By, Ascellia M. Arenas
🔆Cellibrate Black History🔆 I am teaching my classes about pre, during, and post slavery America; Jim Crow Laws; Segregation, and The Civil Rights Movement, this month. I showed them all kinds of realia: film clips, historical documents/photographs, and non-fiction vs fictitious texts about our history. I also taught them that post civil war segregation tactics didn’t end with Dr. King having a dream or Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus. Look at this picture for a moment…In that very lot, behind my siblings and me (in front of our property) the Klan used to burn crosses to try to intimidate us and make us move out of our neighborhood. This photo was taken in 1977, in Pembroke Pines, FL. We moved there in 1974. This was one of four properties my father owned (at that time). He wanted to move us to a new neighborhood, an exclusive neighborhood, where we can get a great education and then go to college, like my parents did. We were one of three black families in the entire city that owned homes there. Yes, my parents were friends with the other two couples that owned homes in the quiet suburban neighborhood, too. For years we defended our rights to live on this block, in this quaint little neighborhood, shrouded by pine trees. Imagine that…pine trees in Florida. Times have changed, a little. There are many families living here now, of all races and cultures. That empty lot is completely developed with hundreds of other homes with people living in them of all races, sizes, and varying degrees of intelligence. The neighborhood has grown significantly. My how things change, people change, but some ideas don’t; unless you influence the change.
If you don’t talk to your children about real life, if you don’t teach them about their history, they will be doomed to repeat it. Make moves… #cellibrationpublishing #AYV2016 #blackhistorymonth
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