state of black history

Freshman year of high school can make anyone feel lost, but Seattle teen Janelle Gary felt especially lost when she entered high school in 2015. After she was forced to move when her building was demolished, part of a wave of gentrification driving out residents of the historically black Central District neighborhood, she ended up in an honors class where she was one of the few black students.

And, she says, black perspectives were also in the minority within most of her classes. In her honors history class, she felt the teacher was “tip-toeing” around hard race-related questions and “trying to avoid” a controversial discussion — for example, when it came to the role race played in the government’s response to the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. But things were different in her Ethnic Studies class, where teacher Jesse Hagopian didn’t shy away from looking at the impact of race on both history and current events.

Hagopian knows what it’s like to be the only black kid in an honors class because he was that kid too. In college, a class on race in society encouraged him to challenge the way he had always thought about race. “When I graduated college,” he says, “I decided the best thing I could do was teach [kids] these issues in high school before they dropped out.” Now, 2020 will be the second year Hagopian and a group of other educators inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement have organized a national Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools. Thousands of teachers—including in the three largest school districts, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago—will wear “Black Lives Matter” shirts to school and teach lessons on black history and race issues from February 3 to February 7. Among their demands is Black History and Ethnic Studies to be required classes at all K-12 schools.

Their call to action echoes a line from TIME magazine’s 1963 cover story on James Baldwin’s rise to fame, when the scholar said, “I began to be bugged by the teaching of American history, because it seemed that history had been taught without cognizance of my presence.”

February marks Black History Month. Dating back to 1976, it’s an expansion of “Negro History Week” started February 7, 1926, by Carter G. Woodson, known as “the father of Black History,” as time “set aside…for the purpose of emphasizing what has already been learned about the Negro during the year,” as Woodson once explained.

But nationwide, secondary school teachers are going out of their way to teach African and African history not only during the month of February, but year-round as Woodson envisioned.

SECTION HEADER TK

But even now, when students learn black history, they’re generally learning about the same people over and over again: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Barack Obama. Teachers and students alike tell TIME that there’s little variation, overall, in what such lessons cover.

And there’s a reason for that, says LaGarrett King, Professor of Social Studies Education and Founding Director of the Carter Center for K12 Black History Education.

“One of the main problems with us getting black history right is we are still trying to use this notion that black history is American history, which sounds good,” says King. But, he says, that creates a problem when American history is taught, as it often is, as a story in which “every generation has improved our society.” The narrative of constant improvement imposes a tendency to make excuses, to attempt to argue that only some “bad people” in American history were racist, and to move quickly through topics that might make white students feel guilty. In addition, black stories often end up told through a white lens, and stories of black people resisting in any way other than nonviolent protest—like Denmark Vesey‘s rebellion—are left out.

“Black history is typically taught through European contact,” King says. “If the first time that black people enter the school curriculum is through when they’re enslaved, that gives the impression these particular people were not that important to American democracy and didn’t contribute to the intellectual development to the country.”

“students walk away from our schools with no knowledge of African civilizations. TKTK, I can tell you’re making a note to yourself. This section is still a bit disorganized but I think this is going in the right direction.

“The last major narrative of black presence in U.S. history tends to be the civil rights movement,” says Christopher Busey, a professor at the University of Florida’s School of Teaching and Learning who, with Irenea Walker, studied how Black History is represented in social studies standards, “and that’s largely presented as successful [because of the] Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. So what ends up happening is, when we have more contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, people are largely unable to make sense of it because we skipped the war on drugs with Reagan and the targeting of black communities by police. Their last conceptions of black citizenship are tied to this idea that we all had a dream and that we overcame and then Obama [was elected President].”

Another challenges is that many in the mostly-white teacher population have not taken a course on black history themselves, and may not feel comfortable teaching it.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, 44, a white high school social studies teacher who teaches black history year-round in a World History class in an affluent mostly white school district in the Portland, Ore., area, said the best school-wide teach-in on Black History was in response to racist graffiti found in the bathroom. But, she says, she’s seen resistance to incorporating black history into the curriculum because white teachers don’t feel prepared to talk about race. “It reinforces the fundamental flaw which is that black history is seen as peripheral or black lives are seen as peripheral in every context,” she says, “so it feels like a burden to them.”

She says is often asked what it’s like to teach black history in a predominantly white school. “The subtext is always, ‘black history is for black students.’ The answer to why do white kids need black history is that it is history and it’s their history too,” she says. “It’s a shared collective past.”

H2 Here: things are changing

When Carter G. Woodson wrote his first black history articles, he was responding to lynchings. He started a publication called the Negro History Bulletin in 1937 to talk about, blacks in civil war, that was a little mag, sent to the churches and sunday schools and public schools, that’s how they learned about it,

The civil rights movement of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s led to further growth of this discipline, and inspired students to stage walkouts to ask for more black history classes. And today, in the post-Ferguson world, global events are once again sparking a change in how black history is taught. [This should maybe move to the top section]

“Whenever there’s a tragedy in black America, there’s always been an uptick on black history courses, most recently Black Lives Matter and police shootings,” says King. Just as social media fueled the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s fueled discussion among teachers on how to contextualize these current events, such as hashtags on Twitter like #FergusonSyllabus and #CharlottesvilleSyllabus.

“I have spent so much time talking about Black Lives Matter over the last two years and I’ve had to weave Black Lives Matter into my lectures on various topics because students — both K-12 and college level — heard about the movement, and they wanted to figure out how does this connect to what happened in the ’60s or even earlier. They wanted to understand what they were seeing on television,” Keisha N. Blain, professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, who has taught K-12 students in summer programs.

And the teachers who are pushing for change aren’t acting alone. [Or some transition like that]

In 2005, Philadelphia became the first major American city that requires students to take a Black History class to graduate. Seven states have launched commissions designed to oversee state mandates to teach Black History in public schools, and Illinois requires colleges and universities to offer Black History courses. To meet rising demand, there are six Black History textbooks on the market, and go-to websites for online resources include Teaching Tolerance, Teaching for Change, Zinn Education Project, and Rethinking Schools.

For the past two years, The College Board has been piloting an Advanced Placement seminar in the African Diaspora, developed in partnership with Columbia University’s Teachers College, the University of Notre Dame and Tuskegee University. In 2019-2020 school year, 11 schools nationwide are piloting the seminar, up from two in the 2017-2018 school year.

“I realized African-American people had a life before they were colonized,” said Tatiana Amaya, 19, freshman at Claremont McKenna College, describing what she learned from the African-American history class in high school and further coursework at a local community college in her senior year.

TK not everywhere is making the same strides As a recent New York Times investigation on textbooks showed, textbooks vary on how much they get into race issues. A Texas textbook attributes the 1950s growth of the suburbs to “crime and congestion” in the cities, while a California textbook points out that African-Americans couldn’t buy houses in these new areas.

Teachers that teach black history year-round are the exception not the rule, so students at schools that don’t teach Black History learn it through family members, at church, such as at Sunday School, or at some kind of “Freedom Schools” that teaches black history during summer and over school breaks, usually with small class sizes, and pairing younger students with older student mentors. (The Children’s Defense Fund runs these programs nationwide, but dozens of programs call themselves “freedom schools” that aren’t affiliated with the non-profit.) While they aren’t preparing students to teach Just as in 1964, 21st century “freedom schools” aim to as ’60s civil rights activist Charlie Cobb put it, “fill an intellectual and creative vacuum” in students lives and “to get them to articulate their own desires, demands, and questions.”

The teaching of Black History in school is “Steadily improving, yet still stagnant,” argues King.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X are brought up, it’s usually in terms of King as the non-violent one and his expression about advocating for change “by any means necessary” often appears as “opposite” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy of nonviolent resistance. “U.S. curriculum at both elementary and secondary level tends to pit those two against each other,” says Busey, and to frame King as an example to follow and Malcolm X as someone to fear—even though, as LaGarrett King points out, “I haven’t seen any historical record of Malcolm X lynching any white people.”

“It’s okay for white people to have guns but as soon as a black person has a gun, it’s so scary,” as William Anderson, 36, who teaches an Ethnic Studies class in Denver, explains the common misconception that Malcolm X was violent. “I know his rhetoric could make white people uncomfortable.”

But, educators say, that framing means students could miss part of Malcolm X’s life worth emulating, like his resilience. As the son of a father killed by white supremacists and a mother in a psychiatric hospital for nearly three decades, “his life is a beautiful example of what transformation and growth can look like,” says Anderson.

“Before I took an African-American history course, I didn’t realize how much we center black men when it comes to the civil rights movement — Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Carter G Woodson. But a lot of the time we left women out—Shirley Chisholm, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer,” says Maye-gan Brown, 22, a senior at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn., who took a required Philadelphia black history class in her freshman year of high school.

The impact of learning African and African-American history is anecdotal at this point, as it’s almost impossible to track what’s happening in the classrooms nationwide on a daily basis. But teachers tell TIME that it’s motiving students to learn. In 2018-2019 school year, 80% of students in the five schools piloting the AP African Diaspora classes, passed the course, including underperforming students, according to Kassie Freeman, a senior faculty fellow at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, who helped develop the class.

Since Abigail Henry, who teaches African and African-American history to ninth-graders in Philadelphia, started putting historical leaders on trial in mock trial — such as arguing whether George Washington “promoted the institution of slavery” — she noticed special education students “who barely say anything in class, all of a sudden get one of the highest grades” during such interactive lessons.

Learning about Black History inspired civil rights leaders to act. For example, Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks traces the political awakening of Rosa Parks, who became the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to her horror after discovering William Gallo Schell’s 1901 book Is the Negro a Beast? as an eight years old and then becoming determined to “read everything I could” about black history and rebellions against white supremacists when she got to high school.

Students told TIME learning history about their ancestors helped them feel rooted at a time when everything is uprooted with gentrification.

“We’re told you can be anything you want to be as long as you go to school and get an education, yet there hasn’t been investment in my community, and children are passing by abandoned buildings, homeless people, crime scenes and dodging bullets on the way to school. That says, people don’t care about me,” says Brown.

Listening to Malcolm X’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Anderson’s student Makaia Loya, 17, an aspiring teacher and social worker, found “situations [Malcolm X] was talking about I could relate to my culture, my family and my history.” For example, when Malcolm X declared, “When you spend your dollar out of the community in which you live, the community in which you spend your money becomes richer and richer, the community out of which you take your money becomes poorer and poorer,” she started rethinking her career goals. “I grew up thinking, ‘I’m getting as far as I can from here, the ghetto. And now I’m like, as soon as Ieave and have something to bring back, I’m coming back.”

Lessons about black history also resonated with Pascagoula, Miss., senior Kinchasa Anderson, 18, during a field trip last fall to Medgar Evers‘ house in Jackson, Miss., where blood stains are still visible on the driveway from when white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith shot the activist on June 12, 1963. “It just struck me — these people really put their life on the line for us, for my generation, for generations to come,” says Anderson.

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