Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and prepare for Black History Month in February with a plethora of vocabulary learning resources found on Vocabulary.com.
Vocabulary from Current Events: Race has been at the forefront of the national conversation this year, sparked by protests around the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which led linguists at the American Dialect Society to choose the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as 2014's Word of the Year.
Meanwhile, when "Twelve Years a Slave" took home an Oscar for Best Picture, we posted a vocabulary list from the memoir that inspired the movie. We also now offer "We're not asking, we're demanding: Vocabulary from "Selma," the movie."
Vocabulary from the Harlem Renaissance: Check out new vocabulary lists designed to unlock Harlem Renaissance primary sources materials:
- an essay by the first African American Rhodes Scholar Alain Locke, "The New Negro,"
- a poem commemorating the founding the Harlem Renaissance, "To Usward,"
- vocabulary from a song sometimes referred to as an African American anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing,"
- Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," short story "Sweat," and novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God,"
- the Langston Hughes poem "Mother to Son."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Resources: Learning more about Martin Luther King, Jr. through the biopic "Selma"? Check out other MLK resources on Vocabulary.com, including:
- MLK-specific Vocabulary Lists: "Martin Luther King, Jr. 'I have a dream' speech," "Figurative Language in King's "I have a dream" speech," "Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963)," "50th Anniversary of the March on Washington,"
- a worksheet on King's use of metaphor, MLK's Meaningful Metaphors (borrowed from our sister site The Visual Thesaurus)
- a tip sheet on how examining a single word King used — in this case, oasis — shows why his language is still so powerful today.
- a new vocabulary list from "Selma," "We're not asking, we're demanding: Vocabulary from "Selma," the movie."
Lists from Literature by African American Writers: Our collection of featured vocabulary lists supports reading of many works of African American writers, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, W.E.B Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Phyllis Wheatley, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X. Or find some of the most memorable words from these and other important African American figures in Bartlett's Familiar Black Quotations.
