Identifying and Resisting Jim Crow with Words and Songs

How have works of literature and music by Black Americans shared an empowering theme of identifying and resisting Jim Crow?

Know (knowledge):

• The poems “The Hill We Climb” and “Old Jim Crow Got to Go” by Amanda Gorman, and the song “Old Jim Crow” by Nina Simone
• How the poems and song share an empowering theme of identifying and resisting Jim Crow
• About the poet Amanda Gorman and the songwriter Nina Simone
• How literature and music can function as creative expressions of protest
• What Jim Crow means, the time frame of the Jim Crow Era, and how its legacy continues

Mastery Objective:

• Students will be able to identify Jim Crow and the resistance to it by examining poetry and songs by Amanda Gorman and Nina Simone.

In this lesson, students discover and discuss a shared theme of identifying and resisting Jim Crow by examining works of literature and music by Black Americans.

Literature and music are powerful tools of self expression and empowerment. Sometimes, when they share a common theme, they can collectively convey a shared experience. Poems and songs that are thematically linked can be especially potent examples of expressing a shared experience. 

Two Black American women artists from two different generations, the poet Amanda Gorman (b. 1998) and the songwriter Nina Simone (1933 - 2003), have created works that share an empowering theme: identifying and resisting the racist and discriminatory practice of Jim Crow. The poem and song’s shared subject are immediately apparent by the similarities in their titles, Gorman’s “Old Jim Crow Got to Go” from 2018, and Simone’s “Old Jim Crow” from 1964. In both works, the artists identify Jim Crow and call for the resistance to it. 

Merriam-Webster defines the policy of Jim Crow as “racial segregation and discrimination enforced by laws, customs, and practices in especially the southern states of the U.S. from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the mid-20th century.” Jim Crow was the impetus for much of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. While Jim Crow sought to be presented by its patrons and practitioners as a benign cultural practice, it was in fact a decades-long and nationwide brutal form of oppression that included acts of domestic terrorism, including lynching. While the Jim Crow Era may have ended in “the mid-20th century,” its legacy continues. Throughout American society today, “racial segregation and discrimination enforced by laws, customs, and practices” is rampant in the U.S. justice system, as well as in the nation’s financial and real estate markets.