- What can you infer about Troy and Lyons’s relationship? What pieces of evidence make you think that?
- pp. 17–18: How do Troy and Lyons’s work ethics conflict? Explain in your own words using evidence from the text.
- Activity to historically contextualize Fences:
Fences is set in the late 1950s. For each event or era, write “Pre” if it happened before Fences is set or “Post” if it happened after Fences is set.
_____ Slavery officially ends in the United States.
_____ Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues.
_____ The civil rights movement begins.
_____ Harriet Tubman saves countless lives and wins the freedom of thousands of slaves through the Underground Railroad.
_____ School desegregation begins in Boston; this was approximately 15 years after Melba Pattillo Beals integrated an Arkansas high school.
_____ Martin Luther King Jr. gives his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
_____ Reconstruction begins; though African-Americans are now free, the political and social climate in the country does not allow them much more safety or freedom than they had had during slavery.
_____ Barack Obama, an African-American, is elected President of the United States.