PRIMER ACTIVITY:

Critical Quote Analysis

Choose from the quotes provided based on which are most appropriate for the grade level you teach and invite students to read and think carefully about the messages embedded in each.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

— Frederick Douglass, 1845

The true character of society is revealed in how it treats its children.

— Nelson Mandela, 27 September 1997

I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living the future created by it.

— Saidiya Hartman, 2007, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
— Angela Davis, 2014

You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening.
— Ijeoma Oluo, 2018, So You Want to Talk About Race

• Using big themes of education, history, responsibility, and possibility for change, ask students to spend a few minutes reflecting on what central message they take away from each quotation.
• Invite students to, in 2-3 sentences, describe that central message in their own words.
• Have students discuss their analysis in partners or pairs of three for a few minutes and prepare to share what their group discussed with the whole class.
• Students share their group discussions and engage in larger class discussion around realities of modern-day slavery.

PREPARING FOR THE RESCUE LIST

Students should have a working knowledge of slavery as they engage in this lesson.

KWL Activating prior knowledge and curiosity:

Using the KWL Handout Provided [Appendix A] ask students to fill in the K column by responding to the following prompt:

What I already know about slavery is:

Then, ask them to fill in the W column by responding to the following prompt:

What I want to know about slavery is:

Ask that they leave the Learn column empty for now.

Using teacher-selected texts to provide excerpts containing historical information regarding the atrocities associated with the Middle Passage and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the United States. As students read these excerpts and passages have them fill in the

Learn column of the K-W-L handout. Have a class discussion about what new information they learned regarding the experiences of those who were enslaved.

Keep in mind that the film clips that they will be viewing from The Rescue List will be covering topics related to:

• modern-day slavery, trafficking, and abolition
• educational inequity
• Trauma, healing, and community

During the viewing of “The Rescue List” they will use the knowledge in the Learned section as a lens through which to evaluate the atrocities of modern-day slavery depicted in the documentary and engage in further structured dialogue about the topic.