When CMadison and I began homeschooling Charles, Damon and Evan back in 1991 we developed our own curriculum.  We hired African and African-American graduate students at The Ohio State University (2 young African-American women, 1 young African-American man and 4 young African men) to come to our home and teach biology, French and math.  And as an aside, limiting ourselves to a single car, most meals at home with food from our garden and no stylish clothes, shoes, beauty shop/barber shop, cable or video game expenses made paying for grad school tutors and fabulous enrichment programs quite feasible-plus all the lectures were FREE! Anyway, those amazing tutors selected the texts for their classes from Long’s Bookstore at OSU, but CMadison and I had the distinct pleasure of handling all the Humanities.  The traditional canon was easy… Iliad, Odyssey & Aeneid… tons of Plato and Aristotle…Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy…all the usual suspects they would have covered had they stayed in prep school. But we added our own elements for a truly broad-based and rigorous academic experience, elements that would NOT have been covered in prep school.  And since it’s Black History Month and some folks have asked for our partial bibliography and list of lectures, I’m delighted to share this information. Let me know if you’re interested in what else we included…

Bibliography

Bell, Derrick, And We Are Not Saved. Basic Books, Inc., @ 1987.

Bell, Derrick, Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, Inc., @1992.

Biko, Steve, I Write What I Like. Harper & Row, @1978.

DuBois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk. Bantam Books, @1989.

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), @ 1961.

James, George G.M., Stolen Legacy. The African Publication Society, @1980.

King, Martin Luther, Why We Can’t Wait. The New American Library, @1964.

Lemelle, Sid, Pan Africanism for Beginners. Writers and Readers Publishing Inc. @1992.

Mandela, Winnie, Part of My Soul Went With Him, W.W. Norton & Co. @1985.

Rogers, J.A., Sex and Race,  Helga Rogers, @1945.

Williams, Eric, Capitalism & Slavery. Capricorn Books, @1966.

Woodson, Carter Godwin, The Negro in Our History, The Associated Publishers, Inc. @1941.

Woodson, Carter Godwin, The Mis-Education of the Negro. AMS Press @1977.

African Proverbs, compiled by Leslau, Charlotte & Wolf. Peter Pauper Press, Inc. @1985.

The African Diaspora, Interpretive Essays, ed. by Kilson, Martin L. and Rotberg, Robert I., Harvard University Press, @1976.

The Horizon History of Africa, American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc. @1971.

The Langston Hughes Reader, George Braziller, Inc., @1971.

Lectures

Bell, Derrick (Prof., NYU), Institutionalized Racism at Capital University.

Bolton, Charles (Colonel), NASA’s Space Program at The Ohio State University.

Clarke, John Henrik (Prof., Cornell), Pan-Africanism at The Ohio State University.

Farrakhan, Louis (Minister), Black History Month, East High School.

Gates, Henry Louis (Prof. Harvard) Letters to my Daughters at Ohio Dominican University.

Hacker, Andrew (Prof., Cornell), Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, at The United Way Conference.

Martin, Tony (Prof., Wellesley) Marcus Garvey at The Ohio State University.

Nichols, Edwin, Ph.D. Anthropology of Races and Cultures at The Ohio State University.

Stanley, Jean Fuller (Prof. Wellesley), Mythology, Magic and Medicine: Scientific Contributions from the Third World at The Columbus Wellesley Club.

West, Cornell (Prof. Harvard), Race Matters at The Ohio State University.

Young, Andrew, The Civil Rights Movement and Memoirs of MLK at Mount Carmel East.