Alternatives to To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird is worth reading — but don’t make it the only book about racial justice on your list, or you’re missing the point.
Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird is worth reading — but don’t make it the only book about racial justice on your list, or you’re missing the point.
It’s not that Harper Lee’s coming-of-age classic isn’t a good book — it is. The problem comes when we try to make it the great American novel about racial justice — which it’s not. How could it be when it’s focused on racism as an incident in the coming-of-age story of a white woman and when its hero is a white man who never actually comes out and condemns racism? So read To Kill a Mockingbird — please read all the banned books! — but also read these books that shift perspective from a young white girl to actual experiences of people of color.
The Hate U Give BY ANGIE THOMAS
If Scout were a young Black woman and Tom Robinson was her friend, you’d get close to the vibe of this YA novel. Starr Carter lives in a poor Black neighborhood and attends a ritzy white private school, putting her smack in the middle of two worlds. Those worlds collide when her best friend is killed in a police shooting during a routine traffic stop — while Starr is sitting in the passenger seat. Like Mockingbird, The Hate U Give looks at the ways racism affects institutions we trust — like the courts or the police.
All American Boys BY JASON REYNOLDS AND BRENDAN KIELY
Quinn didn’t see what happened in the store, but he did see the aftermath: His friend’s police offer brother relentlessly beating Rashad. Told in Quinn and Rashad’s alternating perspectives as they navigate the aftermath of Rashad’s beating, this is a hard book to read in light of everything that’s happening in the world right now. That’s exactly why you should read it.
Dear Martin BY NIC STONE
Justyce is used to living in a world where the fact that he’s a young Black man is enough to make the people around him fear and suspect him — but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He finds solace writing letters to his hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who made great strides for Black civil rights — but who also ended up dead because of racism. (The sequel, Dear Justyce — about two friends who grow up together in Atlanta before their paths diverge — one to Yale University, one to the Fulton Regional Youth Detention Center — is also a contender.)
Internment BY SAMIRA AHMED
Mockingbird was set in the past, but Internment imagines the future: In a not-too-distant United States, Muslim-Americans are forcibly relocated to internment camps. Teenage Layla is one of them, and she’s more than ready to join the brewing rebellion. Though Internment has some literary flaws (including an unfocused second act and spotty character development), its premise is enough to make it worth reading. When is it OK to decide someone’s existence makes her a threat to society?
The Round House BY LOUISE ERDRICH
Young Joe is the Scout figure in this story: When his mother is raped and beaten, Joe wants to bring her attacker to justice, but the law around the Ojibwe reservation is so twisted and complicated that justice is hard to find, even for his father, who works as a judge. As his mother retreats more and more into herself, Joe turns to Ojibwe myths and spirits (which the book treats — appropriately — with the same world-shaping significance as Greek myths and spirits) to solve the mystery. This is a stark and lyrical reminder that justice looks different depending on the color of your skin and where you live.
Monster BY WALTER DEAN MYERS
Steve is on trial for his role in the shooting of a convenience store clerk — Steve was supposed to stand lookout while another kid robbed the store, but the clerk ended up dead. Steve didn’t kill him, though, so he doesn’t understand why his whole life has turned upside down. Of course, we see through Steve’s story that it’s more complicated than he wants to believe. The open ending means that we have to make up our own minds about how guilty Steve is — as well as what guilt the judicial system, racism, peer pressure, and profiling play in Steve’s trial.
The House You Pass on the Way BY JACQUELINE WOODSON
If you want a book entangled with rural Southern history but told from a Black perspective, Woodson’s dreamy, lyrical novel is a solid bet. Staggerlee’s grandparents are famous for dying in a civil rights era bombing. Her parents are infamous in their small town for their interracial marriage. Staggerlee knows she doesn’t want to become famous as “the gay girl” in town, but she can’t keep denying who she really is.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption BY BRYAN STEVENSON
This non-fiction book illuminates the inherent racism of the U.S. criminal justice system through the story of one man's experiences. Stevenson demonstrates how the death penalty traces its roots back to Jim Crow "justice," pushing readers to question what they think they know about American justice and the American dream. The author is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. (I’d probably read the original with high schoolers, but there is a young adult version if you’re reading with younger students.)
Beloved BY TONI MORRISON
This is the hardest book on the list — both in terms of complexity and subject matter — and not every kid will be ready to tackle this in high school. It’s worth reading if you have a student who can handle it, though. This is a horror novel — a gorgeous, dreamy, lyrical horror novel — about a woman who has escaped from slavery but remains haunted by its — literal — ghosts. This book recognizes the personal and na- tional trauma of slavery and its legacy in its dense, difficult story of the costs of surviving. Tom Robinson could be Sethe’s grandson; her history is his history.
Homeschool Unit Study: The Harlem Renaissance
Black History Month is the perfect excuse to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African-American culture that lit up the creative landscape of the 1920s with its epicenter firmly located in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood.
Black History Month is the perfect excuse to celebrate the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African-American culture that lit up the creative landscape of the 1920s with its epicenter firmly located in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood.
Jacob Lawrence, 1917-2000, To Preserve Their Freedom, from Toussain L'Ouverture series, serigraph, 1988-1997. Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona Beach.
The Harlem Renaissance is one of my favorite periods of U.S. history to explore in our high school homeschool. My students get excited by the sheer abundance of possibilities: You’ve got art, you’ve got literature, you’ve got music, you’ve got social criticism, you’ve even got food. On apparently every front, Black Americans were bringing their culture and creativity into play, and the result is almost an embarrassment of riches. There are several directions you could go with this unit: Treat it as a literature unit, and dive into some of the period’s most important works, or use it as a jumping-off point for a big, interdisciplinary study of early 20th century African American history. We usually do the latter, since the Harlem Renaissance also provides an impetus and meaningful background for the civil rights movements of the mid-20th century.
READ
Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
The sociologist and activist W.E.B DuBois was in many ways the father of the Harlem Renaissance, and in this, his most important work, DuBois makes a claim for re-thinking of African-American identity that was to resonate with a generation of African-Americans. DuBois was himself a remarkable figure — the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, he wrote many books, founded the Niagara movement, which opposed Booker T. Washington’s policies of conciliation, and fought for the rights of African-Americans to vote and enjoy the same privileges as other Americans. Souls of Black Folk memorably and movingly describes DuBois’ dawning awareness of his “double consciousness” as an African-American, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes
One of the central debates of the Harlem Renaissance was the question of what art, specifically African-American art, was meant to do. Should the concern of black artists be to counter white stereotypes or simply to portray black life as realistically and authentically as possible? While DuBois thought the former, a younger, more militant generation of black artists, most prominent among them the poet and novelist Langston Hughes, aimed to show all of Black life in their art. In this essay, published in the Nation magazine in 1921, Hughes criticizes those middle-class Blacks who are ashamed of their race and calls on African-Americans to embrace their own heritage and “indigenous” art forms, such as jazz.
Cane by Jean Toomer
Blending poetry with sketches of black life in the South and North, Toomer’s Cane is one of the literary masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer was a racially mixed man who could pass as white and, according to Henry Louis Gates and Rudolph P. Byrd, often chose to.
Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston
Though best-known for the classic (and staple of high school English curricula) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston began her career carrying out anthropological field work in the South. This collection of her sketches from her travels in Florida, Alabama, and New Orleans show how central the African-American experience in all parts of the United States, not just in Harlem, were to members of the Harlem Renaissance
LOOK
Carl Van Vechten
Van Vechten was one of the most unusual figures of the Harlem Renaissance. A prototype of what Norman Mailer would later call the “White Negro,” Van Vechten saw himself as a champion of African-American culture, and though his involvement in the movement was controversial, he was instrumental in bringing the work of African-American writers and artists to a wider public. A novelist, dance critic, and Gertrude Stein’s literary executor, he also photographed many of the Harlem Renaissance’s prominent figures, including DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston.
Aaron Douglas
The visual arts were central to the Harlem Renaissance, and Douglas’s African-influenced modernist murals caught the attention of the leading intellectuals of the movement like Alain Locke and W.E.B DuBois. Douglas’s best-known work were the illustrations he created for James Weldon Johnson’s books of poetic sermons, God’s Trombones.
LISTEN
“Prove It On Me Blues” Ma Rainey
Big, bold, and fearless, Ma Rainey was one of the first female blues singers to achieve fame. Though she didn’t have a great voice, Rainey delivered the double entendre-laden lyrics of her songs with a power and intensity that paved the way for later female singers like Bessie Smith. Here, Rainey sings in remarkably bold terms about her romantic pursuit of a woman, and of her preference for lesbian relationships. The theme of homosexual love was central to the Harlem Renaissance, the historian Henry Louis Gates even arguing that the movement “was as much gay as it was black.”
“T’aint Nobody’s Business if I Do” Bessie Smith
More than any other singer, Bessie Smith embodied the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance — its emphasis on race pride, its uncompromising view of the value of African-American lives.
“Black and Blue” Louis Armstrong
Originally written by Fats Waller for the musical Hot Chocolates, “Black and Blue” became, in Louis Armstrong’s hands, a defiant statement on what it was like to be black in America (Ralph Ellison riffs poetically on the song in his great novel Invisible Man.)
WATCH
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Henry Louis Gates’ sweeping survey of African-American history provides a good general background to the movement and his section on Black popular arts and film of the 1920s is particularly helpful.
Against the Odds: Artists of the Harlem Renaissance
Focusing mainly on the visual arts, this documentary shows how art and politics were inextricably linked for members of the Harlem Renaissance.
Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”
Jazz cadences and rhythms can be found throughout the poetry of Langston Hughes and in this spoken reading, Hughes reads his own poetry to jazz accompaniment, from a broadcast of The 7 O’Clock Show, 1958.
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