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Section 2: Overview

Slavery’s Legacy

We will deepen our understanding of the push-and-pull factors that influenced African-Americans’ decisions to leave the South by using selected informational and literary print and non-print texts and considering the following question:

  • What is the relationship between the end of slavery and the Great Migration?

Additionally, we will further analyze the violent legacy of slavery and its role in migration decisions by digging deeper into poems by Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, excerpts of which Wilkerson uses as epigraphs throughout her text.

  • Lesson 1:

    We will review and discuss excerpts of an essay and examine several maps to supplement our understanding of the larger context, background, and legacy of slavery that resulted in the conditions that led to the Great Migration.

  • Lesson 2:

    Through reading an excerpt of an article by W.E.B. Du Bois, we will continue building on our understanding of the social and political environment left in the wake of slavery’s “end.”

  • Lesson 3:

    We will explore two poems, “The Lynching” by Claude McKay and “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright, and we will draw connections among these literary texts and the unit’s informational texts to extend our understanding of the social and political context out of which the Great Migration grew.

  • Lesson 4:

    We will read two poems by Langston Hughes, “One-Way Ticket” and “The South,” which are both excerpted by Wilkerson in her epigraphs. These poems will allow us to further unpack the violent legacy of slavery and to understand its connections to the Great Migration.

  • Lesson 5:

    We will synthesize our understanding of the supplemental texts we have read and Parts 1 and 2 of The Warmth of Other Suns to determine the key ideas they convey about the relationship between slavery’s “end” and the Great Migration, which is the focus of the Section Diagnostic. We will also evaluate the structures used in the supplemental texts and Parts 1 and 2 and how those structures relate to the authors’ and poets’ purposes in the texts and how the language of the texts shapes the readers’ perceptions.

  • Lesson 6:

    We will participate in a class discussion to express and synthesize our understandings of the unit texts and the social context that precipitated and perpetuated the migration out of the South. To prepare for the discussion, we will compose quick-writes using guiding questions.

  • Lesson 7:

    We will review the teacher’s feedback on our Section Diagnostic and will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.

  • Lesson 8:

    We will share the understanding we have gained through our independent reading and continue reading our texts.