The Great Migration Day 9 - Life in the North

As a summary activity for our unit, you will imagine that you are an African-American, who has moved to the North during the Great Migration.

In order to complete this assignment, carefully analyze the following handout.  Explore what living conditions, employment opportunities, and community activities were like for African-Americans who had moved to the North during the Great Migration.

You will compose a letter in the imagined voice of an African American who has moved to the north, and is writing to a relative living in the south.  Reference details from the handout, to illustrate what life is like in a northern city.

In composing your letter, you should answer the following questions:

• What state are you originally from? 
• Where do you currently work, and how does it compare to the work you did before moving
• How would you describe your living situation?
• How do you spend your time when you are not at work?
• How has your new life in the North met the expectations you had before moving? How has it not?
• What role has Blues music played in your life since moving from the South? Where, when, and how do you most often listen to Blues music?

You will be evaluated using the following RUBRIC 

DUE DATE:  

• 1st Draft: Wednesday October 26th
• 2nd Draft: Thursday October 27th
• FINAL DRAFT: FRIDAY OCTOBER 28th

***LATE ASSIGNMENTS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED***  

Blues and the Great Migration - Day 8

Hello, Rockers!

Here is your assignment for today.  Please save the document to your google drive, and make a copy. Use your name in the file name.

Answer the questions, and then email me when you're done (michael.tesler@wjps.org).   If you don't finish, you must finish for HW.

Here's a link to the assignment.  

Rock on!

Blues and Great Migration Day 7

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR ASSIGNMENT 

Due BEOP (By the end of the period), or for HW

The Blues and the Great Migration Day 6

Greetings, young Rock and Rollers!

CLICK HERE for a link to your assignment.  

Assignment is due, BEOP (by the end of the period).  If you don't finish, you must complete it for HW by TOMORROW!

The Blues and the Great Migration - Day 5

1. Visit a page from the 1940 U.S. Census. Explain that a census is a process of recording information about a population. This page is a record of the people who lived on a plantation outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, and was taken around the same time as the photographs we previously examined.

If the image is too small to read, you can access a high-resolution scan of the full census page here.)

In your notebooks, please answer the following questions...

• What kind of information is collected on this census form?
• What race are most of the people who live on the plantation? Can you find anyone who is not a member of that race?
• Look at column 28, which lists “Occupation.” What is the reported occupation for most of the African Americans on this list? What is the reported occupation for one of the white people on the plantation?
• Look at column 7, which lists the names of the plantation’s inhabitants. Locate the name “McKinley Morganfield.” What sort of information does the census tell us about Muddy Waters in 1940?
• Based on the materials discussed thus far, what are some general conclusions we can make about the lives of many African Americans living in Mississippi around 1940?

The Blues and the Great Migration - Day 3

Complete the exercises below.

1. In his 1955 article “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” Muddy Waters says that when he first started playing in Chicago, people called his songs “sharecropper music.”

Review the reading on sharecropping.

Answer the question below:

How did the sharecropping economy in the southern United States function, and how did the system keep sharecroppers stuck in a cycle of poverty?

2.  Study the lyrics to Muddy Waters’ “Burr Clover Farm Blues.”   Muddy Waters recorded this song in 1941, when he was living on a Mississippi farm and working as a sharecropper. Muddy was recorded by Alan Lomax and John Work, two musicologists working for Fisk University and the Library of Congress to study the folk traditions in rural communities. Muddy Waters left the farm and moved to Chicago in 1943, two years after recording this song.

Answer the questions below:  

• According to the lyrics, what seem to be the singer’s feelings about the possibility of  leaving the farm? How do the lyrics convey the singer’s sense of “displacement”?
• Why might some audiences have identified this sound as “sharecropper music”? How do you visualize the setting for a song such as “Burr Clover Farm Blues”?

3.  Carefully study the following photos

• What are your first impressions of the photograph on the left? How many people do you see, and how would you describe the way they look in this photo? What relationship do you think these people might have to each other?
• What are your first impressions of the photograph on the right? How would you describe the size of the house?
• Notice the proximity between the house and the cotton pile. What might this proximity suggest about the relationship between work and home life for someone working as a sharecropper? How much leisure time do you think a sharecropper living in this cabin had?

The Blues and the Great Migration

In this lesson, we will discuss the factors that led to the Great Migration.

Please complete the following.

1. Read the following handout.
2. Complete the questions at the bottom of the handout in your notebook.
3. If you don't finish the assignment in class, you must finish it for homework.