Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and host of the Teaching Hard History podcast series.

Lindsay Anne Randall was curator of education and outreach at the Robert S. Peabody Institute at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She has been a museum educator, using archaeology and anthropology to teach students about issues of inequality in the United States. Randall is a senior regional humanities specialist at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

Teaching Recommendations

Given that process drama lessons are different from the classroom lessons with which most people are familiar, let’s examine how you might create a process drama lesson.

This discussion uses an example of a process drama lesson in which students are presented with a scenario of enslaved people living on a plantation in Virginia before the American Revolution, facing a choice of whether to run away to fight for the British or to stay. To many students, this might seem like a simple choice. If an enslaved person ran away to the British and the British won the war, then they would have gained their freedom. Why wouldn’t someone choose to do that? Any chance for freedom might seem worth it. However, as historians and teachers, we know that such a choice was more complex. Process drama can help students begin to understand the experiences of historical individuals.

Research and Plan for the Lesson

1.  First, carefully select the topic and focus. 

• This step is one of the most important in the process. And it is crucial to understand and avoid the pitfalls that can create harm.

We have no doubt heard news reports about lessons that sound like this process but went horribly wrong. For example, we’ve read about lessons in which students were asked to pretend they were members of the KKK and to justify the treatment of Black people, or lessons in which students were asked to debate the ending of slavery with pros and cons as members of the legislature on the eve of the Civil War.

You don’t want to be the teacher who creates a lesson that harms your students or their families or community. 

The idea of a process drama lesson might seem challenging — particularly one related to the history of slavery or any other sensitive topic — and you might want to simply revert to an easier lesson with an impersonal worksheet or reading of a primary source. This unease is understandable because, in a process drama activity, you are going to be asking your students to debate, discuss, and argue not as themselves, but as historical individuals. However, the way to address the concerns isn’t to simply ignore this type of meaningful teaching but to identify the problems with those harmful lessons and learn how to avoid them. 

• Engaging as historical characters isn’t the problem — which characters students were asked to engage with is. 

A common thread in the problematic examples mentioned is that the teacher asked 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 1800s, 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 choosing a topic, ask yourself why you want your students to empathize with those whose history they will be engaging with. Why do you want there to be an emotional investment? What is gained from this type of instruction?

2.  Communicate your motivation to students. 

• Communicating your motivation might take the form of posted learning objectives or essential questions, providing information to clarify the goal and motivation of the activity.

For the lesson about the lives of enslaved people during the American Revolution, the goal was to have students look beyond the history texts to realize that real people were affected in real ways, that this history mattered to people then and still matters today. The motivation was to help give a voice to underrepresented historical people in the minds of our students.

Too often, history books, textbooks, and even classroom instruction deal with enslaved people as passive people in history to whom things just happen. This is damaging to our students not only as historians but also as citizens of our communities. This history continues to affect us today, and students need to understand the intergenerational trauma that has resulted from it.

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

3.  Do the research to gain in-depth knowledge about the topic.

You need to know the information related to the topic being taught like the back of your hand. This cannot be a “phone-in” lesson that you briefly researched via Google the night before. Serious prep work must be involved. 

• Find a subject you are comfortable taking a deep dive in researching. This is not to say, however, that you need to take a course or get an advanced degree in a subject to have the proficiency to create this type of lesson.
• One way 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 make the most of your research.

No matter how you decide to do the research, strong foundational knowledge about the subject will help you be more confident that the subject is appropriate for a process drama. If you feel uncomfortable or unprepared to talk about sensitive topics such as race, having more foundational knowledge can help.

Learning about a topic in-depth will also help you see connections between historical events and contemporary issues, giving you the confidence to engage with your students in these discussions.

4.  Identify the knowledge and skills you want students to gain from the activity. 

• Refer to your curriculum standards for guidance in identifying the knowledge and skills students need, and then expand on that learning.

For example, one Massachusetts history and social science framework objective 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.” This knowledge objective can be a starting point, but instead of focusing on how white Americans resisted British policies, we can refocus on how others living in the colonies felt about both British and American policies.

Standards tend to have a white, Eurocentric topical focus, and we sometimes need to be creative to better reflect the diverse history of our country in our classrooms. It is valuable to show 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.

The Components of the Process Drama Lesson

The parts of the process drama lesson are the scenario, character biographies, student-directed activity, revealing of outcomes and wrap-up discussion. Let’s examine these components through the sample process drama lesson.

1.  The Scenario

• First, give students context or set the stage. 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 the example lesson, students are presented with a scenario in which enslaved individuals must decide whether to run away to fight for the British during the American Revolution. 

Sample Scenario Explanation: The year is 1775, and you are an enslaved person on a plantation in Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the British Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, has issued a proclamation that states: “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 enslaved people 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 composed of runaway former enslaved men. They said that those who join are given food and clothes, in addition to their freedom. Many colonists, however, are trying to prevent enslaved people from running away. Those who are caught trying to make it to the British are severely punished, even hanged. A group of youth comes together in secret to discuss the choice that Lord Dunmore’s proclamation has given you.

2.  Character Biographies

• Give students character cards with information about an individual, such as their name, age, and a short biography. Each fact might help students determine what action is best for their character. 

These cards are similar to the ID cards from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 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.

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 an enslaved man, Abraham. Everyone here calls you Bet. You have a 3-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.

• Make the information in the character cards varied. You might disclose that some characters are single, are married, have children, have elderly parents, are male or female, among other possibilities.
• A crucial point 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 an enslaved person. 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 (see example below).
• You might also incorporate simple props such as sashes with a color to denote 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 judicious and use props sparingly. They’re only meant to help highlight information, not create ambiance or propagate any racist stereotypes.

Example of a covert card and 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 sugarcane fields for a year before you were sold again to a ship’s captain. While working on the sugar plantation, you saw many enslaved people 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. 

• Directions can be added for the student. Optional, personal decision: If you choose to inform your owner about the plans of another enslaved person to run away to the British, he will not sell Josephine to another plantation nearby. There is no guarantee, however, that he will keep his word, since in the past he has repeatedly failed to fulfill promises.
• The card might end 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 a possible informant.

The diversity of characters 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 introduces students to the idea that actions can be viewed through multiple lenses and that many factors influence decisions. 

For example, 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 selfless, 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. 

• Please be careful in handing out covert cards such as optional informant. You don’t want this activity to make any real tensions or bullying that might be taking place between students in real life worse.

3.  Student-Directed Activity

• During the activity, students meet as their characters and engage with each other to figure out what they would do in such a scenario. To do this, students should be free to direct the movement of the classroom, such as moving about the room, staying in their seats, or meeting in large or small groups.
• The teacher has a crucial role during this part of the lesson to participate with students and offer perspective, and, crucially, to redirect and address inappropriate comments and actions.

Students also direct how they will interact with one another within the confines of the activity. While students are engaging with the lesson, the teacher’s involvement is key. This is not a lesson in which only students are participating.

• One way that teachers 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 encourage students to defend their decisions. Move around the room while students are talking and interact with them to offer perspective.

For example, if a student is thinking of having their person run away, the teacher 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 will face harsh punishment. I wonder if it’s worth it?”

Or if a student is considering remaining on the plantation to protect their family, the teacher might say: “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?”

Redirect students to maintain appropriate comments and actions.

• A crucial role for teachers during the lesson is laying ground rules, redirecting students’ comments or actions in a positive manner before they become inappropriate and addressing any inappropriate statements or actions.

Since students often consider the classroom a safe place, they may push the boundaries of what is acceptable. Redirection can be used as a powerful teachable moment for all students. This needs to be done in a sensitive manner to not single out a student or inhibit future participation. 
One pervasive issue that has come up is students who want to speak as they imagine their character might. This is always problematic.

• Lay ground rules in the beginning to head off inappropriate comments or actions. For example, give students the rule to talk like themselves — no accents, no different speech patterns, no different vocabulary. 
• To address the problem if it still comes up, pause the activity and remind students that they are to speak normally. Briefly explain that how we think people of the past talked is often inaccurate and typically based on harmful caricature or stereotype.
• Another ground rule is that students cannot verbally attack other students, but they can attack the decisions of a character. Discuss what the distinction means. 
• Knowing students is key, and by moving around the room, teachers can use their role as devil’s advocate to redirect in a positive manner. If a student says something seriously problematic, teachers need to deal with that situation and not ignore it.
• If a student’s actions need to be addressed, it is important to remember that while you don’t want to single out a student, you do need to deal with the issues with 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.

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

4. Revealing of Outcomes and Discussion

• After the activity, ask students to decide their character’s actions based on their beliefs and interactions during the activity. 

For this scenario on whether they would attempt to run away and join the British, to visually show their decisions, students might move to different parts of the room. Here is where the teacher might pause the class and reveal that one student had an optional personal decision and ask the student to share what they have decided. 

• Then hand out envelopes that reveal the outcomes for the characters based on their decisions. 

For this lesson, 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 war. The character can be sold back into slavery or shipped off by the British to a small settlement in Nova Scotia. 

There are different possible outcomes that are relatively historically accurate. In reality, these options were more open to men than to women, which can also be used as a discussion point about the impact of gender on opportunities.

5.  The Wrap-Up Discussion

We often think of periods in our nation’s history, such as the American Revolution, as positive events. However, this type of lesson can highlight the difficult realities that minority groups, particularly enslaved people, faced during the founding of our nation. Not everyone celebrated American victory.

• The wrap-up discussion is the most critical part of the lesson. Such a discussion can allow students to articulate their thoughts and feelings related to the exercise. It can also demonstrate how their perceptions and empathy for historical events and people might have shifted and can be used in future discussions as a way to make historical connections.
• Some discussion questions to ask include: “How did you feel during the activity? What were some choices 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?”

Importantly, the wrap-up discussion allows students to process what they have learned. While the teacher should give the discussion some direction, students should be free to not only share their thoughts and feelings related to the exercise but also dictate the discussion topics. Students’ own lived experiences informed the choices they made for their character, and unpacking that is a critical component to any discussion.

Our experiences living in the United States have been shaped by the history of enslavement in our country. The discussion allows students, in a safe and supportive environment, to engage in a conversation about the important concept of race and racial stereotypes and the connections between historical events and today.

Using the process drama technique to teach history is valuable because students are not only empathizing with those in the past but also making concrete and meaningful connections to how history impacts current issues. 

As educators work to prepare students to be responsible citizens, highlighting these connections is vital to ensuring students are prepared to confront, deal with and change these damaging legacies.

Resources From Teaching Hard History Framework

Teaching Hard History: American Slavery

A comprehensive K-12 guide to teaching this critical topic and to helping students understand how slavery influences us in the present day.

• Grades K-2 Essential Knowledge 1: Students should be encouraged to think and talk about the meaning of freedom.
• Grades 3-5 Essential Knowledge 15: In every place and time, enslaved people sought freedom.
• Grades 6-12 Summary Objective 5: Students will describe the roles that slavery, Native nations and African Americans played in the Revolutionary War.

Teaching Hard History: Key Concept Videos

In these short videos, historians and scholars explore the history of African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the United States.

Teaching Hard History: Text Library

A collection includes more than 100 primary sources selected to support teaching and learning about slavery, the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people and the essential concepts in this framework.

Teaching Hard History Online Archives and Databases

This page includes links to online archives and databases to support educators in using original historical documents to represent the diverse voices and experiences of enslaved people. 

Talking to Children About the History of Slavery in the United States

Recommendations and age-appropriate information for families and educators to emphasize in conversations with young children about slavery and racism in the U.S.

Additional Resources

• Kennedy Center, “Process Drama: Taking a Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes”
• Learning for Justice, “A Different Kind of Pedagogy”
• Learning for Justice, “Ending Curriculum Violence”
• 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”

Full Transcript of the Episode

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 Pittsylvania 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.

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Please note that because Learning for Justice is not a credit-granting agency, we encourage you to check with your administration to determine if your participation will count toward continuing education requirements.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and host of the Teaching Hard History podcast series.

Christy Clark-Pujara, a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic, is the chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Teaching Recommendations

History at its best is not about the past; it’s about the present and how we function in the present. When students understand that slavery is central to the history of the U.S., current conflicts and debates about race in this country will take on deeper meaning because they’ll understand that the stakes are not about what’s happening right now, but what’s been happening since 1607. They’ll understand how the racial disparities and divides today are not a function of the last 50 or 100 years; they’re a function of hundreds of years.

Use the key points and examples of the business of slavery in the North — the West Indian trade, the Atlantic slave trade, and the 19th-century economy and textile industry — to illustrate the ways commerce in the North was integral to perpetuating slavery. Emphasize how the Northern economy, and indeed the nation, was built on participation in the institution of slavery.

In teaching about the West Indian trade and the Atlantic slave trade, give students the information about the sloop Adventure. Then I ask them: “What else can we learn about how the economy and society functioned in order for this transaction to have taken place?” Help students make connections in understanding the people involved.

Many students will understand almost immediately and might offer responses such as: “Well, somebody had to build the ship.” Once they have the idea of shipbuilders and carpenters, ask them to go further to elicit discussion such as: Someone had to load the ship. And where did they get the stuff from that was on the ship? So that’s local farmers.

Have students then think about: “Where did they get the rum?” Help them to see that the rum came from local distilleries, and they will begin to understand that an entire economy was connected to the ship, from tradesmen to distillers, to merchants, to farmers. And then have them think about: “Who’s on that ship? What kind of food are they eating, and is this a food they’re familiar with?”

Have students consider how enslaved people are then sold to a place they know nothing about, to do work they’ve never done before. And that the ship comes back home to Rhode Island to do it all over again.

Something a student pointed out once was that he tended to think about a profession like a blacksmithing in a rather benign way. But these ships are outfitted with shackles. And when you examine how the sloop Adventure made its money, shackles become incredibly important for keeping people bound who were later sold. These types of connections are important for recognizing how Northern people and industries were interconnected with the institution of slavery. Ask students: “What does this tell us about our society? What does this tell us about our economy?” 

Then examine the 19th-century textile industry and the importance of Southern cotton for Northern industry and economy. Teach these connections and help students as they begin to grapple with understanding that slavery was national, not just regional. Help them realize that people of African descent are an essential part of our nation and our history. 

If we’re going to understand who we are as a nation, we must reckon with this history. Our students are going to live and function in an increasingly multiracial and multicultural country and world. We do them a disservice when we let our discomfort in talking about race shape how we teach and what we teach. We owe it to ourselves, to our students and to our nation to tell the most complete, honest picture of how we got to where we are.

Students watch the news, and they see the headlines. We have an opportunity to provide them with a more comprehensive context to understand our world today. And more importantly, we can provide them with the appropriate context to act differently and to become involved in local initiatives and community service. 

A lot is at stake. This is not merely academic; it’s not just about changing what’s in a history book. It’s about how we function in the world, how we talk to one another, how we interact with people we work with, how we include or exclude groups of people in our neighborhood. It’s about our very humanity.

Resources From Teaching Hard History Framework

Teaching Hard History: American Slavery

A comprehensive K-12 guide to teaching this critical topic and to helping students understand how slavery influences us in the present day.

• Grades K-2 Essential Knowledge 7: Students should know that enslavers exploited the many types of highly skilled labor of enslaved people for their own profit.
• Grades 3-5 Essential Knowledge 11: Students will know that the main purpose of American slavery was to make money for enslavers.
• Grades 6-12 Summary Objective 4: Students will demonstrate the impact of slavery on the development of the French, British and Spanish colonies in North America.
• Grades 6-12 Summary Objective 8: Students will examine how the expanding cotton economy spurred Indian Removal and the domestic slave trade.

Teaching Hard History: Key Concept Videos

In these short videos, historians and scholars explore the history of African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the United States.

Teaching Hard History: Text Library

A collection includes more than 100 primary sources selected to support teaching and learning about slavery, the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people and the essential concepts in this framework.

Teaching Hard History Online Archives and Databases

This page includes links to online archives and databases to support educators in using original historical documents to represent the diverse voices and experiences of enslaved people. 

Talking to Children About the History of Slavery in the United States

Recommendations and age-appropriate information for families and educators to emphasize in conversations with young children about slavery and racism in the U.S.

Additional Resources

•    Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island
•    Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
•    Learning for Justice, “How Did Sugar Feed Slavery?”
•    Learning for Justice, “Sugar Manufacture in the Antilles Isles”
•    TED ED (video), “The Atlantic Slave Trade: What Too Few Textbooks Told You”
•    Learning for Justice, “What Learning About Slavery Can Teach Us About Ourselves”
•    Robert Champlin, A Rhode Island slaver; trade book of the sloop Adventure, 1773-1774
•    Rhode Island Historical Society, Christopher Champlin Papers
•    Washington Post, “In Search of Slave Clothes: A museum Director’s Hunt for a Painful Symbol (‘Negro Cloth’)”
•    Library of Congress, The African American Odyssey: Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period
•    National Park Service, Lowell’s (Mass.) Southern Connection
•    Harvard Business School, Lehman Brothers
 

Full Transcript of the episode 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My people are from Kelly, Georgia, which is a little more than an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. There they experienced the horror of enslavement and the joy of emancipation. My great-grandfather was born there around 1870. He was the first in my family born free on American soil, and I was born a century later, a world away in Brooklyn, New York.

Growing up in Brooklyn, all of the family members I knew lived in and around New York. And while I did think about the enslavement of my ancestors, I didn’t dwell on slavery itself. Just about everything I had been taught in school about the peculiar institution focused on the cotton-producing South. And every time I checked, there weren’t any cotton fields in New York City. But I began to think differently when I enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

At Morehouse, my dorm room could have easily been mistaken for a shrine to New York. Together with my roommate, who also hailed from the city, every inch of every wall was plastered with reminders of the Big Apple. There was a poster for Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee joint, pennants for the Mets and the Yankees. I was a Mets fan, of course, and he was the Yankees fan. And even a New York City street sign, but don’t ask us how we got that.

And much to the chagrin of my professors, I didn’t confine my New York nationalism to my dorm room. I freely shared it in the classroom including during discussions about slavery in America. I don’t remember exactly what I said in my freshman history class about American slavery that day, but it was some wisecrack about slavery being basically a Southern thing. I do remember exactly how Dr. Windham responded. “Brother,” he said, “you got a lot to learn.” And he was right.

So I did what many people believe is impossible for New Yorkers to do. I shut up, I listened and I learned. I learned about the practice of slavery in the North, about the critical role that the region played in maintaining the institution, first by financing the transatlantic slave trade and then by fueling demand for products produced by enslaved people. I learned that slavery was anything but a Southern thing.

At the end of my freshman year, I drove with my uncle out to Kelly, Georgia, and visited the gravesite of my great-grandfather for the first time. As my uncle and I stood quietly by ourselves in a dense thicket of underbrush, he began to tell me about our family’s post-slavery history, from Georgia to Ohio to New Jersey and to New York. It was an extension of the lessons on slavery that Dr. Windham had taught me all year, that colonies and states like Georgia and New York were interconnected and interdependent from slavery onward. Thinking back on it, I find it more than a little ironic that I had to go south to learn about the North.

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. In this episode, we’re going to confront and challenge the notion that slavery was simply a Southern institution. Historian Christy Clark-Pujara will explain how commerce in the North was integral to perpetuating slavery, and how the Northern economy was in many ways built on its active participation in the institution. She’ll share a framework for exploring these connections in the classroom, along with several rich examples.

And understanding the role of slavery in the Northern economy ultimately raises important questions for students about how to understand America and its economy today. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Christy Clark-Pujara: We misunderstand the institution of slavery when we only locate it on the plantation. We misunderstand the history of the United States as a whole when we do not acknowledge that the institution of slavery was national, rather than regional. Moreover, when we don’t acknowledge the role that Northern colonist and citizens played in the maintenance of the institution of slavery, we misunderstand the institution.

Slave plantations did not exist in isolation. It’s the people outside the plantation that bring the captives, that bring food, clothing, wood and other basic necessity. It’s the people outside of the plantation that transport the goods produced by captive workers. They were dependent upon the activities of people outside of the plantation for those places to thrive and exist.

When we think of slavery as simply a Southern institution, rather than a national one, the erasure or marginalization of the Northern Black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the Northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction: that the North has no history of racism to overcome. It also feeds into a false narrative that Black people were not part of the founding of the Northern colonies, and they were.

We think that the North has no need to redress institutional racism or work toward reconciliation. In other words, that contemporary racial disparities are not grounded in history, but are rather a reflection of poor personal choices or even worse, innate inferiority. So understanding, fully understanding, how and why the institution of slavery is central to understanding American history shapes how we see ourselves today.

The business of slavery, as all economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, foods and goods that made plantations possible. How did enslaved people get brought to the plantation? How were they fed? How were they clothed? Where did the seeds come from? Where did the money come from to invest in those places? Where do the products leave from and how do they leave?

Understanding that the plantation didn’t exist in isolation; the business of slavery was essential to the institution of slavery. Our understanding of slavery has grown tremendously in the last several decades, but our understanding has been dominated by a few particular visions of enslaved people, particularly the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, and people toiling under the threat of the lash in the hot sun.

These depictions are accurate. However, they are not solitary. Enslaved people labored in small households throughout the Northeast. Enslaved people labored on docks. Enslaved people labored on slave ships. Examining the business of slavery allows for a fuller picture of the economic systems that sustained and maintained race-based slavery throughout the Americas. It was the business of slavery that allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a single staple or cash crop.

Furthermore, enslaved and free Black people called the Northern colonies and states home, and the history of those places remain incomplete without a full accounting of the experiences of Black people in those places. Without a full accounting of the role that enslaved and free Black people played and the centrality of the business of slavery in the founding, the maintenance and the economic ascent of the United States, objections to righting the wrongs of the nation’s past will remain.

Whether it is Affirmative Action at our institutions of higher education or addressing racial disparities in mass incarceration, we must remember that our interpretations of the past shape who we think of as worthy, contributing members of our nation. In many ways, slavery, the stalled emancipation process and circumscribed Black freedom cast people of African descent as apart from the nation, even though their labors were central to its creation. A lack of understanding of how race-based slavery and its legacies marginalized an entire race of people for centuries serves to further ostracize people of African descent today.

So I’m going to give three examples of the business of slavery in the North. The first is the West Indian trade, the second is the Atlantic slave trade. And the final example is going to be about the modern economy in the 19th century and the textile industry, particularly around the commodity of cotton.

First, the West Indian trade. Sugar production forever changed the Western diet and waistline. The first plantations in the Americas began operating in the 17th century. And in the Americas, sugar was cultivated in the Caribbean. As the demand for sugar grew and becomes insatiable, just as it is now, these plantations would become increasingly dependent on Northern American colonists.

Most of the land in the Caribbean is going to be used for sugar production, so they imported all of their food and their necessities. And New England farmers and merchants acted as the grocers and the big box stores for the West Indian sugar plantations. There’s this constant demand for sugar, and so all the arable land is being used for sugar. That means you need to import all of your food. It means you need to import wood because you have to boil sugar at the end of the production process. It means that you import candles because these sugar mills are running 24 hours a day, and you also need candles to light your home. It means that you are importing clothing. It means you’re importing all the basic necessities of life.

And New Englanders provided those necessities. New Englanders supplied enslavers in the West Indies, “the West Indies” and “the Caribbean” are used interchangeably, with captive laborers, with livestock, with dairy products, with fish, with candles and lumber. The plantations cannot run without these imports from the outside because plantations do not exist in isolation.

In return, New Englanders received molasses, which is a byproduct of sugar production, it’s the runoff, which they distilled into rum. Rum becomes a major export out of New England. In Rhode Island, it’s the number one export. In the city of Newport alone, there were 16 distilleries. And in the 18th century, rum becomes its own form of currency. Then and now, liquor always has a market. But in a place like Rhode Island, the connections were even more salient. And I’ll just give you an example of what I mean.

Local slave labor played a key role in the growth of commerce. Moreover, the abundant plantations of the West Indies provided farmers and merchants with a market for their slave-produced products. And so, farmers in the Narragansett country, this is the southern half of Rhode Island, put thousands of enslaved men, women and children to work producing foodstuffs and raising livestock for the West Indian trade. You have enslaved people in southern Rhode Island growing foodstuffs for enslaved people in the West Indies.

Merchants in Newport and Providence transported local agriculture, especially livestock and cheese, to the sugar plantations in the West Indies in exchange for molasses. The same merchants then brought back molasses to Rhode Island and sold it to local distillers, who then used it to make rum, the colony’s number one export. And so, this bilateral trade was the cornerstone of the economy in Rhode Island.

Now, I’d like to move on to the Atlantic slave trade, which complemented the West Indian trade. I’ll start with the story of a slave ship. In 1773, the sloop Adventure sailed out of Newport, Rhode Island. The ship was owned by Christopher and George Champlin. In addition to the captain and officers, there were 11 sailors aboard the ship. The bulk of the departing cargo consisted of local products.

The Adventure was outfitted with handcuffs and shackles made by local blacksmiths, 26 gallons of vinegar, pork, beef, sugar, molasses, wine, beans, tobacco, butter, bread and flour. This food was to feed the crew and enslaved people on the return voyage. But the vast majority of the cargo space was reserved for locally distilled rum—24,380 gallons of rum—which was enough to purchase several dozen enslaved captives. Enslaved women cost an average of 190 gallons, and men averaged 220 gallons.

The Adventure reached Africa in five weeks. It took the captain four months of cruising along the coast to acquire 62 slaves, along with rice, pepper, palm oil and gold dust. Fifty-eight captives survived, and they were sold in Granada for between 35 and 39 pounds. The ship’s owners received a 5 percent return on their investment. Such voyages were common in Rhode Island. Slave-trading voyages produced profits from 2 to 10 percent. Most voyages yielded returns of 5 or 6 percent. And while these profit margins may seem low by contemporary investment standards, investments in the Atlantic slave trade were less risky and more liquid and needed less time to garner returns than all other forms of possible investment in the 18th century.

But it isn’t just the transfer of captives from Point A to Point B. The Atlantic slave trade creates a whole other economy within itself, and especially in relation to the bilateral trade between the Northern colonies and the West Indies. It’s important that we think about the wider implications of the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades.

Shipbuilders, sailors, corkers, sailmakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, stevedores were all employed by the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades. Coopers made barrels that stored the rum which was exchanged for enslaved people, who were sold throughout the Americas. Clerks, scribes and warehouse overseers conducted the business of the trade. Outfitting even the smallest ship required a small army of tradesmen.

African slave-trading voyages also required additional crew to control and manage the human captives, usually twice as many than a commodity’s trade. Merchants, many of whom were slave traders, paid significant taxes to the cities for public works. For example, the duties collected on the purchase and sale of enslaved people in Rhode Island were used to pave the streets of Newport. So whether or not you owned a slave, you benefited from the business of slavery.

In the classroom, I’ve given my students the bare-bones information about the sloop Adventure. And then I ask them, “What else can we learn about how the economy and society functioned in order for this transaction to have taken place?” And for the most part, students get it almost immediately. They say, “Well, somebody had to build the ship.” Okay, so we’ve got shipbuilders and carpenters and they’re like, “Well, someone had to load the ship.” And where did they get the stuff from that was on the ship? So that’s local farmers.

And then they think about, “Well, where did we get the rum from?” Well, the rum came from local distilleries. And then, they begin to start to understand that an entire economy was caught up on that ship, from tradesmen to distillers, to merchants, to farmers. And then, they start thinking about, “Okay, who’s on that ship and what kind of food are they eating, and is this a food they’re familiar with?”

“And then, they get sold to a place that they know nothing about, to do work they’ve never done before. And then that ship comes back home to Rhode Island to do it all over again.” Something that a student pointed out to me once was that he tended to think about a profession like a blacksmith in a rather benign way. These ships are outfitted with dozens and dozens of shackles. And when you examine how the sloop Adventure made its money, shackles become incredibly important. That’s how you kept the people bound who were later sold.

So I give them the bare bones and then ask them, “What does it tell us about our society? What does this tell us about our economy?” And they also get the social component of it; that this is a place where holding certain people as property is normative, acknowledged and respected. Slave traders were not maligned. They were elites, and so it tells us a lot about how a society functioned.

There was slave labor in the North from the colonial period through the American Revolution. Slaveholding was socially acceptable, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. But after the American Revolution, slavery, as an institution, slaveholding as a practice, begins to fall apart in the North. Slavery dies out in these places. The primary reason is the business of slavery was always more important in the North than slave labor itself, and most Northerners are opposed to slavery’s expansion, not its existence.

Moving on to the modern economy, and cotton in the 19th century and how it transforms the U.S. economy really is the engine behind the U.S. economic ascent in the 19th century, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse in the world. The history of slavery isn’t something that we cannot connect with. In fact, I’m willing to bet that every person listening has a direct connection to slavery that they just don’t know about.

Just to give you an example, if you own a pair of jeans, if you’ve ever worn a pair of jeans, if you’ve ever bought a pair of jeans, you are intimately connected to the history of slavery in this country. Levi Strauss buys its patent from a textile mill in Rhode Island after the American Civil War. The mill was no longer manufacturing slave clothing, but the patent that was bought was a patent that had manufactured slave clothing. It was called “Negro cloth.” It was a coarse cotton wool material made especially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved people in the American South. It was tough. It was durable, it washed well and it was designed for enslaved people on America’s plantations.

Enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States produced the bulk of the world’s cotton and almost all of the cotton consumed by the U.S. textile industry during the antebellum era. Northerners, especially New Yorkers, were buying, selling and shipping it. By 1860, cotton represented more than half of all of U.S. exports, and lower Manhattan was populated with cotton brokers, bankers, merchants, shippers, auctioneers and insurers who profited from that export. Only New York banks were big enough to extend a massive lines of credit to plantation owners so they could buy seed, farming equipment and people. New York was also home to the water- and rail- transportation companies that shipped cotton from the South to the North.

When we think about the Industrial Revolution, when we think about public investment in rail lines and shipping industry, we often don’t think about it in conjunction with the institution of slavery. But it was the institution of slavery and cotton that was the impetus for it all. Over the 19th century, the textile industry transformed Northern towns. By 1852, the industry employed 14 percent of the labor force, and by 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills.

These textile factories were often the sole employers in towns throughout the region. And they were a direct link between Northern advancement and wealth, and Southern slavery. Textile mills are just one example. Manufacturing plants throughout the North, and in New England in particular, that produced farming implements, who are they selling those farming implements to? Southern plantation owners to be used by enslaved people.

Factories that produced shoes were often making shoes for enslaved people who wore them out in the fields. So the manufacturing industry, as it existed in the 19th century, was directly connected to the American plantation. Rhode Island, again, provides a salient example of the connection between Northern investment and Southern slaveholding.

Between 1800 and 1860, more than 80 Negro cloth mills opened in Rhode Island. Twenty-two Rhode Island towns and cities manufactured Negro cloth for over 60 years. More than 80 Rhode Island families owned part of a Negro cloth mill at some point in the 19th century. By mid-century, 79 percent of all Rhode Island textile mills manufactured slave clothing. In the famed Lowell Mills, about a third of all textiles produced were destined for Southern markets, plantations in particular.

The look and feel of a city like New York was transformed by those who were invested in cotton, invested in the business of slavery. The now-infamous Lehman Brothers began as cotton brokers. The first Morgan fortune was made by Charles Morgan, who was a steamship captain and merchant whose shipping line dominated the Gulf coastline, transporting enslaved captives from the upper South to the Deep South. So enslaved people were sold by the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands, the estimate is over a million enslaved people were sold from the upper South, the Chesapeake, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware to the new South or the Deep South to grow cotton in places like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Some of them walked through forced migrations, others went by water. Charles Morgan transported people by water from the upper South to New Orleans to Galveston, Texas. That’s how the Morgan fortune was first built. You also have people like Alexander Stewart who was a cotton merchant who opened the United States’ first department store in New York City in 1848. New York remains a fashion capital of the world and its first department store was opened with investments in slave-picked cotton.

When I teach these connections and the bright line starts showing up for students, what most really begin to grapple with is the understanding that the sin of slavery is national. That whether or not you ever owned a slave, you benefited from slavery if you live and function in this country. And that is a difficult pill for many of my students to swallow: that we all have benefited from slavery because the United States became what it was through the exploitation of millions of people of African descent. To understand that when people say slavery built the United States, that it’s not hyperbole or just something you say to be sensational, but just a reflection of the truth and what that means for racial disparities today.

But then the next thing I see is a realization that people of African descent are an essential part of this place, that it’s not an add-on. I teach African-American history classes and what I am most trying to do is to get students to understand that African-American history isn’t an additive. It’s central to understanding American history. You don’t know who you are as an American unless you know the story of slavery.

History at its best is not about the past. It’s about the present and how we function in the present. And when students begin to understand that slavery is central to the history of the United States, current conflicts and debates about race in this country will have real meaning to them because they’ll understand that the stakes are not about what’s happening right now, but what’s been happening since 1607, and why we have such racial disparities and divides. These are not a function of the last 50 years or hundred years. They’re a function of hundreds of years.

And if we’re going to really understand who we are as a nation—who contributed, who built, who belongs, who’s a part of—we have to reckon with this history. The most common response I get from students is, “Why didn’t I know this? Why don’t we talk about these things?” And the fact of the matter is our students are going to have to exist and function in an increasingly multiracial, multi-country and global world, and we do them a grave disservice when we let our discomfort in talking about race shape how we teach and what we teach. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our students and we owe it to our nation to tell the most complete, honest picture of how we got to where we are.

They turn on the news, they see the headlines. We have an opportunity to provide them with the proper context to understand that. And more importantly, we can provide them with the proper contacts to act differently, to speak differently, to get involved in local, to get involved with local initiatives and community service. A lot is at stake. This is not academic. It’s not just about changing what’s in a history book. It’s about how we function in the world, how we talk to each other, how we interact with people we work with, how we include or exclude groups of people in our neighborhood. It’s about our very humanity.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christy Clark-Pujara is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the department of African Americans Studies. She’s the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, and is currently working on a book about Black people in the Wisconsin territory from the French colonial period through the American Civil War. 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. Clark-Pujara for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford with production assistance from Tori Marlin and David Macasaet at L & S Learning Support Services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series.

And 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 on 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.

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