Image rights: Tanner portrays an older Black man teaching a boy to play the banjo, emphasizing family, learning, music, and intimate everyday life. The painting offers a powerful counterpoint to the racial caricatures common in nineteenth-century American visual culture.
The Banjo Lesson
Henry Ossawa Tanner · 1893
Tanner portrays an older Black man teaching a boy to play the banjo, emphasizing family, learning, music, and intimate everyday life. The painting offers a powerful counterpoint to the racial caricatures common in nineteenth-century American visual culture.
Learn moreRelated Cultural Works
A Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Cooke · 1964
Cooke's soul classic became a rallying cry of the civil rights movement, expressing hope and resilience in the face of racial injustice — often called the greatest civil rights song ever written.
Learn more
American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding
Faith Ringgold · 1967
Ringgold's American People series examined race, identity, and American life during the Civil Rights and Black Power era. The Flag Is Bleeding asks students to consider who is represented by national symbols and who gets to claim them.
Learn moreAugust Wilson's Century Cycle
August Wilson · 1982
Ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, chronicling the African American experience in Pittsburgh — the most sustained dramatic portrait of Black life in American theater.
Learn moreBeloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel confronts the psychological and spiritual trauma of slavery through the haunting story of Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman in post-Civil War Ohio.
Learn more
Black Business in Chicago, 1899
African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition · 1899
A photograph documenting a Black-owned business in Chicago that was included in the visual record assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It provides evidence of Black entrepreneurship, urban life, and economic development at the turn of the century.
Learn moreBlack Chicago and the Great Migration
Unknown photographer · 1910
Photographs of Chicago's Black neighborhoods, businesses, churches, and public life help students trace how migration transformed northern cities. They can be paired with Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley to compare documentary photography with artistic interpretation.
Learn more