Celebrate Juneteenth! (Black History Month pictures and sticky notes)

When I was growing up, I'd never heard of "Juneteenth".  That says a lot about my education -- how lacking and skewed it was.  Because Juneteenth is the "oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery in the United States".  Kind of a big deal, don't you think?



I don't know the best way to celebrate the day, except to be super glad that I live in a country where slavery is illegal, and to continue to speak against oppression, and to hug my kids.


A few years ago, my sons teased me into starting a "Black History Month" dinner (in February, not on Juneteenth).   Since printing out stuff and preparing for the dinner is something that takes a bit of lead time, I usually do it during the summer.    So here's an extra bit of Juneteenth celebration this summer: I'm sharing with you my Black History Month pictures, in case you want to do something similar yourself in February.

What follows below are documents that my family has used for a Black History Month themed dinner activity. It consists of photographs of notable African Americans, which we taped up all over our living room and dining room walls, and a set of sticky notes in random order, which we worked together to match with the corresponding person. Each photograph gets exactly three sticky notes: a name, and two interesting facts.

The files are large enough that I couldn’t upload them all at once, so there are five different files of photographs; each file has about 11 photographs interspersed with biographies, so if you print these out double-sided, the biography will be on the back of the photograph for your reference.




There are two sets of documents with clues that are supposed to go on sticky notes. To get the clues onto the sticky notes, I suggest

1. Print out the pages on regular 8.5x11” paper,
2. Attach 2x2” sticky notes over the clues, trimming the sticky notes on the top row to about 2 x 1.25” as appropriate,
3. Run the paper back through the printer, so the clues will print on top of the sticky notes.
4. If you use different colors for the top row, the middle row, and the bottom row, then each photograph will get one sticky note of each color.

Here are links to the files:

First set of photographs:  

Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Colin Powell, Katherine Johnson, Condoleeza Rice, Tracy Chapman, Scott Joplin, Charles R. Drew, Judith Jamison, Misty Copeland, John Hope Franklin

Second set of photographs:

Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Oprah Winfrey, Marshal “Major” Taylor, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Madame C.J. Walker, Bessie Coleman, Lewis Hamilton, LeVar Burton

Third set of photographs:

Duke Ellington, Maggie Walker, Martin Luther King, Leontyne Price, Dred Scott, Jessie Owens, Mae Jemison, Ida B. Wells, Spike Lee, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall

Fourth set of photographs:

Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe, Booker T. Washington, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright, Barack Obama, Audre Lorde, Percy Julian, Etta Falconer

Fifth set of photographs:

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Florence Griffths Joyner, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, George Washington Carver, Ella Fitzgerald, Sidney Poitier, Muhammed Ali, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisolm

And here is a set of sticky note clues (all mixed up), and the rest of the sticky note clues.

And here are the answers to the first set of sticky note clues.