Activity: Social Barriers

Activity: Picture Analysis The African American Struggle

Steps:
1. Have the group leader take out the pictures from the folder.
2. Place a picture on your desk facing your group members. (Begin with picture A and then continue
alphabetically)
3. For each picture describe the picture and then randomly select a group member to answer a question
that relates to the picture.
Picture A: This is a picture of Africans jammed on the deck of a slave ship.
Why are there so many of them jammed together?
How many do you think will still be alive at the end of the voyage?
Picture B: Slaves in front of their quarters on a South Carolina plantation
Who are these people?
What was a typical day for them like?
Picture C: Painting by A.A. Lamb entitled The Emancipation Proclamation.
Who is the man on the horse?
What was the Emancipation Proclamation?
What is the artists intended message?
Picture D: The first African-American Senator and Representatives to U.S. Congress.
What important law made it possible for them to become the first African-American members of Congress?
What type of legislation might these men consider important? Why?
Picture E: Thomas Nast cartoon form the Reconstruction period.
Describe what you see in this political cartoon.
What do the figures in the cartoon represent?
What is the lost cost that the cartoon refers to?
Picture F: Members of the Ku Klux Klan anoint baby into the Klan.
From what racial group are the people in the robes?
What attitudes do they hold? Why?
Picture G: Photograph of two black men lynched by whites in Marion, Indiana, 1930.
Why do you think these black men were lynched in public?
What seems to be the mood of the whites who have witnessed the lynching?
Picture H: Photograph of a black man drinking from a drinking fountain designated as colored.
Why were separate facilities created for blacks and whites?
Can facilities that are separate really be equal?