Celebrate Black History Month with Graphic Novels

If you'd like to incorporate new literacies into your classroom's celebration of Black History Month, consider exploring graphic novels.

There are multiple graphic novels that are perfect for middle and high school that either directly or indirectly tackle the topics of Black history and African-American identity.

The following graphic novels are but a small sampling of what is available at your local library or bookstore. We hope these titles and others like them inspire you and your students this February. (All summaries taken from Rationales for Teaching Graphic Novels, edited by James Bucky Carter, Maupin House, 2010.)

Bayou Vol. 1 by Jeremy Love
Lee Wagstaff is a young girl in the midst of several layers of trouble. As if being African American in Charon, Mississippi, during the 1930s wasn’t tough enough, her white friend Lily Westmoreland tells her mother that Lee lost her locket, a prized heirloom. Lily actually had it snatched from her while playing too close to the bayou. A creature, later revealed as the dim-witted and cannibalistic Cotton-Eyed Joe, grabbed for Lily but only caught the necklace. The text interweaves Southern folklore and history with elements of the grotesque and uncensored fairy tales to create a mystic journey narrative replete with tropes and signifiers of African American and Southern culture.

Incognegro by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece
Zane Pinchback is a talented African American journalist writing for the New Holland Herald based in Harlem, New York, but few know him for who he is. Rather, they know him by his pen name, Incognegro. As Incognegro, Pinchback, a light-skinned man, visits lynchings across the American South and details the grotesque events in a nationally read column. He also collects as much personal information as he can about participants and publishes it.

Little Rock Nine by Marshall Poe and Ellen Lindner
Three years after the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools are inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education, the town of Little Rock, Arkansas still had not allowed black students to attend an all-white public high school. This historical graphic novel is the story of two fictitious high school boys growing up in Little Rock, one white, William McNally, and one black, Thomas Johnson, who was the son of the maid who works for William’s prejudiced grandfather.

Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography by Andrew Helfer and Randy DuBurke
Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography begins with the birth of Malcolm Little in 1925 and ends with his assassination in 1965. The book is divided into eleven chapters, each covering a period of Malcolm X’s life. Rather than dwell on his personal life, such as the relationship between himself and his wife and children, it places his life and work in the context of the civil rights movement and the position of African Americans in a predominantly white culture. It also examines his personal growth from young orphan to petty criminal to leader militating for African American liberation.

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm and Rich Tommaso
This piece of historical fiction begins in 1929 when Emmet Wilson decides to leave his young family at 18 years old to make money as a professional baseball player. His career choice takes him away from home for a long period of time, but he makes a larger amount of money in the Negro League of baseball than he would otherwise make working at his farm. In his first game as a professional, he faces Satchel Paige, one of the legendary pitchers of the league, and perhaps the greatest pitchers of all time.

For lesson plan ideas, full plot summaries, and ideas for thematic braidings for each of the graphic novels listed above, consider Rationales for Teaching Graphic Novels. Edited by James Bucky Carter, Ph.D., this CD resource compiles 108 rationales by more than 20 authors to help secondary teachers choose graphic novels that best suit their curricula and/or classroom libraries.

For a free PDF download of the rationale for Bayou Vol. 1 by James Bucky Carter, visit the Rationales for Teaching Graphic Novels page on MaupinHouse.com.