Accused of a crime he did not commit, and not willing to accept a guilty plea, Kalief Browder spent three years on Rikers Island, primarily in solitary confinement, while awaiting trial. Two years after his release he committed suicide –he was 22 years old.
Jesmyn Ward is the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the novel Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award. An associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University, Ward also wrote the memoir Men We Reaped. With her fourth book, The Fire This Time, Ward has assembled a powerful collection of work by contemporary writers of African descent. Divided into three parts, Legacy, Reckoning, and Jubilee, The Fire This Time examines the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and is an homage to James Baldwin.
Audre Lorde (1934 – 1992) described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” A champion for the liberation of all dispossessed people, Lorde concentrated her activism in the struggle for freedom for Black lesbians. Her poetry has impacted the lives of countless diverse people around the world, enabling active readers of her work to move closer to their own personal freedom. Lorde’s work is important because it is art; it is also important because it is activism.
There are many lenses through which to view literary great James Baldwin. These lesson plans examine Baldwin the author activist and provide a historic context for young people to better understand that #BlackLivesMatter is a fresh iteration of the centuries-long Black freedom struggle.
In Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Emily Raboteau’s second book, the author journeys from New York to Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South on a quest for the Black Promised Land. A memoir that penetrates Raboteau’s deep need for a homeland to call her own, this narrative expresses the African American longing for a place to belong. The forced displacement of Africans and the subsequent erasure of an authentic African identity has generated the beautiful, expressive culture of Diasporic peoples in the west. Yet, an insistent urge to locate a place of origination persists in the communal heart of slave descendants, and this narrative is its pulse. Click here to preview and download this lesson plan.