Resources

• Teaching Hard History, Episode 11: Slavery in the Supreme Court (podcast)
• Learning for Justice, Human Rights and the Constitution
• Learning for Justice, U.S. Constitution: Articles I, IV, V
• Learning for Justice, Preamble to the US Constitution
• Learning for Justice, Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution
• Learning for Justice, Exploring American Identity through the Constitution

Dr. Paul Finkelman

• President, Gratz College
• An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
• Editor, Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present
• Editor, Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The title of my first book is Bloody Lowndes. It tells the remarkable story of the transformation of rural Lowndes County Alabama from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of Southern black militancy during the height of the civil rights movement. But Bloody Lowndes does not begin in the 1960s as one might expect but rather a century earlier at the moment of emancipation. You see, to understand the African-American freedom struggle in the 20th century, you have to understand the African American freedom struggle in the 19th century.

Like most places in the Alabama Black Belt, Lowndes County is resource-poor, making the preservation of local records a luxury the county cannot afford. When I asked the probate judge if they still had rest ledgers from the 19th century, I was not surprised when he took me to a long-neglected shed containing county records scattered about and piled high in no particular order.

After a fair bit of climbing, crawling, sifting and sorting, I actually found what I was searching for, Lowndes County’s register of arrests from the 1880s. These turn-of-the-century records revealed a pattern and practice of police misconduct and judicial malfeasance that made a mockery of criminal justice. African-Americans were routinely arrested on trumped up charges and convicted in sham trials and when they could not pay the exorbitant court cost, they were leased to plantation owners and mine representatives who could. It was slavery by another name.

I was especially struck by the ridiculous charges that landed black people in jail, charging black folk with abusive language was a favorite because it could be applied to any black person saying anything to any white person at any time. Another equally absurd charge was reckless eyeballing, when a black person made and maintained eye contact with a white person for too long. No matter the charge, the accused had little recourse. They were at the mercy of Lady Justice and she was not wearing her blindfold.

A few years ago, I watched US Attorney General, Eric Holder, deliver an update on federal investigations in Ferguson, Missouri. He described Ferguson as a community where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety but as a way to generate revenue.

Eric Holder: Revenue, a community where both policing and municipal court practices were found to be disproportionately harmful to African-American residents. A community where this harm frequently appears to stem at least in part from racial bias, both implicit and explicit and a community where all of these conditions, unlawful practices and constitutional violations have not only severely undermined the public trust, eroded police legitimacy and made local residents less safe, but created an intensely charged atmosphere where people feel under assault and under siege by those who are charged to serve and to protect them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As I listened to Attorney General, Eric Holder, I thought immediately about what I had found in that courthouse shed in rural Alabama. The parallels were striking. Holder could just as easily have been talking about Lowndes County more than a century earlier when he concluded that Ferguson’s emphasis on revenue generation through policing had fostered unconstitutional practices and contributed to constitutional violations at nearly every level of law enforcement.

Lowndes County, Alabama, and Ferguson, Missouri, are not anomalies. They are reflections of a legal system that has consistently failed to provide African-Americans with equal justice under the law. This historical reality begs the question when it comes to African-Americans is America’s legal system broken or is it working just the way it was designed to? Let’s find out.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. A special series from Learning for Justice: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

The United States was founded on the principles of freedom and liberty. It was also founded on a Deep and abiding belief in the institution of slavery. These conflicting ideas are enshrined in the United States Constitution, which created the legal foundation of our nation. Understanding how America protected slavery in law and treated enslaved people in court is so important that we’re going to spend a couple of episodes on this topic.

In this installment of Teaching Hard History, legal historian, Dr. Paul Finkelman, explains the role that slavery played in the founding of the United States. He explores how the institution informed both politics and laws during the Revolutionary Era and outlines how the politics of slavery shaped the U.S. Constitution in ways that are still evident today. I’ll see you on the other side, enjoy.

Paul Finkelman: The irony of American history is that we’re one of the few countries in the world that begin with the stated purpose: we hold these truths to be self-evident that we’re all created equal. England doesn’t have a statement “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all Englishmen have the rights of Englishmen.” France doesn’t say this is what it means to be French. The French Declaration of Rights says that, but that’s well after France became a country, but we state it.

The Declaration of Independence says “We’re all created equal. We’re all endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and yet the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned about 150 slaves when the revolution began. In the rest of his lifetime, he would own many, many more slaves, dying with over 200 slaves.

Slave-owners are all over Continental Congress, which is adopting it and so there is this inherent tension from day one between the rights of slave-owners to be free and to have liberty, including the liberty to own other people, to buy and sell other people, to whip other people, to treat other people like property and other Americans who find this to be immoral and appalling and horrible and that’s the tension that comes in with the creation of the United States. So how do we balance slavery and freedom in a nation that on one hand begins with assertions of freedom and rights of liberty and on the other hand these assertions are actually being written by slave-owners?

So, let’s start with that problem. During the American Revolution, the English intellectual, Samuel Johnson, sarcastically asked, “Why do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” and, of course, it’s a very valid question. If we think of the heroes of the revolution, while many of them are opposed to slavery, John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Jay, the young man, Alexander Hamilton, many of the other leaders of the revolution, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, the Pinckneys in South Carolina, they all owned huge numbers of slaves and indeed, probably a majority of the revolutionary leadership in terms of sheer numbers were slave-owners and this is a question that very few people in the revolution wanted to think about.

Now, as the revolution began however, liberty began to spread in some parts of the nation. At the battles of Lexington and Concord, there were black soldiers fighting along white soldiers in the Massachusetts militias and at the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the heroes was a black soldier. When George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the American troops, he was shocked to discover that there were hundreds of black soldiers in his new regiments. Obviously, for a Virginia slave owner, the sight of black men with muskets and bayonets was something he had never encountered and something that he probably always feared and worried about.

But gradually, George Washington came to the conclusion that black soldiers were just like white soldiers, some were cowards, some are heroes. Most were simply men doing their jobs as good soldiers and by the end of the revolution, one of Washington’s favorite regiments was the First Rhode Island, which was about 50% black and 50% white and most of the blacks in the First Rhode Island had been slaves when the war began. So we see during the revolution a transition from slavery to freedom.

Some northern states began to dismantle slavery. Pennsylvania passes the first piece of legislation in the history of the world to end slavery, the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The law worked in this way. The children of all slave women would be born free and thus literally, slavery would die out in Pennsylvania. Eventually, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and even the Canadian province of Upper Canada, today known as Ontario, would adopt a gradual abolition act, based on the Pennsylvania law.

Shortly after Pennsylvania passed its Gradual Abolition Act, Massachusetts adopted its 1780 Constitution, which declared that all men were born free and equal and by 1783, after their Constitution was adopted, the Massachusetts courts ruled that this meant that slaves could no longer be held in Massachusetts. New Hampshire had a similar clause in its Constitution and states that joined the Union after the revolution, like Vermont and Ohio, simply prohibited slavery in their new constitutions.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, only Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island had passed gradual abolition acts and only Massachusetts and New Hampshire had ended slavery. Slavery was legal in all of the other states and while we think of slavery as being a southern institution, there were substantial number of slaves in both New Jersey and New York at the time the Constitutional Convention met.

The U.S. Constitution was, of course, a complicated document, written by a nation in which slavery was legal and prosperous in most of the states. At the convention, slavery is debated throughout the summer of 1787. At the very beginning of the convention the question is, “How do you allocate representation in Congress?” and immediately there is a debate between those people who say allocation of representation should be based on the whole number of free people and those who would like it based on the whole number of people.

The difference, of course, is critical because Virginia has the largest population in the nation if you count slaves and free people, but if you only count free people, Pennsylvania has the largest population. Thus, the debate in the convention is about political power. Does the South get political power for its slaves or is the national government going to be based only on the contributions of free people and thus, only free people will be counted for representation?

We all know, of course, that in the end the Constitutional Convention adopts something called the Three/Fifths Clause. The Three/Fifths Clause says, “That representatives and direct taxes would be allocated in the country by counting the whole number of free people, including indentured servants and others who have some sort of servitude but are not slaves and Three/Fifths of all other persons.” So, the Constitution requires that you count up all the free people and then you count up all the slaves and multiply them by Three/Fifths, 60% and that becomes the basis for representation.

Now, this clause is often misunderstood. The Three/Fifths Clause does not say that black people are 3/5th of a person. It says that political power will be allocated to the states by counting slaves under a Three/Fifths rule rather than a full rule. The irony of this is as follows. Those who opposed slavery did not want to count slaves at all for representation.

After all, if you counted slaves for representation, it simply gave the slave-owners more power. It didn’t give the slaves any power. One of the delegates at the convention mocked the idea of counting slaves and said, “Does a voter in Virginia get as many as votes as the number of slaves he owns?” and, of course, this was laughable and not what was going to happen, but it did indicate the political issue at stake.

On the other hand, Southerners said, “You should count all slaves for representation.” This didn’t mean that Southerners thought black people were equal. It certainly didn’t mean they thought slaves were equal. What it meant was the South wanted to get more political power for its slaves and the way to do this would be to count all the slaves. If this had been done, then the southern states would have had probably a majority in the House of Representatives at the beginning of the nation. However, by doing the Three/Fifths ratio, the southern states don’t get a majority, although they have close to a majority.

The other place where the Three/Fifths Clause matters a great deal is, of course, the election of the president. During the debate over electing a president, James Madison says, “The fittest things.” That’s the language he uses. Of course, “Fittest means the best thing, “he said, “would be for the people themselves to directly elect the president,” but then Madison says there are a couple of problems with that. One of the problems is that were different rules for voting in different states, so that would mean that if you had a popular vote, the state which had the most expansive voting rules, what they called the “franchise” at the time, that that state would have more votes in the presidential election.

But you could have easily have solved that problem. You could have simply said that every free adult male in the country could vote. No one was considering that women could vote at the time, so that would not have been on the table. But Madison said the other problem was if you counted just the popular vote, our slaves won’t count. He actually says, “We won’t get any power because of our Negroes,” and of course, what he means by that is if you have a direct election of the president, the North with a much larger population of free people is going to overwhelm the South.

One of the delegates at the convention actually put an asterisk in his own private notes and said that Madison was really trying to make sure that Virginians got elected president because if Virginia can’t count its slaves and election of the president, then a New Yorker or a Pennsylvanian or a man from Massachusetts is going to get elected president.

The end result was that the Three/Fifths Clause is folded into that monstrosity called the electoral college. Now, why do we have the electoral college? Not because of states’ rights, not because the delegates didn’t trust voters, we have the electoral college because it was the only way they could figure out how to count the numerical power of slaves in a country where slaves, of course, wouldn’t vote. And so the electoral votes that every state got was based on the number of members of the House of Representatives that each state had and that was based on the Three/Fifths Clause.

If you look at the presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, between a man, Adams, who had never owned a slave and hated slavery and had written the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which ended slavery in Massachusetts and on the other side you have Thomas Jefferson, who by 1800 owns at least 200 slaves, including a few who are his own children who he fathered with his own slave, Sally Hemmings, you see the power of the Three/Fifths Clause in the electoral college.

If it had been a popular vote, Adams probably would have one because the population of the North was so much bigger than the population of the South if you excluded the slaves. In fact, if you took away from Jefferson all the presidential electors he got by counting 3/5th of the slaves’ representation and therefore for electors and did the same for Adams, Adams would have won the electoral college as well. So here is an example where this bargain over slavery in the Three/Fifths Clause affects not only Congress but also affects the President of the United States.

If you look at subsequent debates, if you look at the debate over the Missouri Compromise, which allows slavery to spread into Missouri west of the Mississippi, north of where the Ohio River reaches the Mississippi, the Missouri Compromise could not have been passed if the South had not had a significant number of representatives based on counting slaves as three-fifths of the population for representation. Similarly, it’s impossible to imagine in 1850 that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 could have been passed if there had been no Three/Fifths Clause because the votes weren’t there.

So, what the Three/Fifths Clause does is to change the political dynamic by giving southern whites, slaveholding Southerners, greater political power than northern voters had and this will continue from the beginning of the nation right up until the Civil War. It is not insignificant that almost all of the presidents elected under the Constitution before Abraham Lincoln were slaveholding Southerners and among the Northerners who become president, you discover that three of them came from slaveholding families.

Martin Van Buren was from New York, but he had owned slaves in New York before New York completely abolished slavery in 1827. William Henry Harrison was elected from Ohio, but, of course, the Harrisons were Virginia slave owners and William Henry Harrison had owned slaves for much of his life. Finally, oddly, in 1856, James Buchanan who was elected president, turns out to have come from a family in Pennsylvania that owned slaves and continued to own the descendants of slaves in long-term indentures well after Pennsylvania had passed the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.

If you look at the presidency, what you discover is of the 12 presidents between Washington and Buchanan, only four of them, the two Admases, Fillmore and Pierce had not either owned slaves or come from slaveholding families. This, again, indicates the power of slavery in the political process, which comes from the Three/Fifths Clause in Article I of the Constitution.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We’ve been listening to Dr. Paul Finkelman discuss the relationship between liberty, slavery and the law in the new nation. People continue to explore the specific provisions in the Constitution that protected the institution of slavery and the interest of slaveholders. Once again, here’s Dr. Paul Finkelman.

Paul Finkelman: The other big debate at the Constitutional Convention concerned the African slave trade. Almost everybody in America realized that the African slave trade was horrendously awful and immoral, even people who believed in slavery, even people like Jefferson, who had owned slaves all his life, who would buy and sell human beings throughout his life, who had fathered children with his own slave, even some like Jefferson found the African slave trade to be immoral and wrong.

On the other hand, Georgia and South Carolina had lost thousands of slaves during the American Revolution and when the British troops left the United States, tens of thousands of African-Americans went with them to freedom somewhere else, some to Canada, some to England, some to the British West Indies. Sadly, some were re-enslaved in the British West Indies but most of these former American slaves lived their lives with liberty.

So at the Constitutional Convention, the delegates from Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina insisted that the African slave trade get an explicit, specific protection because these delegates knew that the Congress would abolish the African slave trade immediately because it was popular and because most Americans thought the African slave trade was just horrible and wrong.

Thus, the Constitution provides, and I will read the clause because it’s such a convoluted clause and it gives you an idea of how hard the delegates worked to hide what they were doing. The Constitution provides in Article I - Section IX “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.”

If you read this today, you might have no idea what they are talking about “Importations of such persons.” What the Constitution is saying is the Migration and Importation Clause, which we refer to as the African Slave Trade Clause, provided that Congress could not end the African slave trade until at least 1808. However, the clause did not require that the African slave trade ended in 1808. Sadly, many historians, some political scientists and legal scholars don’t understand this and often write in textbooks that the clause required an end to the African slave trade. It did not. It says it cannot be ended before 1808.

The Deep South delegates, the South Carolinians, the Georgians, they believed that by 1808 the Deep South would have a bigger population than the North. They believed that this American population was moving south and west and thus, states like Alabama and Mississippi would have been brought into the Union by 1808 and the South would have essentially a veto power over a ban on the African slave trade. Luckily, it didn’t work out that way. Luckily, Ohio came into the Union, but Alabama and Mississippi did not. Luckily, by 1808 the northern population was substantially larger than the southern population and so we can ban slave trade in 1808.

What happened in the meantime? At least 60,000 slaves are brought into the United States between 1803 and 1808. This is the largest importation of slaves into what became the United States in the entire history of the country. From the colonial period to 1803, you never had 60,000 slaves brought in in five years and then from 1803 to 1808 you got at least 60,000 slaves. This is the debate over the slave trade.

Towards the end of the convention, Southerners demanded a clause to allow them to recover runaway slaves and Northerners, without any great debate, without very much thought seemed to be worn out by these constant debates over slavery and they are so worn out that they allow for the Fugitive Slave Clause to be inserted into the Constitution. Like the clause on the African slave trade, the Fugitive Slave Clause is almost impossible to understand and is convoluted.

The clause read “No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” This is Article IV - Section II - Paragraph III of the Constitution. It doesn’t mention the word “slave.” It doesn’t mention the word “fugitive.”

But the impact is clear. If a slave runs away from Virginia to Pennsylvania, he cannot become free under Pennsylvania law. If a slave runs from Kentucky into Ohio, she does not become free under Ohio law. Rather, Ohio or Pennsylvania are obligated to return this upon the claim of the person to whom such service or labor may be due and, of course, how do you prove that claim? How do you prove you own someone else?

In 1793, Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Law, which has almost no protections for people claimed as fugitive slaves, but it doesn’t work very well in part because many Northerners simply don’t help Southerners capture runaway slaves. In 1842, the Supreme Court will hear its first case on the Fugitive Slave Law. It’s remarkable that the law’s passed in 1793 and there’s no case that reaches the Supreme Court before 1842.

But in a case called Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, the court holds that no state can interfere in the return of a fugitive slave. That Congress has the constitutional power to pass the Fugitive Slave Law, although there were many people who said that Congress did not have this power. They thought that this was a regulation of state to state relations. Furthermore, the court ruled that a master had a right to seize a slave anywhere the slave was found without any judicial process. A slave catcher could simply grab someone and say, “This is my slave. I’m taking him or her back to my state,” and the free state had no right to interfere.

Now what this led to was a remarkable response by northern states. Northern states immediately passed laws prohibiting their state officials from helping in the return of fugitive slaves, prohibiting the use of jails for fugitive slaves. Well, it was one thing to cross from Maryland into Pennsylvania, grab your fugitive slave and go back to Pennsylvania. That you could do in an afternoon. Quite another to go up to New York or even to Philadelphia or to Ohio and grab a fugitive slave and try to bring that slave all the way back to the south. You can’t do it easily and you can’t do it without the help of local officials.

An example of how this worked occurred in Boston in 1842 when a fugitive slave named George Latimer was seized by a slave catcher and put in the Suffolk County Jail. The jailer accepted the fugitive slave until public pressure forced the jailer to let him go because the sheriff of the county was, of course, an elected official and it was clear the population would not stand for allowing Massachusetts’ jails to house runaway slaves. Once Latimer was released, his master found that there was no safe place to keep him in Boston and for a small amount of money, he agreed to free him. So, this is an indication of the crisis that occurred in some northern states when the Supreme Court said that states could not protect free Blacks from kidnapping.

This ultimately led to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the first national law enforcement act in the history of the United States. It provided for a federal commissioner to be appointed in every county in the United States. The federal commissioner had the authority to authorize the return of fugitive slaves. The commissioner had the authority to call up the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Coast Guard or local militias to protect an owners’ interest in a fugitive slave and it led to about a thousand African-Americans being returned to the South between 1850 and 1860.

One of the ironies of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 is that it completely violated states’ rights because the 1850 law, as well as the Prigg decision in 1842 said that the states had absolutely no power to protect their own citizens from being wrongly seized as fugitive slaves. And when we think about the debates of the 1850s and the claim that secession is about states’ rights, it turns out to be the opposite.

The southern states did not secede to protect states’ rights. They seceded because they were fed up with northern states’ rights. They were fed up with northern states that were trying to protect their citizens, their neighbors, their friends from being seized as fugitive slaves. Sometimes the people seized were not actually fugitive slaves at all. Other times they were. But for Northerners, it didn’t matter. If your neighbor was living next door to you peacefully, you saw no reason why that person should be dragged to the south as a fugitive slave.

So, the irony is that the first federal law enforcement apparatus was an anti-states’ rights law passed by Congress at the insistence of Southerners for the protection of slavery. So, these are the kind of the major provisions of the Constitution that play-out with regard to slavery. But there are a couple of others that are worth noting.

There are two places in the Constitution where the document provides for the suppression of rebellions and insurrections. Article I of the Constitution - Section VIII says, “Congress shall have the power to provide for calling forth a militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” Article IV of the Constitution says, “The United States government can do the same thing against insurrections in the states.”

Now here’s the interesting thing. Why do we have double protection against insurrections and rebellions? The textbooks all say, “Well, they’re thinking about Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts,” and certainly, they were thinking about Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, but the Southerners were thinking about slave revolts. They were worried about their own slaves.

When southern delegates go back to the ratifying conventions after the Constitution, they say, “We should support this Constitution. We should ratify it because it’s going to protect slavery,” and one of the ways it protects slavery is that the national government will suppress insurrections and rebellions. And when is the militia called out? When is the army called out?

After Nat Turner’s rebellion, the U.S. Navy hunts for slaves who had been part of Nat Turner’s rebellion. When John Brown organizes a raid into Virginia, now West Virginia, to help free slaves, the local Virginia authorities don’t have the power to suppress John Brown. They have to wait for the US Marines to arrive, led by an Army Colonel named Robert E. Lee and so John Brown is suppressed by the US Army.

So again, the interesting thing is while Southerners talk about states’ rights, they are in fact delighted to have the federal government send troops to Virginia, send troops to what is now West Virginia, send troops to Louisiana, send troops to anywhere where there might be a slave rebellion. And so again, the Constitution protects slavery by guaranteeing that the United States government will suppress slave rebellions.

Finally, most people who were at the Constitutional Convention argued that the convention was a government of limited powers and as a result, the national government could not interfere with slavery where it existed and this becomes very important for understanding the nature of what the Southerners thought they were ratifying. They argue over and over again that the national government can never interfere with slavery, but that the national government can protect slavery.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a general during the revolution, the hero of South Carolina and the head of the South Carolina delegation to the convention, returns to South Carolina after the convention. He tells the state legislature, “We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them. For no such authority is granted and it is admitted on all hands that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution and that all rights not expressed were reserved to the several states.”

The delegates who come back from the convention are thrilled with what they’ve won. They have one a Constitution, which gives them political power for their slaves, protects the African slave trade for at least 20 years, guarantees that their political power to elect members of Congress will also affect the election of the presidency, guarantees the national government will suppress slave insurrections and rebellions and guarantees that their fugitive slaves can be captured and returned to the southern states.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Dr. Paul Finkelman is the president of Gratz College in Philadelphia. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and later studied at Harvard Law School. He’s the author of more than 50 books and over 200 scholarly articles. The US Supreme Court has recognized his legal expertise by citing him in four of its decisions. We’re going to continue his discussion of liberty, slavery and the law in our next episode, moving from how the institution of slavery shaped the U.S. Constitution to how the Supreme Court dealt with cases about slavery prior to the Civil War.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They are the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we’re featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at LearningForJustice.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery.

Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at LearningForJustice.org. Thanks to Dr. Finkelman for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shay Shackleford, with production assistance from Tori Marlan and Jonathan Jennings at Gratz College.

Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zobriski. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know and take a minute to review us in iTunes. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt
• United States of America, Declaration of Independence
• France, The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)
• Pennsylvania, An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery (1780)
• Massachusetts, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1980)
• U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2: Three-Fifths Clause (1788)
• U.S. Congress, Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
• The Compromise of 1850, The Fugitive Slave Act
• The Slave Trade and the Constitution, Article I, Section 9: Migration and Importation Clause
• Teaching American History, U.S. Constitution: Article IV, Section 2I: Fugitive Slave Clause
• U.S. Supreme Court, Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
• Asa J. Davis, The George Latimer Case: A Benchmark in the Struggle for Freedom
• Learning for Justice, Lesson, Nat Turner
• Learning for Justice, John Brown's Speech to the Court at His Trial

 

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Resources

• Learning for Justice, Framework for Teaching American Slavery
• Learning for Justice, A Different Kind of Pedagogy

Lindsay Randall

• Curator of Education and Outreach, Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology
• LinkedIn

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thank you for allowing me into your home. First, I’d like to ask you a couple of biographical questions. Where were you born?

Janie Graves: I was born in Pennsylvania County, Virginia on October 22, 1948.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Janie Graves began teaching Social Studies at Durham High School in 1975, just as desegregation swept across the South, flipping the school from white to black. For the next 20 years she taught government, American history, and street law, a favorite of hers. A keen observer, she knew her students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Janie Graves: To get a verb/noun connection, you must know grammar, otherwise you are not going to write well. You’re not going to speak well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: She also knew the fraught racial politics of the school board.

Janie Graves: There’s clearly something wrong with the system, when you have legislators dictating, people and the educators that are dictating what should be taught, and how it should be taught.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Which is why she opposed this decision to turn Durham High into a magnet school. That move was meant to flip the school again, this time from black back to white. Her vocal opposition to this controversial plan led me to interview her for my oral history project. My name’s Hasan Kwame Jeffries. I’m interviewing Miss Graves at her home on March 12, 1995.

I was in my first year of graduate school at Duke University, but I was taking oral history with Jacqueline Hall at UNC Chapel Hill, one of the perks of going to school on Tobacco Road, that and ACC hoops, of course. The interview was a part of a group assignment. My group, like the others, interviewed local women in an effort to redefine grassroots leadership.

When I interviewed Miss Graves, she did not disappoint. She spoke with candor about the school board’s plans, and with passion about the obstacles black students faced. When she shared her fears about the uncertainty about their future, she welled up. I remember her saying, “Graduation, to me, is a crying day. We’ve done so much to get them prepared, to walk, but to walk where?”

My group met once or twice to hash out our presentation, settling on something simple. We’d each identify who we interviewed and explain why. It was a truly unimaginative approach to history. The other groups clearly put more thought into the assignment.

As I listened to their presentations, I gained a clear understanding of what their interviewees had accomplished, but I did not get a good sense of who these women actually were as people, and how they actually felt about the world around them.

When it was our turn, my fellow group members read the bland, and frankly boring, biographical sketches that we had crafted. It was worse than I thought. More than any other group, we had managed to turn dynamic, thoughtful, radical women into a list of dates and organizational affiliations. At that moment, I realized we were doing these women a terrible disservice. I also realized that our grade was falling fast.

I was desperate. I scrapped my biological sketch of Miss Graves and hastily arranged a dozen or so index cards with quotes from her interview into what I hoped would be a coherent first-person narrative of her opinions and feelings. I didn’t stop there. I decided to actually perform the interview.

When my turn came, I stood up, slowly turned around, and without saying a word, began walking about the room, fidgeting with things here and there, just as Miss Graves had done at the start of our interview. When I finally spoke, I used only her words. Staring off into the distance, just as she did when she formulated her thoughts, and catching someone’s eye, as she caught mine when she wanted to drive home a point. I ended the monologue with the last thing she had said in the interview. A heart-rending commentary on the likely fate of her students.

When I finished, there was a long silence. So, I took my seat, unsure of exactly what I had just done, but when I glanced over at Professor Hall, she smiled and nodded approvingly. I knew right then: mission accomplished. I had salvaged our grade. But I had also accomplished something quite unexpected. While performing the interview, more than Miss Graves’ words leapt from my lips. Her passion and her pain did as well.

I remember that moment because I remember being Miss Graves. I also remembered sharing the very last thing Miss Graves said in her interview. For me, graduation from high school is a very sad time because I know it’s going to be life …

Janie Graves: For me, graduation for high school students is a very sad time because I know it’s going to be life for them. It’s almost, it’s saying, “Life in prison.” The prison, though, is the world. Either they make it, or they die, but oft times, they die.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Oft times they die.

Janie Graves: Oft times they die.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Oft times they die. I thought I had understood the things she had said to me during our interview, but it wasn’t until that very moment when I had to think deeply about what her words meant to her, that I truly understood their meaning.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It’s a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides an in-depth look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American Slavery.

In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. Historical subjects can often seem distant and two-dimensional. It can be a challenge to convey what was at stake for people living through a particular experience.

In this episode, Lindsay Randall explains a technique called “process drama.” It is a way to help your students build empathy, and better understand the risks and complexities that enslaved individuals actually faced. She’ll walk us through how to create a successful lesson plan, highlighting things that work and noting a few things to avoid. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Lindsay Randall: Whenever I talk about process drama and how I use it in the classroom, one of the first questions I get is, “What is that?” And when I explain that it is a teaching technique where students are presented with a problem or a situation and interact with each other using improv to move to a conclusion, I am often met with skepticism.

Most educators that I talk to have never encountered this particular teaching method. They might be familiar with other interactive lessons, but not this. They are very weary of it, especially those who teach at the high school or college level. This is because the word “drama” has certain connotations.

When people hear the word “drama,” they envision stage performances, costume roles, sound and lighting, and that couldn’t be farther from what a process drama lesson really is. Lessons that utilize process drama aren’t about creating performances. They aren’t engaging with an audience. Shockingly, for the history classroom, they aren’t even trying to depict 100% factual scenarios.

Instead, they are explorative. They allow students to use prior knowledge in conjunction with their own life experiences to make meaning of the past. The process is the purpose. The process helps to connect students to the material that is being covered. It encourages students to become more engaged and invested in the classroom.

Having students wanting to learn, without even realizing it—that hits every teacher’s sweet spot! Process drama is so much more than a flashy activity that can hook students. In today’s world, as educators, we’re required to have multiple layers in our lessons. It can’t just cover only a topic. It needs to reinforce important skills or other benchmarks and standards.

Process Drama is amazing at ticking a lot of these boxes for history teachers. Logical and critical thinking, check. Understanding cause and effect, check—making this teaching method perfect for the history classroom. It demonstrates that history is more than just the memorization of dates and other facts. It creates a unique framework that can cast the student in the role of the historian.

During the process drama activity, students are allowed to focus only on the facts that they deem most important. This mimics the process of identifying and analyzing points while writing a research paper. Throughout the activity, the students are debating and arguing with one another. This is similar to working through conflicting historical sources.

At the end of the lesson, students reflect back on not only their experience, but that of their peers. This last crucial step is like synthesizing a pile of muddled information into a coherent narrative. But more important than all of that, process drama allows me, as the teacher, to answer the most universal questions in history education. Ones I know we all get. “Why couldn’t they have done ______,” or “Why didn’t they do ______?” In relation to the topic of slavery, one of the questions I get the most is, “Why didn’t slaves just run away or revolt?” Understanding why individuals in the past made the decisions that they did is one of the most difficult concepts for students at all grade levels to grapple with.

In the example process drama lesson that I will be discussing with you today, students are presented with a scenario of enslaved people living on a plantation in Virginia in the lead up to the American Revolution, facing a choice of whether to run away to fight for the British, or to stay.

To the students, this might seem like a no-brainer. If a slave ran away to the British, and the British win the war, then they gained their freedom. Why wouldn’t someone choose to do that? Any chance for freedom would be worth it. However, as historians and teachers, we know that such a choice is not nearly as simple as it is in the minds of our students. Process drama can help students begin to understand the experience of historical individuals.

I want to pause here and say, process drama, by no means, can or wants to give students an authentic experience related to any topic such as slavery, nor does it seek to minimize the horrific nature and conditions of slavery. No lesson can or should ever do either of those things. What it does do is force students to look at the facts and situations, to consider the perspectives and motivations of people in the past separate from their own beliefs. It is a tool which fosters empathy in students. Given that this is a very different lesson than most people are familiar with, I’m going to spend some time talking with you about how you might create a process drama lesson.

First, you have to select the topic and focus. This is one of the most important steps in the whole process, because everyone has heard news reports about lessons that sound similar to what I am proposing you do, but went horribly, horribly wrong.

We’ve all read about lessons where students were asked to pretend they are members of the KKK and to justify the treatment of black people, or ones in which students are asked to debate the ending of slavery with pros and cons as members of the legislature on the eve of the Civil War.

It is understandable that you don’t want to be that teacher. You don’t want to be the teacher that creates a lesson that harms your students, or their families, or your community. The idea of making a process drama lesson might scare you, particularly one that is related to the history of slavery, or any other sensitive topic. This is because in doing so, you are going to be asking your students to debate, discuss, and argue not as themselves, but as a historical individual. Because of that unease, it is easier to just do a lesson with an impersonal worksheet or an impersonal reading of a primary source—any other type of lesson that doesn’t put you and your students out there.

I get it. I really do. But the way to fix the issue isn’t to simply ignore this type of meaningful teaching, but to identify the problems with those particular lessons, and learn how to avoid them. Engaging as historical characters isn’t the problem. Which characters they were asked to engage with is.

A common thread in every example you see in the news is that the teacher was asking students to create historical empathy and emotional understanding for groups for which it is simply not appropriate to do so. Yes, we need to understand the motivations of the KKK, or the mentality of southern senators in the 1800’s, but we shouldn’t empathize with them. We don’t need to validate their views, and we should never

ask our students to do so either.

When picking a topic, you should ask yourself why you want your students to empathize with those whose history they will be intimately engaging with. Why do you want there to be an emotional investment? What is gained from this type of instruction?

It is also important to communicate your motivation to students. It could take the form of posted learning objectives or essential questions, something so that they understand the goal and motivation of the activity.

For the lesson about the lives of enslaved people during the American Revolution, it was essential for me to have students see past the text in history books to realize that real people were affected in real ways, that this history mattered to real people and still matters today. It helps give a voice to underrepresented historical people in the minds of our students.

Far too often, history books, text books, and even classroom instruction deal with slaves as passive people in history, to which things just happen to. This is damaging to not only our students as historians, but also as citizens of our communities. This history continues to affect us today, and our students need to understand the intergenerational trauma that has been created from it.

This activity also highlights that those that are enslaved, despite the horrific and controlling conditions that they were forced to live under, had personal thoughts, convictions and motivations. While we may never fully know everything about these people, we can see in the records a material culture that they left behind one undeniable truth. They had agency. Limited as their agency might be, it is an important aspect of understanding the history of slavery that our students must know about.

Now, another key to doing this type of lesson well is that you need to know the information related to the topic like the back of your hand. This cannot be a phone-in lesson that you briefly researched via Google for five minutes the night before. There is serious prep work involved, but don’t let that scare you either.

It is totally worth it. Once you have built the lesson and supporting materials, it can be used again and again and again. For example, the lesson that I am talking about today is one based on intensive research I conducted for a college course. Well, one of my other process drama lessons is based off my Master’s thesis about the relationship between Puritans and Native Americans.

You need to find a subject that you are comfortable taking a deep dive into what has been written about it. This is not to say, however, that you need to take a course or get an advanced degree on a subject in order to have the proficiency required to create this type of lesson. One way that you can gather more in-depth knowledge is to search the internet for a college syllabus related to your topic.

Typically, professors include seminal works or ones that focus on new research in their required readings. They also frequently post guiding questions for each reading. Selecting one or two of these books and using the related questions can help you to make the most of your research.

No matter how you decide to go about it, a good foundational knowledge about the subject will also help you be more confident that the subject is appropriate for a process drama. If you ever feel uncomfortable or unprepared to talk about sensitive topics such as race, this will also help you.

Learning about a topic in-depth will give you the power to see connections between historical events and contemporary issues, giving you the confidence to engage with your students in these discussions. I know that these conversations can be scary to have. As a white woman who frequently teaches students of color about their own history, I get that it can be nerve-racking.

You don’t want to mess up something so weighty, so important. While my own racial and gender identity does mean that I will never have the full understanding of everything my students go through, being at least academically prepared about the depth and breadth of their history allows me to better connect with them. It allows me to show them that their history matters, and if their history matters, then that shows that their voices matter.

The next step to creating a Process Drama lesson is to identify the knowledge and skills you want your students to gain from the activity, looking to your own curriculum standards for guidance. Since I’m from Massachusetts, I’ve used our history and social science curriculum frameworks.

One of the objectives for US-1 is, “Students will be able to analyze how Americans resisted British policies before 1775, and analyze the reasons for the American victory and the British defeat during the Revolutionary War.” I use that knowledge objective as a starting point, but instead of focusing on how white Americans resisted British policies, I twisted it a little to focus instead on how others living in the colonies felt about both British and American policies.

Standards tend to have a very white, Eurocentric topical focus, and we sometimes have to be creative so that we can better reflect the diverse history of our country in our classrooms. It is valuable to show our students that the history of events, such as the Revolutionary War, which we treat as being something to celebrate, was in fact more complicated than what we often consider. It was not celebrated by everyone

involved. American victory meant dire consequences for some people. This is the complicated history we owe our students.

To further student understanding, you should also identify skills that the lesson will allow students to engage with. Again, using my state’s curriculum standards, one of the skill objectives that I have identified is “Students will be able to understand bias and points of view and how causation relates to continuity and change by being able to: show connections, casual and otherwise, between particular historical events and ideas and large social economic and political trends and development; distinguish between long-term and short-term cause and effect relationships; explain how a cause and effect relationship is different from a sequence or a correlation of events.”

Now I’m going to walk you through a brief list of the parts of the process drama activity that I’ve created, and then I’ll discuss each part in more detail. The components of the lesson are: the scenario, character biographies, student-directed activity, revealing of outcomes, and discussion. Let’s break each of those down for you.

First, you have to give the students context or set the stage. To do this, you might read a scenario to the class, which places them in a particular situation. It can be 100% factual, or it can be slightly fabricated. Whatever you think is best based on your research.

In this example, students are presented with a scenario where enslaved individuals must decide whether or not to run away to fight for the British during the American Revolution. Here’s what I explained to the class.

The year is 1775, and you are a slave on a plantation in Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the British Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, has issued a proclamation. The proclamation states that “All indentured servants, Negros, or others appertaining to rebels, free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s troop as soon as may be.”

This means that any slaves of American patriots who fight for the British will be given their freedom upon British victory in the conflict. You have heard stories about the British, especially their Ethiopian regiment, which is comprised of runaway slaves. They said that the slaves who join are given plenty of food, nice clothes, in addition to their freedom.

Many colonists, however, began controlling for runaway slaves, and those who are caught trying to make it to the British are severely punished, even hung. A group of youth come together in secret to discuss the choice that Lord Dunmore’s proclamation has given you.

Then students receive a character card with information about an individual such as their name, age, and a small biography. If you have ever been to the National Holocaust Museum, it is very similar to what is done there. The information might tell a student that their character was a woman with a young infant child, or that they were an elderly man whose wife had recently died.

Each fact might help students determine what is best for their character to do in regards to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation. For example: Name: Elizabeth. Age: 25. You were born on this plantation along with your sister, Celia, who still lives here, and is married to another slave, Abraham. Everyone here calls you Bet. You have a three-year-old daughter named Abigail. Your husband was sold away from the plantation two years ago, and you have not seen him since. Your primary job on the plantation is to serve as a cook and laundress for your owner and his family.

Again, have fun with this, and make the information in the character cards varied. You might disclose that some characters are single, married, have children or are childless, have elderly parents, male, or female, among other possibilities. These different character traits and factors help to make the lesson more engaging. It allows for an infinite number of outcomes.

Let me pause here to mention a crucial thing to remember when creating character cards. Whenever doing a process drama, the characters should hold comparable roles or social status. There can be differences between positions or experiences characters have, but there should never be a true power imbalance between anyone, such as would exist between a master and a slave.

Again, there are individuals we don’t want our students to empathize with. To produce a more complex and nuanced lesson, you might also choose to secretly incorporate a feature that can have unexpected consequences. This could take the form of a student receiving a background card that has a covert role.

Name: Caesar. Age: 40. Background: You were born in the Ashanti Empire where you were captured and brought to the West Indies. You labored in the sugar cane fields for a year before you were sold again to a ship’s captain. While working on the sugar plantation, you saw many slaves die from sickness and disease. The captain brought you up to Virginia where you were sold at auction.

You have now lived here for 15 years. You have a wife, Josephine, who lives here at the plantation also. Here’s where you could add directions for the student. Optional, personal decision: If you choose to inform your owner about the plans of another slave to run away to the British, you will not sell Josephine to another plantation nearby. There is no guarantee, however, that your owner will keep his word, since in the past he has repeatedly failed to fulfill promises he has made. Then you can end the card with a final set of directions such as: If you decided to inform on another student, you must wait for the directions from the teacher before informing the student of your choice. Do not let other students know that you are an informant.

This can foster discussion after the lesson about the ramifications of a single choice, why individuals may or may not have acted in the manner that they did. It is a great introduction to students about the idea that actions can be viewed through multiple lenses, and that many factors influence them. If a student decides to serve as an informant, is that selfish because they are taking away another character’s chance at a better outcome? Or is it self-less, in that they were trying to protect Josephine?

While there are no correct answers to such questions, these are the issues we need our students to begin wrestling with. In doing so, our students can begin to see agency more clearly in examples that aren’t as straightforward as they might be used to. But please be careful in handing such a card out. You don’t want this activity to make any real tensions or bullying that might be taking place between students in real life worse.

You might also incorporate simple props such as sashes with a color—denotes a person’s gender. These types of props help to make discussions and interactions smoother, especially if you have students making the decisions for a character of a different gender. Remember to be very judicious and use props sparingly. They’re only meant to help highlight information, not create ambiance or to propagate any racist stereotypes.

During the activity, students meet as their characters and engage with each other to figure out what they would do in such a scenario. Would their character decide to run away or stay? To do this, students should be free to direct the movement of the classroom, such as moving about the room, staying in their seats, meeting in large or small groups, whatever they want.

Students also direct how they will interact with each other. There could be pacts made, arguments, cajoling, limited threats, and as long as it’s within the confines of the activity, any and all of it is allowed. While students are engaging with the lesson, your involvement is key. This is not a lesson where only students are participating.

One way that you can interact with the students is by playing a devil’s advocate role. This can encourage students to participate. They see that you are also fully committed to this activity, and it can force students to defend their positions. When I’m teaching this exercise, I move around the room while students are talking.

I listen to what they are saying and then whisper things to them. If they are thinking of having their person run away, I might say something like, “You’re right, and if more people decide the same thing, you might have an even better chance. There aren’t enough resources to catch everyone. But, if you choose that and your character is caught, well, they would face a very harsh punishment. I wonder if it’s worth it?”

If a student was considering remaining on the plantation to protect their family, “I totally understand where you are coming from. You want to protect your family, and this is certainly the safer option. Or is it? What if too many people choose to run away? Do you think that there might be consequences for those who stay behind?”

One of the most central roles that you are also responsible for during the lesson is redirecting students’ comments or actions in a positive manner, before they become inappropriate. Since many students consider the classroom a safe place, they may push the boundaries of what is acceptable, whether it’s related to the history and betrayal of slaves, Native Americans, or other minorities. This can be used as a very powerful, teachable moment for all students. This needs to be done in a sensitive manner, so as to not single a student out, or inhibit future participation. One of the most pervasive issues I have had is students who want to speak as they imagine their character might. This is always problematic.

One of the best ways to head that off is to lay ground rules in the beginning. One rule I always give them is to just talk like themselves. No accents, no different speech patterns, no different vocabulary. However, when I’ve had students still try to do this in class, I pause the activity and remind them that they are to talk normally with a brief explanation that how we think people of the past talked is often inaccurate and typically based on a harmful caricature or a stereotype.

Another ground rule I have is that you cannot verbally attack a fellow student, but that you can attack the decisions of a character. We talk about what that distinction means. In the heat of the moment, with self-preservation on the line, this is another area where students might engage in inappropriate actions. This usually is more related to real social issues between students and less with the activity. But it’s just as important to deal with these. Knowing your students is key here, and by moving around the room, you can use your role as devil’s advocate to redirect in a more positive manner. If a student just comes out and says something really bad or something you need to deal with, don’t ignore it.

If a student’s actions need to be addressed, it is important to remember that while you don’t want to single a student out, you do need to deal with the issues in front of the entire class, whether during the activity or discussion. This is because while you might get through to the single student, the other students may not be aware that you have addressed anything.

Your actions, or perceived lack of actions, can inadvertently reinforce stereotypes or create the belief that your classroom is not a safe space. Never be silent. This advice goes not only for process drama lessons, but as just a good classroom policy in general. But if you do ever find yourself having to stop the class, know that class participation may be tentative after that. So again, use your role as the devil’s advocate to get the activity moving.

At the end, you’re going to ask your students to make a decision based on their beliefs and interactions during the activity as to whether their character would run away to the British or not. To visually show their decisions, one group might go to that side of the room, the rest to the other side of the room.

It is also here where you pause the class and reveal that one student had an optional personal decision, and ask the student to share what they have decided. Depending on the answer, a student may need to move to a different side of the room. Now, you hand out envelopes that reveal the outcomes for the characters based on their decisions. Either their character remains enslaved, is caught and shipped to the West Indies as punishment, or makes it to Lord Dunmore and the British.

If the character is successful in escaping to the British, there can be further ramifications once the British lose. The character can be sold back into slavery, or shipped off by the British to a small settlement in Nova Scotia. A more in-depth example of an outcome for a student who decided that their person would attempt to run away to the British might be: You successfully made it to the British Army. You serve in Colonel Tye’s elite black brigade in New Jersey. Despite all your efforts, the British ultimately concede victory to the American colonists. For those who are near New York, the British create a list called the Book of Negros. You are able to convince a British official that you are a runaway slave and had fought for the British, and so your name was added to the list. The British brought you to Nova Scotia, where they promised to give you land and freedom. Although they did keep their promise, the land that you were given was rocky and could not support crops. You also face discrimination and physical threats from your white neighbors.

Or there might be a different outcome for a student who also chose to have their character run away to the British. Like the other outcome, they are still successful, but have a different consequence when the British lose the war. You successfully made it to the British Army. You serve in the British Army under General Cornwallis. You traveled with the Army and helped fight, as well as gather supplies as you march across Virginia. During your march through Virginia, there was a breakout of smallpox, but you are lucky and do not succumb to the sickness. This meant that you were able to join Cornwallis and the rest of the Army at Yorktown. While under siege, even more soldiers, both white and black, died of smallpox. Since large numbers of the Army are sick, the American and French forces are able to successfully take Yorktown, effectively winning the war. When the American troops enter, they found you, took you, and sold you back into slavery.

There are a multitude of outcomes that can be created that are relatively historically accurate. In reality though, these options were more open to men than to women, which can also be used as a discussion point at the end about the impact of gender on opportunities. The variety of outcomes demonstrates to students that whether their character ran away or not, the outcomes were not often positive ones.

As I had mentioned before, we often think of periods in our nation’s history, such as the American Revolution, as very positive events. However, this type of lesson can highlight the difficult realities that minorities, particularly enslaved people, faced during the founding of our nation. Not everyone celebrated American victory.

That leads me to the most critical part of the lesson, one that you cannot skimp on: the wrap-up. Such a discussion can allow students to articulate their thoughts and feelings related to the exercise. It can also demonstrate to you how their perceptions and empathy for historical events and people may have shifted, and can be used in future discussions as a way to make broader, historical connections.

More importantly, it allows students to process what they have learned. To deescalate emotions the students might be feeling, they should be directed to return to their seats. Often simply changing the setting in this manner serves to immediately bring students back to the present.

Then some of the questions you might ask are, “How did you feel during the activity? What were some choices that your character faced? Were they easy for you to make? Why or why not? How did the choices of others impact what happened to you? How did the uncertainty of your choices influence what you decided? How do you think your gender affected your choices?”

While you should give the discussion some direction, students should be free to not only share their

thoughts and feelings related to the exercise, but to also dictate the discussion topics. Your students’ own lived experiences informed the choices they made for their character, and unpacking that is a critical component to any discussion.

Their experiences, and that of everyone living in the United States, have been shaped by this history of enslavement in our country. The discussion is where students can engage in a conversation about the important concept of race and racial stereotypes connecting between historical events and today in a safe and supportive environment.

That is really why using this technique to teach history is so valuable. Not only are students empathizing with those in the past, but they are able to begin to make concrete and meaningful connections as to how history impacts current issues. As we work as educators to prepare our students to be responsible citizens, it is vital that we highlight these connections to ensure that our students are prepared to confront, deal with, and change these damaging legacies.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Lindsay Randall is the Curator of Education and Outreach at the Robert S. Peabody Institute at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She’s been a museum educator for over a decade, using archeology and anthropology to teach students about issues of inequality in the United States.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we’re featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection.

We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials available at Tolerance.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units, and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find those resources online at Tolerance.org.

Thanks to Dr. Oliver for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford with production assistance from Tori Marlin and Gregory Dann at Rockpile Studios. The recording of my interview with Janie Graves is from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. If you like what we’re doing, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a minute to review and rate us in iTunes.

We appreciate the feedback, and it helps us get more visibility among potential listeners. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University and your host. You’ve been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Kennedy Center, Process Drama
• Lindsay Anne Randall, Udder Destruction: The Role of the Dairy in the Creation of Conflicts between English Colonists and Native Americans in 17th Century New England
• Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, The Origins of the American Revolution
• Learning for Justice, Proclamation of Earl of Dunmore (1775)
• BlackPast, Ashanti Empire/ Asante Kingdom (18th to Late 19th Century)
• PBS, Colonel Tye
• National Museum of American History, Yorktown: Triumph of the Alliance

 

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