Write a journal with at least 3 paragraphs about what you have learned by reading the historical background of the poetry listed on the attached.

Write about what you have learned by reading the historical background of the poetry:

Gwendolyn Brooks - "We Real Cool," "The Last Quatrain of the Battle of Emmett Till," and "Malcolm X"

Rita Dove - "Sonnet in Primary Colors," and "Rosa" June Jordan - "Poem About Police Violence" Adrienne Rich - "The School Among the Ruins"

HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDS OF THE ABOVE POEMS (see poems attached for reference)

"Rosa," of course, refers to Rosa Parks, a very important actor in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950`s and 1960`s. Though she is famously quoted as saying that she was just tired and wanted to sit down, sparking her arrest and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in fact she was a seasoned activist who had been trained in passive resistance at the Highlander Center.

Emmett Till was a fourteen year old black boy who was murdered in Money, Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (He was from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi.) His mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, was largely responsible for igniting massive protest of his death for insisting on an open casket and by saying, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." Even though two white men admitted their guilt, no one was ever jailed for the murder.

Militant black nationalist leader of the Black Muslims (1925-1965), and one of the most prominent African Americans of the 1960s; in 1964 he formed his own Muslim organization and was no longer advocating strict separatism at the time of his assassination.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Mexican painter famous for her self-portraits. Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera (1886-1957) (line 12).

Three major figures in the development of communism in the former Soviet Union: Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), who founded the state; Karl Marx (1818-1883), the German political philosopher who provide the theoretical underpinnings; and Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), who succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union.

According to astrologers, the twelfth house of the zodiac represents the unconscious, our fantasies, and the hidden side of life.

All cities where, in the last decades of the 20th Century, civilian populations suffered greatly during armed conflicts.

Missiles or remotely piloted surveillance drones.