The Piano Lesson

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is the American Dream? How do you think the American Dream might have looked for Black Americans in the decades after slavery was abolished? How did they build lives for themselves? What kind of obstacles did they face?

Teaching Suggestion: Students will likely come to this topic with varying degrees of information and misinformation. You might consider asking this as a prompt for a class discussion to gauge their knowledge and then sharing or teaching the following links to give them a foundation to understand the world of the play. This question addresses the theme Generational Inheritance and the Black American Dream.

• This article by the History Channel explains Jim Crow laws from slavery to the civil rights era, including the discrimination that Black Americans faced while trying to build their lives post-emancipation.
• This 13-minute video on the Great Migration from Crash Course Black American History gives an overview of the historical context that informs the characters’ lives, although it is never explicitly mentioned in the play.