Looking Through the Eyes of Injustice: Integrating Poetry and African American History

In looking at this article more in depth I realized the potential that poetry brings into the classroom. Students can get a real sense of emotion and connect to the people that experienced discrimination and injustice during the civil rights movement. By students seeing clips from the time period they learn a lot about the oppression and injustice African American people felt during the movement. I agree that students need to experience poetry to express their feelings and emotions on sensitive topics such as racism and the pain of the civil rights movement. I believe that students have a lot of emotions they want to express and poetry is a great form of expression. While attempting to teach civil rights emotions in my pre internship, i found it difficult to find a way for my students to express their many thoughts and emotions to relate to the people who have experienced it. Poetry would have been a great way of allowing them to vent their emotions and thoughts in a representative form. Poetry in the classroom is a powerful method of making history jump and become more relevant to students lives.