What an exciting opportunity it can be to plan teacher workshops, hold a conference, initiate poetry, oratory, or poster contests in the schools. Have a film festival each April, or during each Black History month!
Please pass along your ideas and we will attempt to pass them along to others.

1.    SCHOOLS/LESSON PLANS. Now that April 9th is over, we need to gather lesson plans from all over. The New York Times is soon to publish lesson plans. The Labor Museum in New Jersey has completed lesson plans and has offered to have them added to our website. From Doug Calvin in Washington DC, a teacher in New Jersey, and from two teachers in Chicago, lesson plans are on our home page for anyone to download. The 1980 lesson plans from Detroit are listed on our home page as well, but are available by purchase only from a company that is listed. These and others need to be gathered and looked over and further developed.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH AND APRIL 9TH come each year, but finalizing lesson plans that you are happy with and getting them introduced into your Board of Education will take a LONG TIME. And certainly the Board of Education is only one way to get into the classroom!

FINALIZE LESSON PLANS. It would be exciting for dialogue to happen between teachers and others to help create excellent lesson plans--maybe it could happen by e-mail.

LOCAL ANGLE. One critical aspect of teaching about Robeson is the local angle--the involvement of Robeson in your community or city. While local studies probably won't make it into the next book on Robeson, they will add to the understanding of the huge contributions he made across the world. In Chicago, we published a 16-page booklet including over 110 events involving Robeson in our city (and we know there are probably 100 more to be uncovered). But for us in the organizing committee, it enriched our education and certainly for teachers will make it a lot easier to introduce this great role model to students. Similar studies could be done in 50 cities worldwide.

TEXTBOOKS. Let's look over our grade and high school textbooks and see what, if anything, is said about Robeson. Please xerox the two sentences or few paragraphs written about Robeson and we'd love to take a peek. One day we need to communicate with those publishers and make our interests known!

ADOPT A SCHOOL. Could a college organization, club, church, or individual select one school and commit to teach about Paul Robeson over a period of time? Shouldn't each city select two or three or more places to have resource material on Robeson. For $200 one could purchase books, CDs, and a few films and begin a resource center.

3.     COLLECT 78s & PLAYBILLS. put out a call for "Robeson items"--78s, LPs, old press and playbills, posters, flyers, etc. We know that these items are precious to many folks BUT they belong in exhibits and publicly accessible archives. Our office continues to receive such items and we are determining the best locations for their placement.

4.     Please keep us up to date with recent clippings, flyers, posters and, IF POSSIBLE, original copies of news articles.

We are so proud of all the exhibitions, film festivals, workshops, new plays, concerts and SO MUCH MORE. We all have launched a REAL RENAISSANCE of interest and love for Paul Robeson -- there are years more for the celebrating!

5.     Support our work. Tax-exempt contributions may be made payable to "IJF/Robeson Project" and sent to PO Box 469, Chicago IL 60690)

Sincerely,

The Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration
E-mail to: robeson.centennial@pobox.com
 (please also include your postal address)
Web site: http://pobox.com/~robeson/