Students will explore a collection of documents that demonstrate some of the collective strategies that African American laborers used to seek economic opportunity. They will extract information from the documents in order to answer these three guiding questions:

• What professions did African Americans engage in? 
• What obstacles did African American workers face? 
• What strategies did African American workers use to combat these obstacles? 

There are six documents included in this collection. Many of them are short, but they are of varying reading levels. Teachers have several options for using them, depending on class reading levels and time constraints. Students might read all the documents with a partner over the course of a class, to finish for homework, compiling individual lists in response to the three guiding questions. Students could then compare their lists in a large group the next day. Students could also be divided into “expert groups” with each group being responsible for understanding one document. Each expert group would then report out to the class and together the class could compile the lists. Finally, the teacher could choose several of the documents and go over them as a class, making the lists together. Whatever the format, it is important to emphasize that students must point to the exact words or phrases in the documents that gave them the information. 

After looking at the lists, students should discuss or respond in writing to the following questions:

• Are the lists complete (meaning do they include all of the obstacles, professions and strategies of African Americans described in the sources)?  
• If they are complete based on the documents we looked at, does that mean they are comprehensive historically? 
• Based on what you know of history, what else could you add to these lists?
• What sources would you look for to come up with more comprehensive lists?
• Consider the list of strategies that African American laborers used to seek economic opportunities. In what ways were they exerting their rights as citizens, guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment?
• Look at each list again. How much of what is on them is determined by race?  In other words, is there anything on the lists that is there because the people involved are African American? Are there things on the list that would be there on a list of all workers, regardless of race? Explain. Is there anything to be gained in our understanding of history and society from asking these questions?