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The Green Book

Travelers on the Road, B&W
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Students will explore the challenges African Americans faced in the Jim Crow Era and how they adapted to resist that adversity by dissecting primary and secondary texts and then creating a photo essay, found poem and Instagram story. Though the lessons are part of a mini unit designed to address broader historical skills such as change and continuity, cause and effect, and analysis of primary sources, each lesson can be used independently. This enables the teacher to integrate the individual lessons into the units they might already teach.

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What if the stories L.A. told about itself relegated you to the margins? This episode explores two underground guidebooks -- The Negro Travelers' Green Book and The Address Book -- that reveal the hidden geographies many Angelenos had to navigate, exposing Los Angeles as a place of coded segregation and resistance.
Coded Geographies

Lesson: How did African Americans adapt to the challenge of traveling in the United States over time?

Download Lesson Plan (PDF)

Content Standards

11.7: Students analyze America’s participation in World War II.

11.8: Students analyze the economic boom and social transformation of post–World War II America.

11.10: Students analyze the development of federal civil rights and voting rights.

CCSS Standards

Speaking & Listening (SL.11-12): Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data.

Reading (RH.11-12): Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

Writing (WHST.11-12): Develop the topic thoroughly by selecting the most significant and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.

Use precise language and domain-specific vocabulary to manage the ideas and concepts.



UCLA History Geography Project USC Libraries Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West PBS SoCal

The Lost LA Curriculum project is a collaboration among PBS SoCal, USC Libraries, the UCLA History-Geography Project and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

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