Tension in Harlem
This movement gave Black writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers a major cultural platform to explore pride, identity, protest, and creativity.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
This is the title of Richard Wright’s autobiography about his childhood and young adulthood.
What is Black Boy?
This documentary directed by Ava DuVernay connects slavery, racism, and mass incarceration.
What is 13th?
This Ralph Ellison story features a young Black narrator forced to fight other boys before giving a speech.
What is “Battle Royal”?
This Toni Morrison short story follows Twyla and Roberta across several episodes of their lives.
What is “Recitatif”?
This neighborhood in New York City became the symbolic center of Black art during the period
What is Harlem?
Richard is often physically hungry, but he also hungers for books, knowledge, freedom, and control over his life. This makes hunger this kind of literary device in the book.
What is a symbol or extended metaphor?
This amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.”
What is the 13th Amendment?
This symbol represents forced confusion and the boys’ inability to clearly see the system controlling them.
What is the blindfold?
This is the orphanage where Twyla and Roberta first meet.
What is St. Bonny’s?
This poet wrote “Dream Variations” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Who is Langston Hughes?
These two religious family members pressure Richard to accept their beliefs and obey their authority.
Who are Granny and Aunt Addie?
This term refers to the huge increase in the number of people imprisoned in the United States.
What is mass incarceration?
This symbol represents the way a promised reward can hide pain, cruelty, and humiliation.
What is the electrified rug?
This mute woman from the orchard becomes the center of Twyla and Roberta’s confused memories.
Who is Maggie?
In his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” this writer argued that there was no such thing as a separate “Negro art” in America.
Who is George Schuyler?
In this scene, white coworkers manipulate Richard and another Black boy into fighting each other for their entertainment.
What is the fight with Harrison?
In 13th, this phrase from a 1996 Hillary Clinton speech is used as an example of political language that helped portray some young Black people as dangerous criminals.
What is “superpredators”?
This symbol represents the narrator’s belief that approval from powerful white men will lead to success and dignity.
What is the scholarship?
The name of Twyla's mother...she "dances all night."
What is Mary?
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston says she does not always feel “colored,” but feels it most sharply when she is thrown against this.
What is “a sharp white background”?
This elevator operator disgusts Richard by clowning for white people and accepting humiliation as part of surviving at work.
Who is Shorty?
In 13th, this 1915 film is discussed as a racist movie that helped glorify the Ku Klux Klan and shape images of Black criminality.
What is The Birth of a Nation?
Who is never named / the unnamed narrator?
At the Howard Johnson’s, Roberta is traveling with two men to see this famous rock guitarist, helping place the scene in the 1960s.
Who is Jimi Hendrix?