GOAL:
To build background for understanding this story in its historical context
ASSIGNED READING:
Chapter 9
WRITING PROMPT:
What do Momma and Dad want Byron to learn in Alabama?
Do you understand Joey's reaction to the angel? Would you have reacted the same way?
Why do you think Momma planned the trip so carefully?
Do you think that Kenny will like the South? Why?
ONLINE PROMPT:
Use the Student Comment Form to share ideas and questions with your online peers.
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Depending on the needs of your students, you may want to give them some background information about racism and about the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (It is appropriate to have this discussion either before or after students read Chapter 9.) To start the discussion, ask students to share what they know about these topics. You can add any of the following information to the discussion as you see fit.
Racism is the belief that one ethnic group is superior to others. Throughout United States history, the racism of some white people has led to tragic suffering and loss for members of other groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. For about 100 years after the end of the Civil War, the legacy of African American slavery in the South was a segregated society in which black people and white people lived side-by-side but virtually in separate worlds. Public facilities such as drinking fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, motels, and schools were designated for either blacks or whites, and the facilities for blacks were invariably poorer in quality.
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled, in a case known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that public schools could no longer be segregated. White racists did not accept this ruling without a fight, and some turned out to jeer at and threaten black students who attended schools that had formerly been for whites only. The most famous and extreme confrontation broke out at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. President Eisenhower had to take control of the Arkansas National Guard and order them to protect the black students.
In the 1960s, the movement for racial equality known as the civil rights movement began to have a strong and very visible impact on national events. Black leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated nonviolent confrontation as a way to fight injustice. Groups of black and white activists rode together on interstate buses and sat together at whites-only lunch counters, and they endured the violent abuse of racists who wanted blacks to stay in "their place." The growth and success of the civil rights movement only infuriated such people, who in some cases resorted to intimidation tactics and even murder to try to stem the tide of change.
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