in America is the official Web site of the PBS broadcast of “Slavery and the Making of America,” a four-part public television series premiering on Wednesday, Feb. 9, 9-11 p.m. on PBS. Parts 3 and 4 will air on Wednesday, Feb. 16. The series is narrated by Morgan Freeman.
For those of you who are experienced with the subject, I’m sure you understand that I have only skimmed the surface of all that’s available on the Internet.
