Black History Month Celebrated Throughout OCHS

Many Ocean City High School teachers just finished a month fully booked with lesson plans for Black History Month. Mainly in the history department, each course followed an important event with class lectures, projects and essays designed to convey an understanding of the black experience in world history.

Freshmen in World History class kept it simple with daily trivia questions that would be on a test at the end of the month. They also had to fill in a map of Africa. To do so, the students used a set of atlases and a map at the whiteboard.

United States History Level 1 studied the 19th century with a focus on the abolitionist movement. Students studied a newly release PBS video, Prince of Slaves. These two classes are for underclassmen.

Upperclassmen had similar studies to do but focused more on individuals such as Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. The United States History Level 2 class studied a paper with 50 questions on black history. They also received a paper with important African Americans on it. American Government classes studied Malcolm X and Barack Obama to a good extent.

A history elective course Contemporary World Cultures started with a map of Africa, and moved on to research tribes of Africa. Then, the students made African masks. The students also watched Hotel Rwanda, a movie focusing on the genocide in Rwanda.

To tie all the events together, a Black History Month celebration was held in the OCHS library where students from Public Speaking course presented speeches on important African Americans. With them, was the Jazz Rock Ensemble playing African-American music. Also, the cast and crew of The Morning Wave did a segment every week in February focusing on a figure in black history.

The most important thing about Black History Month is to educate the students about African-Americans in the past, present and future of the society.