Middle School Holds Black History Month Read-In

From Grant King, Middle School English teacher: On Tuesday, February 17, the entire Middle School engaged in our yearly Black History Month Read-In! Every year, we as a community spend a period exploring Black history through fiction and nonfiction literature selected by the English department. This year, the month’s theme was “A Century of Black History Commemorations.” We chose to focus on an important and complex group in US Black history: the Black Panthers. Students were offered three different texts to choose from, at a range of levels of complexity and across genres: 

• One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams Garcia
• The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History, illustrated by Marcus Kwame Anderson, written by David F. Walker
• Revolution in Our Time, by Kekla Magoon

During Period 1, all over the Middle School, students completed a close looking thinking routine and then dug into their books. We learned about precursors to the Panthers, including bus boycotts, sit-ins, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and about the array of programming and resources the Panthers developed, from free breakfasts to health clinics and community education. (To learn more about the work of the Panthers, feel free to follow this link — or take a look at your child’s book!)

If you’d like to take a look at the routine and a brief description of each book, CLICK HERE! This event is part of the National African American Read-In, a country-wide effort to uplift Black voices and celebrate Black history and culture. We in the English department would like to thank our students and colleagues for their enthusiastic participation and reflection for another great year of this invaluable tradition.