Black History Month Places

Dear Educator,

As we continue to not only celebrate Black History Month, but also educate students about the struggles and triumphs it involved, this week we are looking at places that resonate with Black history. From Compton in the Los Angeles area to Harlem, to the base of the Lincoln Memorial, and more, we are recognizing places that ALL students should know about and why they matter. Let’s start our Black History Month tour of the U.S. with Harlem, a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City, where a wide variety of artists and musicians provided Black voices to the arts at a time when they had few rights.

Harlem is well known as an African American neighborhood, but it wasn’t originally. Wealthy New Yorkers had summer homes there. Eventually, however, the neighborhood changed after economic panic. This was in the late 1800s. During the Great Migration of the early 1900s, Blacks moved from the South to the North. Harlem became a thriving community. Poets Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, author Zora Neale Hurston, jazz greats like Duke Ellington, and actor Paul Robeson were some of the people who led the Harlem Renaissance. Find out more about this important era in Black history in this Geography News Network article.

Of course, people of African descent have continued to make massive cultural impacts up to today. Hip-hop on the West Coast is often synonymous with the city of Compton, located on the southside of Los Angeles. The group NWA released their influential album Straight Outta Compton in 1988, and rap music has not been the same since. The production of Dr. Dre and the smooth flow of Snoop Dog are just some of the highlights of the West Coast hip-hop genre from Compton. Learn more about West Coast hip-hop and the origins of the city of Compton in this GNN article.

The civil rights movement of the mid to late 1900s helped usher in new rights for Black Americans. Numerous events took place from 1954 to 1968 that brought attention to equal rights, leading to the end of segregation, and securing voting rights. This map highlights these major events of the civil rights era.

We leave you this week with a review of the history of slavery in America. We cannot address Black History Month without including the effect slavery had on Blacks in America. The article is accompanied by a map that shows the states that allowed slavery—located in the South—and the free states—which were in the North. There were also some states on the border. Of course, the Civil War erupted, with the North and the South fighting one another. It is important for students to have the historical understanding of how we got where we are today. This article will extend their knowledge of slavery and illustrate the division in America over it.