Start by having students read Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Explain that you will be spending some time analyzing the Black poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.

Divide students into small groups, and give each group one of the poems from the Harlem Renaissance from this Poetry Foundation collection. You should select the poems that you think are the most appropriate for your class and for the topics you’d most like to cover.

Each group should prepare an informal oral presentation to the class that contains:

• A reading of the poem
• 3 facts about the poem’s author
• A description of the poem’s central message
• An analysis explaining how the poem relates to the Great Migration and to Black culture in the 1900s