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What If

Age/Grade Level or Audience

Elementary or middle school history classes.

Description

Organize a thinking game to expand student awareness of racism.

Procedure

Have students name specific changes in United States and world history that would have differed if major events had been altered. For example, what if:

• African explorers had discovered America
• Mennonite and Quaker activists had succeeded in ending slaving in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century
• the first colonial slaves seized control of New England
• Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Cherokee joined with slaves to overpower European settlers in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida
• Frederick Douglass had become President of the United States or a cabinet member under Abraham Lincoln
• Nelson Mandela had been martyred
• trade embargoes had ended Apartheid
• black athletes had been barred from Olympic participation in 1992
• Clarence Thomas's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court had been defeated
• Barbara Jordan had been elected Bill Clinton's vice president
• Jesse Jackson had led a United Nations team in eradicating famine in Somalia or Haiti
• Colin Powell had run for president against Bill Clinton

Sources

Indexes such as Infotrac and Newsbank; periodicals such as Jet, Ebony, Emerge, Life, Newsweek, U S. News and World Report, Forbes, and Black Business; Internet Sources, particularly "Africa Online."
Asante, Molefi K., and Mark T. Mattson, Historical and Cultural Atlas of Africans, Macmillan, 1991.
Bache, Ellyn, The Activist's Daughter, Spinsters Ink, 1997.
Chiasson, Lloyd, ed., The Press on Trial: Crimes and Trials as Media Events, Greenwood, 1997.
Hill, Anita, Speaking Truth to Power, Doubleday, 1997.
Hornsby, Alton, Chronology of African-American History, 2nd edition Gale, 1997.

Alternative Applications

Assign students to compose a news item, tableau, interview, Website, short story, play, poem, hymn, song, movie, or dance expressing a rewritten historical event from the black point of view. For instance:

• Anita Hill's testimony before the Senate committee
• Composition of "Dixie"
• Denzel Washington's role in the film Malcolm X
• Establishment of a holiday honoring Christopher Columbus
• Gettysburg Address
• Jefferson Memorial
• John Newton's composition of "Amazing Grace"
• Lincoln-Douglas debates
• O. J. Simpson trial
• Unveiling of the Vietnam Memorial
• Virginia Reel
• William Styron's publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner