Resources

• Learning for Justice: Teaching Toolkit for “Be Your Own Historian”
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, The True History of Voting Rights (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Student Text, 14th Amendment (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Student Text, Reconstruction (grades 3-5, 6-8, 9-12)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Tensions ran high in Grant Parish, Louisiana, ahead of the 1872 election for governor. Former Confederates filled the ranks of the Democratic Party, and they wanted desperately to oust the Black and white Republican coalition that controlled the state government. Some 4,600 ballots were cast on Election Day, resulting in a close but clear victory for the Republican candidate.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Defeat did not sit well with the former Confederates. They questioned the legitimacy of the election because they did not believe that African Americans had a right to vote. In Colfax, the seat of Grant Parish, white men plotted to overthrow the local government. Inspired by the Klan, they formed their own racial terror group—the White League—and announced plans to seize control of the Parish courthouse. To prevent a coup, a Black militia, comprised of former Union soldiers, marched on the courthouse in advance of the White League and took up defensive positions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: On April 13, 1873, a couple hundred White Leaguers and their supporters showed up at the courthouse with Confederate-issued weapons—including a cannon. It wasn't long before they opened fire, letting loose a blistering volley of pistol, rifle and cannon shot. The Black militiamen held off the siege for as long as they could—killing three white men in the process. But the mob had them outgunned. Surrender was the only way out. But when the former Union soldiers laid down their weapons, they were massacred; some shot, others hanged. In all, about 150 African Americans were murdered that day.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Eventually, 97 indictments were handed down, but only nine convictions followed. And even that modicum of justice proved fleeting. In 1876, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions, ruling in United States v. Cruikshank that individuals could not be guilty of violating Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection under the law because the amendment applied only to states, not to individuals. By narrowly interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, the ruling limited the ability of the federal government to protect the civil rights of African Americans, sending a clear signal to white Southerners that they could do whatever they needed to do to end Reconstruction and restore white supremacist rule.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Three-quarters of a century later, in 1950, the Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry erected a historic marker on the spot where the massacre took place. The marker read: "On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In a mere 32 words, the state marker captured the typical response to hard history. Rather than deal with those aspects of our past that make us uncomfortable in the present—such as racial massacres—we create false narratives. By labeling the massacre a "riot," the marker suggests that the Black defenders of democracy were just as responsible for the tragic events of that day as the members of the white mob.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Rather than deal with hard history, we attempt to rationalize evil. By asserting that the massacre signaled "the end of carpertbag misrule," the marker suggests that the mass murder was necessary to save democracy from corrupt Black and white Republicans.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And rather than deal with hard history, we pretend events like the Colfax Massacre didn't even occur. The version of events captured in that historic marker was taught in Louisiana schools for decades. And when Black Power activists insisted on accurate history in the classroom, Colfax completely disappeared from standards.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Colfax was not an anomaly. America has a long tradition of racialized political violence. Also not anomalous were the white responses to the massacre, including contemporary silences.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But what if we had been teaching the truth about the massacre all along? Perhaps we would not have been surprised on January 6, 2021, by the attempted insurrection by supporters of the outgoing president. Donald Trump whipped up the mob for two months by suggesting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, a baseless claim predicated on the racist idea that ballots cast in Black communities like Atlanta, Georgia, were suspect.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Perhaps too, if we had been teaching the truth about the massacre all along, maybe January 6 never occurs. Maybe Trump voters see through his lies, recognizing in them the same falsehoods that led to the Colfax Massacre. At the very least, many more of us would not have been surprised by the day's events. Shocked, yes. Surprised, no. We also would have been in a much better position to defend the Capitol that day—and defend democracy every day since.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. 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.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: To understand how Reconstruction and the response to it set the stage for the Jim Crow era, we need to fully understand what Reconstruction accomplished, and how white Southerners undermined those accomplishments.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Historian Kate Masur has written extensively about Reconstruction, including co-editing the anthology, The World the Civil War Made. In this episode, she explains what students need to know about the era. Then, educator and exhibits expert Ahmad Ward takes us to Hilton Head Island to discover what he and a team of researchers have learned about Mitchelville, one of the very first self-governed towns of formerly enslaved people in the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But first, my co-host Bethany Jay discusses with Kate Masur how we should be framing Reconstruction in the classroom, from its successes to its unraveling.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm so glad you could join us.

Bethany Jay: I'm so pleased to welcome Kate Masur from the Department of History at Northwestern University here with us today. She's the author of several books, including the recently published Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction, which I might say sparked quite a conversation with some women on a blanket next to me at the beach while I was reading it this summer. Dr. Masur has extensive experience working with K through 12 teachers, and also consulting with museums. So I, for one, have been a fan of your work for a long time, and I'm so glad that you're here to help our audience make sense of the complicated era that is Reconstruction, and also offer some advice about how to teach this content.

Kate Masur: Thank you so much for having me, and I completely love and I'm flattered by the image of my book as beach reading, so thank you so much for conjuring that up.

Bethany Jay: So to get started, you've been in the classroom for a long time. What's your perspective on how most Americans view Reconstruction and how it's taught in the classroom?

Kate Masur: Well, I think there are a couple different challenges associated with teaching Reconstruction. One is that it falls in a weird time in the semester because sometimes the first semester ends with the Civil War, and the second semester picks up after the Civil War, and it's kind of unclear where Reconstruction is supposed to fit in the curriculum. Should you cram it in with the Civil War part, or should you pick it up in the kind of post-Civil War part? So then where do you put Reconstruction?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: There is another problem, which is Reconstruction is really complicated, so it's hard to teach it well. And then there's the looming problem, which is that there are so many myths and untruths and distortions around the history of Reconstruction, particularly, I think for those of us who are a little bit older, maybe people who are teaching in classrooms who were taught the version of Reconstruction, which is it was one of the worst periods in American history. It was a shameful period of repression and unnatural oppression of the Southern states by a vengeful federal government. And so overturning that narrative is part of the challenge of teaching Reconstruction.

Bethany Jay: I was just having this conversation the other day with my students and I was saying I was taught a version of that narrative of Reconstruction. And I said, I'm not that old. I went to high school in the '90s, and then I realized that they probably think that I am that old if I went to high school in the '90s. [laughs]

Kate Masur: I mean, I went to high school in the '80s, and I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it, in part because the teacher seemed to be conveying that this was such an important period in American history, and yet I couldn't fully fathom why that was, since it seemed like everything that happened afterwards kind of overturned it.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Kate Masur: Okay, there was this blip in time where a bunch of really unusual things happened. But why should we really understand this when later we get Jim Crow, we get lynching, we get all this racial repression, and in the end, over the long scope of history, it feels like not a lot changed? So I think that is another challenge: figuring out for ourselves why does Reconstruction matter? What do we want students to learn when we talk about it?

Bethany Jay: You've highlighted a lot of the complications. And Reconstruction is a bit amorphous for most people, partly because it is so complicated. So how can we help teachers to frame Reconstruction in the classroom, to come away with the big ideas that are going to highlight its importance and not just its undoing?

Kate Masur: I have come around to pointing out two main challenges that the United States as a nation faced as the Civil War ended: how do you bring the states that declared themselves out of the Union, formed the Confederacy and waged a war against the United States of America, through what mechanism do you bring them back into the Union? That's challenge number one, and challenge number two is: what will be the future of the four million formerly enslaved people in the Southern states now that this huge institution—slavery—has been toppled?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: What would their freedom look like? What would their rights look like? What kinds of protections, if any, will the nation as a whole offer to them living in this context in which we know that many if not most of their white neighbors really wish they were still enslaved. And I would add that, in the process of solving these problems, national leaders committed this country to attempting to be a multiracial democracy.

Bethany Jay: And the long-standing impact of Reconstruction is this commitment to multiracial democracy. And that gets us to why does Reconstruction matter?

Kate Masur: And this is really the first time that that happened in American history, and that was really fundamental to the struggles and eventually the backlash that we see in this period.

Bethany Jay: And of course, the political process is also part of addressing these two questions: what do we do with states that are in rebellion, and what will be the future of free people? Can you lead us through some of that political process of Reconstruction?

Kate Masur: Sure. So let's put ourselves in Washington, DC at the end of 1864. It's pretty clear that the United States, the Union, is going to prevail in the military conflict that is the Civil War. The Senate had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in the spring of 1864 that's going to abolish slavery and give Congress the power to pass legislation to ensure that slavery is abolished. And in January of 1965, the House passes it, so now a Constitutional Amendment has been passed. And this is a monumental step that the government is taking. What we're looking at is the beginning of a series of measures that comes out of Washington, DC, designed to change the relationship between the federal government and the states, and put federal protection around the individual rights of people in a way that had never existed before.

Kate Masur: And that goes to the question of what is the future of African Americans in the United States? And the way that that connects to the question of how do you bring the former Confederate states into the Union is the Thirteenth Amendment has to go out to the states for ratification. And what ends up happening, Congress makes Southern states approving of certain federal measures a condition of their readmission. So eventually Congress is going to say, "You can't come back into the Union until you do things like ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, ensure that African-American men have the right to vote. And at that point you will be able to send members to the House of Representatives and to the Senate and become a regular state again.

Kate Masur: And so these two issues about under what conditions are the former Confederate states going to be readmitted, and the issue of protecting African Americans' rights for a time in the 1860s go alongside each other.

Bethany Jay: One of the things that my students are always very surprised about in this moment is the nature of citizenship as outlined in the Constitution, because a lot of what's happening during Reconstruction and throughout the entire course of of American history is trying to figure out how do we define citizenship, how do African-American people claim citizenship? Can you explain to us the nature of citizenship before Reconstruction, and how Reconstruction deals with that issue?

Kate Masur: One of the things that's pretty strange about American history is that, from the founding of the country, there was no unified definition of who was an American citizen or what being an American citizen even got you. For example, if you look at the original Constitution before the Reconstruction amendments, there are only a few references to citizenship. A couple of them have to do with citizenship as a qualification for holding high office—the President of the United States, has to be a citizen of the United States. And then there's this interesting clause in Article four, Section two of the original Constitution, which says the citizens of the states are entitled to the privileges and immunities of the citizens of other states, which was a clause that was often really contested before the Civil War when it came to the rights of African Americans. And so one of the things that's interesting is that Article four, Section two, which I certainly encourage everyone to read, it's still there in the Constitution, it kind of referred to state citizenship. So it was more or less saying, if you're a citizen of a state like, let's say, New York, you're entitled to privileges and immunities of citizens in other states when you're traveling to other states.

Kate Masur: And this became the subject of a lot of agitation before the Civil War when African Americans were often working. For example, Black sailors working in the intercoastal trade, they would be on ships that left ports like New York City and Boston traveling to Southern states. When they got to port in, let's say, Charleston or Mobile, they would help unload the ships and then bring new goods onto the ships. And these states passed laws that explicitly said Black sailors need to spend their time in port in prison because we consider them a threat to our society, or they need to spend their time in port on the boat. They can't come ashore. And in the period before the Civil War, we often find people in New York, Massachusetts and other northern states making the argument that this was a violation of the constitutional rights of free Black sailors under the privileges and immunities clause. They should be able to exercise their full rights, including their personal freedom and liberty and mobility, regardless of what state they were in. But even though this was in the Constitution, that citizens are guaranteed a right of free travel, and even though states like New York and Massachusetts recognized free Black people as citizens of their states, there was no way to enforce that interpretation of the privileges and immunities clause.

Kate Masur: Congress was not interested in it. People who wanted to test this in federal courts weren't able to get a case into federal court. This is just one of the many ways in which citizenship remained kind of up for grabs and very diffuse and amorphous. We normally think of the Dred Scott decision of 1857 as kind of the landmark in that history and the declaration that Black people—whether enslaved or free—could never be citizens of the United States. But it's helpful to see Justice Taney's decision in Dred Scott as part of a much broader conversation in which many people—African Americans and white people—were making the exact opposite argument, and had been doing so for a very long time. So Reconstruction policy at the federal level is going to try to resolve some of those questions.

Bethany Jay: And it becomes very clear as part of the political process of Reconstruction, that defining citizenship and ensuring that African-American people can make claims to citizenship no matter what their status was before the war is going to be absolutely necessary to accomplish any of the goals of Reconstruction.

Kate Masur: Yes. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Congress passed in April of 1866 over the veto of President Johnson, basically says what the Fourteenth Amendment would later say in different language, which is: everyone who's born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. So it's basically clearing up any question about whether African Americans, whether they were born enslaved or born free, this is one of the things that they're trying to resolve. If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen of the United States. And then when we get to the Fifteenth Amendment, of course, voting rights is defined around citizenship as a prerequisite for the right to vote. So we have to kind of establish who is a citizen in part so that when it comes time to make a federal definition of who has the right to vote, it's going to say there can be no racial discrimination among citizens in the right to vote. And they're explicitly saying citizens can't be discriminated against racially in the right to vote. It's a kind of important prerequisite to define who is a citizen of the United States, and to have a federal definition that should be uniform across the states, as opposed to allowing states to make their own decisions about who is a state citizen and who is not.

Bethany Jay: In a lot of ways, Congress's moves to define citizenship to protect the rights that are afforded to citizens is a reaction to the first era of Reconstruction, Presidential Reconstruction. First Lincoln, of course, during the Civil War, but then Johnson after the Civil War takes on Reconstruction as a presidential act. And Johnson's time overseeing Reconstruction, as short as it was, makes it clear how much the protection of rights and those definitions of citizenship are needed. Can you speak a little bit to Johnson's time in charge of Reconstruction?

Kate Masur: Andrew Johnson became president in the middle of the process of ending the war, and Johnson wanted to be in charge of Reconstruction policy. And Congress was out of session when he became president after Lincoln was murdered, and so he kind of took matters in hand and he makes a series of proclamations basically for each of the rebel states saying, "I will now appoint a provisional governor. You will make a new constitution. You will accept the abolition of slavery. And there are going to be certain disqualifications for people to hold office." So Johnson puts into his proclamations the policy that if you were a particularly wealthy person, you would be disqualified from holding office or voting unless you got a presidential pardon. And this, by the way, makes people think that Johnson, who was an enslaver himself before the war, he's actually going to be hard on the Southern white elite, and he's going to be a president who looks out for Southern poor white farmers and possibly also for African Americans.

Kate Masur: And all of that turns out to be completely untrue, because over the summer and fall of 1865, all of these members of the Southern elite make pilgrimages to Washington to seek his pardon, and he pardons them. And then during that summer and fall of 1865, Southern state governments kind of reconvene and they say, "Okay, you know, let's create new constitutions. We'll abolish slavery, fine. And we will begin the process of sending representatives to Congress." But really, there wasn't a lot being demanded of these state governments. So for example, the president wasn't saying you have to have laws that protect the rights of free African Americans. You have to have laws that allow Black people to testify in court on the same terms as white people. I mean, none of that, much less that he was not saying that Black men have to be allowed to vote. To the contrary, he was saying the states get to decide who has the right to vote, and the people who will vote to elect delegates to the state constitutional conventions will be the people who were able to vote in 1860 before secession, which were exclusively white men in the states. And so Johnson's policy is really an example of almost the softest possible approach to the former Confederacy. And this is part of what Republicans in Congress are really going to take issue with when they finally reconvene in December of 1865.

Bethany Jay: And we see a lot of former Confederates elected to Congress, including Alexander Stephens.

Kate Masur: Right. Right, the vice president of the Confederacy is going to be sent to Washington to represent Georgia. There's a lot, obviously, of concern among particularly Republicans in the North about these developments. And another thing that's very concerning is that when the Southern states under presidential Reconstruction start to have their constitutional conventions and start to make laws, they pass these things that are called Black codes. And this begins with Mississippi, and then South Carolina comes next. And completely obvious to everyone, they're making these extremely racially-discriminatory laws that say things like, if a Black person commits a crime, the punishment is much greater than if a white person does, or Black people aren't allowed to own property in cities was one of the provisions of the Mississippi Black codes.

Kate Masur: These are a set of laws that, while they're not literally reinstituting slavery, they're designed to create a system of complete white supremacy and racial repression. And this makes very clear there needs to be some outside force exerted on these states to insist that they cannot do things like this, that after fighting this war, after ending slavery, it is not appropriate to create a racial caste system in which Black people have virtually no rights whatsoever, and are completely subject to the whims and the power of white people, of their white neighbors and of state governments. And so this sets up what ends up happening in Congress in 1866 and 1867.

Kate Masur: Another thing that's happening during this same period of quote unquote "Presidential Reconstruction" when the, you know, white Southerners are convening these state legislatures, and prominent former confederates are seeking pardons, African Americans are also mobilizing, both in the North, where people had been free for a long time and were very accustomed to lobbying state legislatures and organizing meetings and petitioning and so on. But also in just about every former slave state, we see Black conventions meeting, people coming together, often in statewide conventions to define what their political aspirations are, and to petition and make arguments both to these state governments that are reforming and to the federal government about what needs to happen next.

Kate Masur: And I wanted to mention one document that I particularly enjoy teaching and talking about with students. It's a document that's available through the Freedmen and Southern Society Projects website. The title that they've given the document is "Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention." And this is a document from January of 1865. So again, before the Thirteenth Amendment even passed Congress, before the Civil War was even over, a group of African Americans meet in Nashville, and they're going to send a petition, a statement of their values and their beliefs to a unionist meeting, a meeting of white unionists that is happening in the capital city of Tennessee in Nashville. And in that petition, they're basically making a case for political equality, racial equality and civil rights. And it's very interesting to read it, and the kind of claims that they make. And I like to highlight with students first of all, their natural rights claims that they make. So basically making claims in the name of humanity, that they are asking for things that they believe all human beings are entitled to.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Kate Masur: They also talk about their loyalty to the Union. So they talk about how Black men have served this country loyally, and they contrast that with the many white people who made rebellion against the United States. And they say, "How can you tell us that we are not entitled to certain kinds of rights when we are the ones that have fought to keep this country together?" One of their main goals is to get the right to vote for Black men. And remember, this is a state-level issue. So they want to tell this meeting of white unionists in Nashville: when you make a new constitution, all men should have the same right to vote regardless of race. And they say "We know that Black men voted in the past." Even in North Carolina in the early Republic, Black men had the right to vote, not to mention in places like Massachusetts and New York. They give a bit of a history lesson, and they kind of say, "We've seen in other places and other times when African-American men voted and everything was fine." Like, don't be afraid of this.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: And they also say "We're in a period of tremendous change." When the US Army first started recruiting Black men into the forces, and that was in 1863, a lot of people couldn't believe it. They thought it would never work. They thought it was too radical. And look how loyally Black men have served, how much difference they made to our ability to win the war. Now you might think asking for Black men's right to vote is something really radical, but we're in a time of change. We can accept things now that we might not have accepted in the past, and don't let your prejudices get in your way. So I think this document really encompasses a lot of the spirit and the kind of ideas that were floating around among African Americans, being transmitted through networks of people who knew one another, who sometimes went to meetings across state lines with one another. And this is only one of many, many documents like this that come out of this moment of great organizing among African Americans during 1865 that only continues into subsequent years.

Bethany Jay: I love this document because we get African-American voices in it, and I also love it because I always use the Revolutionary-era petitions of free and enslaved African Americans petitioning for freedom as part of the revolutionary moment with my students. So continuing this narrative all the way through strikes me as a really nice way to give class time right to Black mobilization and political thought at times that we don't always do it.

Kate Masur: And I would just throw in the Color Conventions Project, which is now at Penn State, is doing an amazing job of making documents like this available. And particularly if you happen to be teaching in one of the ex-Confederate states, there's probably a document like this for you from your state. Because these conventions happened, I think, in every ex-Confederate state if not in 1865, then in 1866 or 1867. So it's a nice way to bring it home if one of your states is represented there. And I should add that it's not only Southern states where African Americans had these conventions, including in the post-Civil War years. I know there's an Illinois one from 1866, and many other Northern states are represented as well, although the issues might be slightly different that they're discussing.

Bethany Jay: Great resources, and thank you for pointing us to that one.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources, as well as a full transcript complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Let's return to Bethany Jay's conversation with Kate Masur.

Bethany Jay: Congress sort of hits a reset on Reconstruction, and takes over from President Johnson and starts again with what's known as Congressional or Radical Reconstruction, Which is the moment that ties civil rights for African Americans with that political process. And one of the first major things that Congress does, we have the 1866 Civil Rights Act, followed quickly by the 1867 Reconstruction Acts. Can you talk with us about how those take control of Reconstruction policy and change the narrative about citizenship?

Kate Masur: When Congress meets in this session from the end of 1865 through the first half of 1866, they're looking at all of these pleas coming in from African Americans. They know that in many places, white Southerners have been enacting violence and intimidation against African Americans, in part around labor relations, to try to ensure that Black people aren't leaving plantations, that they'll remain a labor force on the plantations. Congress is looking at people like Alexander Stephens coming to Congress. They're looking at this kind of defiance that they're seeing coming out of white Southerners toward the political process, and they want to throw some protections around African-Americans' rights and the rights of white unionists in the South. And to do that, they know that they have to constrain the power of the states. A lot of these measures have to do with finding ways within our federalist system of putting strictures around the states and saying the states still have a lot of power, but there are certain things you cannot do, right?

Kate Masur: And so in the 1866 Civil Rights Act, they say all people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens except Indians not taxed, and people subject to the power of foreign government. And then they say, you know, all citizens are entitled to the same rights as white citizens. So they're basically setting white citizenship as a standard, and saying all citizens should enjoy the same rights as white citizens. And then they set up a bunch of mechanisms in that law for enforcement, including that if you take a case of discrimination to your local court or state court and you feel you didn't get justice, you can move it into federal court. It's also going to say that there are federal marshals who can arrest and federal prosecutors who can prosecute people for these kinds of violations. So in other words, they're not willing to leave the protection of rights up to the states, which is where that protection would have always lain in the past.

Kate Masur: And to the surprise of many Republicans in Congress, the President vetoes this law. And then Congress proceeds to pass the law over the President's veto. And this kind of sets the pattern for what's going to happen going forward is that President Johnson is going to resist what Congressional Republicans, who now have a sizable majority in Congress, Johnson will resist them, but because the Republican majority was so large and relatively united, they could pass legislation over the President's veto. So the measures from 1866, the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, which also passes in 1866, they don't really deal with voting rights very directly.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: And this is again, I mean, kind of like blatantly obvious. It's much discussed whether we should go ahead and make sure that Black men also have the right to vote. The view that prevails on that is we can't do that yet because we're worried that if we go too far, we're going to lose in the 1866 midterm election. And so politics really figures in here, and we can think about parallels to that in our present day.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: If the Republicans, for example, were to go really far in 1866, really far at the time would be like, and we're going to force the states to enfranchise Black men. And then they come around to the midterm election and they get, you know, drubbed at the polls and the Democrats come into power, they're not going to be able to do anything else, right? So anyway, what happens is in the 1866 election, they do win handily. Basically, the Northern public puts its stamp of approval on what the Republicans are doing in Congress, and that means that when they come back for the next session, they are poised to pass these 1867 Reconstruction Acts, which are really the things that ensure the enfranchisement of Black men in the former Confederacy. And so it's important to notice that this is coming through Congressional legislation. This is not happening because of the Fifteenth Amendment, which hasn't been passed yet.

Kate Masur: This is coming because Congress is making laws that directly affect and shape Reconstruction policy, again passing them over the President's veto. So the 1867 Reconstruction Acts—and this is what's called radical Reconstruction or Congressional Reconstruction—they basically say, okay, yeah, we're going to start over. We still haven't accepted the representatives that the governments formed under Johnson's policy. We haven't actually said they were legitimate. They've basically put all that on hold and kind of denied the legitimacy of that entire process. And they say, "All right, now you're going to start over. We're going to put the former Confederate states, except Tennessee, under military control. The military is going to oversee elections. Black men will be enfranchised in these elections, and the first set of elections is going to be electing delegates to state constitutional conventions." And then the Congress says, "You're going to meet and you're going to make a new state constitution. And you're not only going to accept the abolition of slavery"—which by now is in the Constitution and the Thirteenth Amendment. "You're going to accept the Fourteenth Amendment. You're going to enfranchise African-American men. And then you're going to, under those terms, elect a new state legislature. And at that point, when you've done those things, you may send representatives to Washington and we'll probably admit you."

Kate Masur: And so it's basically that the terms of Reconstruction and the readmission of the states have changed in a way that emphasizes not only what people saw as the civil rights of all people—especially African Americans—but also political rights. They're also saying, "No go. We're not going forward until Black men have the right to vote and hold office." And that completely transforms the possibilities for what can happen politically going forward during Reconstruction.

Bethany Jay: And one of the thoughts, if I'm remembering correctly, when they were initially debating voting rights for African Americans was a question of would it really matter? Would African-American men vote, or would they be under the power of influential white men? And what we see is when, given the right to vote with these 1867 Reconstruction Acts, that African-American men mobilize in huge numbers to participate both in the state constitutional conventions and further on.

Kate Masur: Right. There was an organization called the Union League that was a Northern-based organization that produced pamphlets, and things like scripts for talking about registering to vote, becoming a voter. Of course, they were Republicans, so they said, "And when you vote, you should vote Republican." And Southern Union League organizations formed. They were not necessarily super directly connected to the Northern larger Union League organization, but the idea was we're going to form kind of local organizations. We see that social structures that came out of slavery, pre-Civil War Southern Black society, served well to form the backbone of these Union League organizations. We know, for example, that during the time of slavery there were enslaved preachers, there were elders on plantations who were particularly respected. Some enslaved people had learned how to read by one way or another. There were also free African Americans in the Southern states who had a bit more status, perhaps they were skilled tradesmen. And so these are some of the people who we see leading these local organizations. There were also white and Black Northerners who came to the Southern states to help with this organizing push going from plantation to plantation holding meetings, talking about the need to register to vote. Talking about what it would mean to be a voter. And in many cases, this was very dangerous work.

Kate Masur: So there are documented accounts of people being murdered and threatened in this work of trying to register people to vote. An illustration that I really use a lot in teaching, it's called "Electioneering at the South," from the summer of 1868 from Harper's. This image shows an African-American speaker on a plantation speaking to a group of men and some women who are sitting on a porch and there is a child standing in the background. And it's a very dynamic picture. The speaker is holding out his hand, kind of gesturing as if he's talking about something really important. It's not directly from 1867 when Black men first voted, but it captures the same kind of idea, just a year later during presumably this is the election season of 1868. This is when Grant was elected, but locally it's defined by a huge political mobilization of African Americans and a lot of violence in some places.

Kate Masur: And I like this a lot because it shows a rural scene. We don't have as many rural scenes of politics. We have rural scenes of agriculture, but this is a rural scene of politics. It looks like they're on a plantation, and it's the formerly enslaved people now free workers gathered around. Another reason why I like this image is because it does show women attending the meeting. So you see some women on the porch and another woman kind of sitting in the background. And this really is consistent with what we know from textual sources. Women did actively involve themselves in politics in this moment of coming into the political sphere, even though it was only men who could actually exercise the right to vote. Women attended political meetings. We have records of women emphasizing to the men in their lives that they must vote and they must vote Republican. There are even some instances where we find that women say we're going to make it clear that we are withholding romance unless our men vote Republican. And really just a lot of documentation that, for African Americans, the vote and becoming part of the body politic as part of this process of becoming free, was something that the entire community was invested in.

Bethany Jay: In terms of the men casting ballots, can you talk with us a little bit about another image called "The First Vote?"

Kate Masur: This image has become really iconic in images of Reconstruction, and this is also from Harper's Weekly from 1867. It was apparently an image that was made from a sketch of an artist who was in Virginia at the time. It shows four Black men kind of in line to vote, and the artist has clearly gone out of his way to show a diversity of clothing and faces and ages among these men. Clearly, one of the men in this line is a United States soldier. He's got the chevrons on his arm, showing that he's an officer. Another looks like a kind of prosperous farmer—the man wearing a hat. And the man in front is wearing patched clothes. He's older. We could sort of imagine him as someone who's seen a lot.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: All of them presumably could have been—in our imagination could have been born enslaved. Or possibly not. We don't really know. But this kind of older man suggests something about that this is something he's been waiting for his whole life. And I think this is something that's interesting to point out: this is not similar to caricatures of African Americans, which tended to homogenize people, to act as if all Black people were the same and had the same kind of caricatured features. This is showing distinction among people. Another thing that I like to point out about this image is how they're voting. You see that there are two glass bowls, and the man who's in the front of the line is depositing his ballot into one of them. And just for students to understand that at this time, people voted in front of everybody else, and oftentimes the ballots were color coded. So, you know, it was partly to make sure that people who didn't know how to read or write got the right ballot. So let's say you had a green ballot for one slate of candidates and a blue ballot for another. So when you went up to cast your vote, anyone who was standing around could know which glass jar you deposited it in and what color your ballot was. This is one of the things that made voting very dangerous. It made it very risky for people who were subject to reprisals.

Kate Masur: White people who opposed Black men's right to vote would gather around these polling places. There were often armed confrontations at polling places in which white people tried to stop Black people from voting with guns, and Black people in turn using whatever guns they might have had in their community, or sometimes sticks intended to look like guns came to the polls as well to try to protect this right. And yet, even when they deposited their ballot, people would know who they voted for, and they could face reprisals like getting fired from their job or getting run off their land. And so this was really, really risky. And back to your question about people who oppose Black men's right to vote saying, "Oh, well, they probably won't have any independence from their employer, or they'll just vote in whatever way their employer wants them to." I mean, these kinds of power relations really did matter. I mean, there were enormous kinds of threats and coercion looming over people. And yet there are so many accounts of Black men again with, like, Black communities, with women supporting them, saying, "You know, I am going to vote the way I choose to vote. You won't tell me how to vote." But it was very dicey. It was very hard. It was very dangerous in a lot of places.

Bethany Jay: I'm so glad you mentioned that, because some of the other things that happened during Congressional Reconstruction are laws to protect African-American people from racial terror, because it's not as though the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are passed and everybody is like, "Well, okay, then. I guess we can't do that." We still see a lot of racial terror happening in the South, and those enforcement acts, you know, the Ku Klux Klan Act really is what allows some of that political activity to go on.

Kate Masur: One of the interesting things is in the early 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant was president, the Justice Department and attorneys within the Justice Department, as well as military people at times, did succeed in arresting and bringing to trial many members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations, and also that the threat of bringing people to trial and actually bringing people to justice was enough as well to suppress some of that violence for a limited amount of time. But white people largely did these things with impunity in their local communities and at the state level, terrorizing Black people to stop them from exercising their right to vote, running them off their land. There were not, in many places in the South, white authorities who were willing to prosecute people who committed crimes against Black people.

Kate Masur: And so what you needed to have is some kind of outside force, in this case federal force, that was going to come in and say, "If local authorities aren't going to deal with this, then the federal government is. So by 1870 and '71, the Fifteenth Amendment has been ratified, so now we have these three Reconstruction amendments lined up which delineate new rights, and the capacity of Congress to pass legislation to protect those rights. So the Congress does in 1870 and 1871 pass a series of additional civil rights laws—the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 71—trying to put kind of teeth into those principles, to really put the enforcement mechanism on the ground, creating statutory language that says, "These are the kinds of crimes against people's right to vote and against their civil rights that are now basically being made federal crimes that can be prosecuted by federal authorities, where we can put federal marshals and federal attorneys on the ground to try to bring people to justice. And these federal laws are really the backbone of the capacity of the federal government to try to bring some kind of justice to the Southern states. But there was so much resistance by Southern white people to this new order, and it was so persistent and violent that they made it incredibly difficult. They made the cost of enforcement incredibly high for the federal government.

Kate Masur: And so this is one of the central tensions of Reconstruction: the amount of federal authority that was going to need to be on the ground in order to curb the kinds of violence and criminality that white people were unleashing on Black people, and the extent to which the government was going to be able to continue to put enough people on the ground to make an effective difference, versus were they at a certain point going to give up and say "We can't do this anymore. This is politically unpopular."

Bethany Jay: Reconstruction plays out differently in different states. Can you point us to a case study of Reconstruction that could be useful for teachers to use to understand how it really played out on the ground?

Kate Masur: South Carolina's really interesting because of the hugely dramatic nature of the change that took place.

Bethany Jay: South Carolina is nothing if not dramatic in this whole time period.

Kate Masur: Yeah, exactly. And I would say also, if you are teaching in a state where this history is really relevant, I would go for the local history of your area.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Kate Masur: Every state is kind of different, but I think there's so much to be said for really bringing the points home to students by talking about the place where you happen to be. But South Carolina is a particularly interesting state to look at. The most prominent theory of states' rights, or because it was the first state to secede and kind of led the intellectual tradition of Southern separatism and secession. And yet South Carolina was the state that had the largest percentage of African Americans in the state. So in 1860 it was about 60 percent African or people of color living in South Carolina. So white folks were a minority, and that meant that the political transformation associated with Black men's right to vote was incredibly dramatic. And if you think about it, if you go from a system in which only white men can vote and have any say in the formal political process to a system in which all men, regardless of race, are entitled to vote, in a place like South Carolina where it's, you know, even a majority of African Americans, this is going to transform the state quite significantly during Reconstruction.

Kate Masur: The state government did pass Black laws in the end of 1865, when the government was convened under the policies of President Johnson. But then things changed dramatically when Black men got the right to vote in 1867 thanks to Congress's Reconstruction Act. And so the first election in which Black men vote is the election to elect delegates to the new State Constitutional Convention. And that convention meets in Charleston in January of 1868, and three-fifths of the delegates to that convention were African American. And obviously, this is a group of people who had not been involved in state politics directly, representing people who had been enslaved just a few years earlier. And this is dramatically going to change the political agenda of this convention.

Kate Masur: One thing that's worth noticing is white representation was even more diminished than you might think because many white people just sat out this election. So white people believing that the system that was being set up by the federal government was illegitimate simply refused to participate. So you actually have a greater representation of African Americans as a result of that. In South Carolina, the state constitution that was adopted in 1868 abolished debtors' prison, it provided for public education, it barred racial distinctions in public accommodations, so places like railroads, streetcars, steamboats. It barred racial discrimination in the right to vote, and that was part of what it had to do if South Carolina was to be readmitted to the Union. It, of course, abolished the Black codes that had been adopted in 1865, and it also forbade segregated schools. That was not something that was actually delivered upon, but it was an ideal. And it also had no provision against interracial marriage.

Bethany Jay: That's interesting.

Kate Masur: So many Northern states and some Southern states during Presidential Reconstruction had banned interracial marriage, and this constitution was silent on it, suggesting that among the many measures that kind of went toward racial equality, they were also not interested in legally barring interracial marriage. Now there were a couple of radical proposals in this constitutional convention that were not adopted. I think it's important to say a couple of things that were on the agenda that they didn't do.

Kate Masur: Some of the Black delegates had argued that women also should have the right to vote in this newly-reconstituted state of South Carolina. But that provision for women's right to vote went down to defeat. And same with a proposal to confiscate plantation owners' land and redistribute it among the poor people. That was floated at the convention and also did not pass. So there were—it was very radical for its time, particularly for the state of South Carolina, but there were proposals that kind of went even toward more progressive goals that did not pass.

Bethany Jay: We often in the classroom talk about 1868 just sort of in reference to Grant's election, but it's really interesting to shift the focus in thinking about 1868 to these constitutional conventions where we see a lot of really progressive ideas in many of these constitutional conventions.

Kate Masur: Absolutely. I mean, I think, Grant's election is a kind of national question, and it's incredibly important, and it kind of takes Reconstruction policy in a new direction, at least as compared to what Andrew Johnson had been doing. And it's also an interesting kind of callback to the Civil War because he was a general and things like that. But yeah, I mean, this is one of the tricky things, but also one of the remarkable things about talking about Reconstruction. So much of the action was at the state level, and it might seem complicated to try to have to get into that, and I definitely think you can't and shouldn't try to cover, like, every state. But there are really parallels to the present as well because, you know, there's so much action going on at the state level now in terms of policies that affect our lives, that affect everybody's lives. And so, you know, when we think about, like, does it really matter what's going on in our statehouse, in whatever state we're in? Yes, absolutely it does. And, you know, we can think about that and kind of bring that home to the students a bit, I think.

Bethany Jay: And questions about what role does the federal government play in those state decisions as well, also really relevant for today.

Kate Masur: Mm-hmm. Yes, it is. All the states have a really different story when it comes to Reconstruction. But one thing I'll say is that across the Southern states, the new Republican-influenced state constitutional conventions and state legislatures made a lot of policies that economically favored poorer people and small farm owners as opposed to plantation owners. And this was quite a change from Southern politics, particularly by the time we get to the late 1850s, where almost all the Southern states had planters in control and economic policies that really favored the interests and the aims of the planter class, which often really didn't support the aims even of white small farmers and white working people who didn't own land. And so across the South, we see a kind of transformation toward economic policies that favor laborers over bankers and creditors, that favor small landholders over large plantation holders. So in tax policy and credit policy, there's really a change in the economic agenda of these states even before we get to issues of race and racial equality.

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Bethany Jay: One of the narratives of Reconstruction we began our conversation with is this idea that Reconstruction is corrupt, governments are ineffective. What does the example of South Carolina tell us about that narrative?

Kate Masur: So South Carolina, again partly because of its demographics, continued to have very strong Black representation in state government into the 1870s. There was a Black majority in the state House of Representatives for quite a while. There were Black Speakers of the House starting in 1872. They eventually do create a land commission for the state which is able to purchase land where people haven't paid their taxes and then sell it on good credit terms. And in this way, actually, thousands of African-American families and a few white families gained access to land ownership.

Kate Masur: But South Carolina then becomes the kind of exemplar for Southerners and Northerners also who want to attack Reconstruction. And there are a lot of caricatures of the South Carolina state House of Representatives in particular that suggest that the people who are making the laws are not competent, they're not qualified, they don't belong there. There are even in Harper's Weekly, as it becomes more conservative in the 1870s, these kind of really horrendous racial caricatures of the South Carolina legislature that we actually see replicated, by the way, in Birth of a Nation. So there are some images in that really racist 1915 film that show a state legislature meeting and African-American men putting their feet on desks and eating fried chicken and leering at white women, and all of these kind of horrible caricatures that draw on ways that the South Carolina legislature in particular was represented at that time.

Bethany Jay: And that's "Colored Rule in a Reconstructed State," right? That's the title of that cartoon. Is that the one you're thinking of?

Kate Masur: Yeah, I think so. And it's such a change, I mean, for teaching, if people wanted to kind of contrast that with earlier images like the one we talked about before, "The First Vote," of the dignity of African-American men entering into politics, and the ways that some of these kind of formerly progressive Northern periodicals eventually sort of turn against the experiment in Reconstruction as the 1870s continues.

Bethany Jay: And even there's that famous picture of the Black delegates to the Constitutional Convention, or the first representatives in South Carolina, you know, those different images that are available as well.

Kate Masur: Right, right. Or "The First Black Congressmen," that famous image where people are portrayed as individual people with the facial features that they would have really had looking dignified and like they belong there. But, you know, one of the things that's interesting looking at the backlash against Reconstruction, I mean, first of all, I think it's important to remember that we are talking about very dramatically changed possibilities for what governments would do. When you bring new people into the electorate who potentially have different class interests and different racial interests from the people who had done the governing in the past, you can really change the direction of government. And the vote is at the center of that. It's incredibly powerful. And so the white backlash is multifaceted. It's partly about resentment that slavery itself is over. It's partly people who never wanted slavery to end, who think that people of African descent belong on the lowest rungs of society, ought to be subordinated by whites and things like that.

Kate Masur: But the virulence of the backlash against Black men's voting and holding office is partly genuinely about fear that policy changes are going to happen that people don't want, right? That wealthy people are not going to be favored anymore in public policy, that tax policies, that economic policies, that policies respecting racial equality are going to go in a direction the white elite doesn't favor. And they are very, very worried about that. And this backlash, you know, takes many different forms. And sometimes we see just overt racism of the most vile kind, you know, people talking about so-called Negro rule or, you know, the barbarism of formerly-enslaved people now getting a chance to rule or be part of politics.

Kate Masur: But there's another strand that I think really resonates now, and kind of is important throughout American history, and that is when new people come into politics, when people are increasingly enfranchised who didn't vote before, the idea that corruption is associated with that. That, you know, there's something wrong with these voters, that they are not able to cast independent votes, that there's mismanagement in the voting process or mismanagement in government. Also, the idea that taxes are too high. This is one of the things that people often talked about against these Reconstruction governments. "Look, you know, I don't have any problem with this new regime, I just think they're taxing us too much and we have to get rid of it." And kind of moving around, kind of avoiding an explicit racial rhetoric and talking about how they just, you know, don't want to see so much government spending. And so, you know, these are kinds of go to statements that people on the conservative end of the spectrum went to during Reconstruction and, you know, we continue to see that kind of thing.

Kate Masur: Now I just want to quickly add, I mean, there was corruption during Reconstruction. The Republican governments did spend a lot of money, often money that they didn't really have. And so there was a lot of kind of debt spending, a huge amount of debt taken out by the states, which were already in debt because of the Confederate war effort. There were people who were kind of self-dealing, who were, you know, working on railroad contracts where they themselves were invested in the railroad and things like that. But there's first of all—and historians have looked into this in great detail—I mean, there's no correlation found between African Americans in office and that kind of corruption. In fact, the kind of power of African Americans during Reconstruction has often been really exaggerated. So South Carolina is really one end of that spectrum, but in many places, Black people didn't hold office or exert political power anywhere near their actual numbers as proportionate in the states.

Kate Masur: And also, Democrats engaged in similar corruption. I mean, so when the Democrats came back into power, they too were spending a lot of money on infrastructure, and making money off of the investments and things like that. And really, this was a period in American history where there was a huge amount of corruption. There had not developed the kinds of standards around if you're in politics, you know, keeping your money out of investments that you might be part of politically that we supposedly have today. And so the corruption issue during Reconstruction is used against newly-enfranchised Black voters and Black representatives. It's used in a racialized way, but we can also acknowledge that there was actual corruption, but it wasn't racialized or necessarily even associated with one party in the ways that partisans at the time made it sound like it was.

Bethany Jay: That narrative of corruption and mismanagement, that helps to make the undoing of Reconstruction respectable or palatable to large numbers of people. And then the racial violence that comes back as Reconstruction is undone in the South sort of makes it complete. Can you talk to us a little bit about how Reconstruction—I don't want to say ends, but how this period of Reconstruction changes as we get to the end of the 1870s?

Kate Masur: The conventional end of Reconstruction is like the settlement of the election of 1876. But what has happened between, you know, the early 1870s and the 1876 election is, for one thing, white Southerners' sort of multifaceted refusal to accept this new order means that the cost of federal enforcement or protection of African-Americans' rights gets higher and higher. So white Southerners are perpetrating violence against Black Southerners and white Southern Republicans. They are murdering people who are involved in politics. They are threatening them with murder and rape. They are doing all kinds of violent things that are designed really to suppress the vote, to persuade Black men not to go out to the polls, that it is more dangerous to try to vote or certainly to campaign politically than to stay home and just mind your own business.

Kate Masur: At the same time, they're resisting in other ways. They're refusing to cooperate with federal prosecutions of the Klan. People won't appear as witnesses. People threaten witnesses. They try to sabotage these federal trials. They try to hide what's going on from federal officials. And so with all of this resistance among white Southerners, you're going to have to have a lot of political will and a lot of commitment coming from Northerners, and particularly the Republican Party, which has always been the only party of the two major political parties that's invested in this period. Like, the Democrats actually never supported Reconstruction. It was only because the Republicans were in the majority in Congress that this was able to continue. And in 1873, there's a huge economic crisis. It's sort of like the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. All kinds of banks fail, companies fail, and people hold the Republicans responsible because it's the Republicans who are in office in the federal government in this period in 1873. And so the Republicans are on increasingly precarious footing after that.

Kate Masur: The House of Representatives turns over to the Democrats in the 1874 election, and all of this makes the Republicans a lot more cautious about doing things like sending troops in to suppress violent white supremacy in cases where white people are interfering with elections in the South. It makes Grant a lot more cautious, it makes Republicans in Congress a lot more cautious. And so the pulling back from supporting these Reconstruction policies doesn't happen all at once as a result of the 1876 election. And I think I would really emphasize the importance of the economic crisis of 1873 in really changing Northern politics.

Kate Masur: But the thing is, even though the possibility that the United States government would protect the rights of African Americans in instances where states were refusing to do anything, that's a fundamental feature of Reconstruction. It's part of the novelty of this period, it's part of the lasting significance of it. And most of that is kind of diminished after 1877, although from time to time, Congress does continue to talk about passing—particularly when the Republicans kind of resurge in power, continues to talk about passing new legislation that will protect African Americans in the South. But even as that possibility of federal protection kind of wanes, interesting things are still happening in the Southern states. So Black men actually continue to vote in a lot of places even after 1877. You have a really interesting biracial movement called the Readjuster Movement in Virginia in the late 1870s and early 1880s that manages to do a lot of progressive things, even though it's again after 1877. And you have a lot of other moments of coalition-building between African Americans and whites who are not interested in the kind of siding with the planter class, and these kinds of biracial fusion movements they're called that persist into the 1880s. And there's a lot of violence, there's a lot of tumult, but there continues to be a fair amount of flexibility in the 1880s in Southern politics in many places.

Kate Masur: And it's not until the 1890s, you know, starting with the Mississippi State Constitution of 1890, that white Southerners begin to get together and really in law, solidify white supremacist rule. And so they're doing it on the heels of a lot of campaigns of violence and intimidation, but they don't have the power to fully implement it until the 1890s. And then there's the question of whether what they're doing is constitutional. And so it's blatantly violating the Fifteenth Amendment to systematically disenfranchise people, even though they try to get around that by saying that it's really not about race. But this has to go up to the Supreme Court, you know? And so it's really not until the end of the 1890s, with decisive things like the Wilmington massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which, you know, a biracial government of the city of Wilmington is violently run out of power, or the Supreme Court renders this decision that all of these state constitutions actually that disenfranchise Black men and many white men as well are actually constitutional, that they do not violate the Fifteenth Amendment. This is really the consolidation of a new order in Southern life and in national life. And it doesn't fully get cemented until the end of the 1890s.

Kate Masur: One of the things that I think that's helpful to convey to students is it was actually pretty hard for white Southerners to quote-unquote "redeem" the South. Like, it didn't happen overnight. It took several decades to bring this more progressive potential biracial democracy to its knees. And people fought back in a variety of different ways. And so it wasn't just like this one moment with the compromise of 1877 that ended it all. No one thing could end it all because it was about processes, it was about things that were going on locally and at a state level. And, you know, in terms of people's lives too, and maybe this is something we can turn to now, you know, many of the innovations, many of the Black institutions that began to take shape after slavery had been abolished persisted even as political prospects for African Americans, you know, dimmed a lot as these years went on.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, can you speak to us a little bit about some of the organizing that went on in Black communities throughout the period that we've been talking about, you know, alongside these political initiatives, and how that persisted?

Kate Masur: Another thread of this story is we are talking about what happens to African Americans after slavery is abolished. And when we have been talking so far about, you know, the future of free Black people, we've focused mainly on politics and federal policy. But another really important aspect of this, if you think about it from the perspective, particularly of, you know, this kind of social history of what did it mean to end slavery, what did it mean for people who had been enslaved, whose ancestors had been enslaved, to now be able to pursue some forms of freedom?

Kate Masur: And we can acknowledge that there were all kinds of forces pushing in on them that limited their choices, and yet there really was a meaningful difference between being enslaved and being free. And African Americans coming out of slavery, they are building institutions. And one of those key institutions is the family. Black families had been threatened and dissolved and assaulted by slavery for generations, simply by the fact that people could be sold away from their families at the will of the owner. That Black parents, even when they weren't sold away from children, weren't able to exert the kind of parental authority and make choices for their children in the ways that free parents were because of the surpassing authority of the enslaver. And so one of the key things that African Americans are doing in the wake of slavery is reconstituting families, looking for family members who had been sold away.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Kate Masur: In some cases cementing marital relationships that had existed for a long time but had never been legally recognized. In other cases, moving away from spouses who maybe had been kind of forced on them by an enslaver, and going to be with someone who they really loved. Taking care of children, going out and looking for educational opportunities for children and adults. I just wanted to mention this website "Information Wanted," which is a really wonderful database of advertisements that African Americans placed in newspapers, basically kind of saying, "I last saw my daughter when she was being sold away to Alabama," let's say. "And has anyone in Alabama come across her?" These are really poignant, and they're really remarkable testaments to the ways that people's family bonds and family feelings persisted despite the assaults that slavery made on Black families. And then when people had the opportunity, they went and tried to reconstitute those.

Kate Masur: One of the other single features of Black communities in this period is trying to build schools and get educated. People might be most familiar with the idea that the Freedmen's Bureau helped create schools in the South, and that is true. The Freedmen's Bureau was very involved in that, but one of the things we find is that, even before the Freedmen's Bureau existed or had the capacity to provide things like construction materials to build a school, or help place a teacher from a Northern society in a Southern school, Black communities were organizing to build these schools. I talked earlier about how structures of Black communities from the days of slavery kind of continued, and so there were often in some Black communities people who had literacy skills, people who owned a little bit of property, maybe they had been free before the war. Many times, Black property owners would give a portion of their land to the community to build a school on. They would raise money and then write to a Freedman's Bureau agent or a missionary society and say, "Hey, could you please send a teacher to our community?" Many of those teachers were African Americans. Many were Southern Black people who again had had an opportunity to get educated.

Kate Masur: And then some too were, like, white Northern missionaries that are better known to us in history. And this is the era when many of the historically Black colleges that we know today were founded. And so people were focusing a lot on common schools, elementary schools, but also looking at creating high schools and colleges and opportunities for higher education for Black students.

Kate Masur: And then the other thing which is kind of connected to schools were the creation of independent Black churches. So freedom created the opportunity for African Americans who had previously been forced to worship in white Protestant churches to leave those churches. And there had been some of those independent Black denominations in the slave states before the war, but now after the Civil War, they really flourish. Independent Black, Methodist and Baptist churches in particular. And churches often were associated with schools, so a church building might be the place where school was also held. And these were really important community institutions. They were places where people obviously could gather not just for worship, but to raise money to create societies that would pay for funeral expenses. This is sometimes where political meetings happened.

Kate Masur: And so again, I mean, in terms of what did and didn't survive from this really dynamic period in American history, these Black Southern institutions: family relationships, churches, schools, these survive, you know, well beyond the 1870s and into the present. And these institutions and this history that I'm talking about right now is a little bit independent from the ups and downs of the political history that we were talking about, right? So all of the ways that African Americans confronted freedom, expressed what they wanted in terms of families and churches and communities and education, all of that flows out from the end of slavery and continues, not totally independently from what's going on politically, but in its own kind of strand of history. And so I think we really have to kind of think about that, and hopefully teach about that as well, because it's really a central thrust of Black Southern history in particular is what happens and how do people kind of confront the end of slavery?

Bethany Jay: And some of those institutions, you know, churches, schools, particularly HBCUs, will be so pivotal in challenging Jim Crow as we get into the 20th century, right? Their organizing power comes back into play as we think about Jim Crow, challenging that period as well.

Kate Masur: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's a real continuity there. You know, different things are possible in different moments. So by the 1890s and later, it would be a pretty bad idea to have a very confrontational politics with the white power structure in a lot of Southern places, but then we see by the mid-20th century in a place like Montgomery, Alabama, Black churches as the seat of an increasingly kind of confrontational movement against Jim Crow, against that kind of racial oppression.

Bethany Jay: Why do you think it's so important that our students not only learn about Reconstruction, but learn about Reconstruction correctly?

Kate Masur: This is one of the most pivotal moments in American history, in which vast changes were possible, and vast changes actually happened. First of all, the idea that it was all undone, although I might have come out of my high school history class thinking that, that's not quite true, right? So we talked about the persistence of Black institutions and the kind of flowering of Black institutions that did not go away, were not undone. Also, the Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the civil rights statutes that were passed in that period—many of which are still part of federal law—these did not get undone. They went unenforced for quite a long time, but provided the framework for future civil rights and voting rights struggles. And today, we're still grappling with those amendments, so we need to understand the possibilities offered by those amendments and by the federal statutes that were passed during Reconstruction, many parts of which are still on the books. And we also need to understand their limitations. I mean, what the Fifteenth Amendment, for example, gave us, but also the things that were left out of it that could have helped us in our current-day struggles over voting rights.

Kate Masur: I would also add that, you know, this is the first time—as I said at the beginning, Reconstruction is the first time when American political leaders really tried to create a multiracial democracy. Such a thing was not attempted back at the time of the American founding. And so to the extent that we're still struggling over these questions about what American democracy looks like, questions about race, about structural racism, about how this democracy is supposed to work with so many different kinds of people in it, with so many people with such different political views, we can look to Reconstruction for the first moment when that was really attempted, and think about also not only what people tried to do and how they tried to do it, but also what brought it down, right? And think about the opposition to it. And these dynamics from this period have things to teach us about what we're up against now when we try to advance ideals about democracy.

Bethany Jay: Well, we have had a wide-ranging conversation about an important and misunderstood era, and I am actually pretty positive that the content and the context that you've provided about Reconstruction will help a lot of teachers to feel more confident bringing this history into their classroom. So thank you so much, Dr. Masur, for being with us today.

Kate Masur: It was really a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Kate Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author of several books, including Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction and An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, DC. Dr. Masur is also the co-editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Next up is my conversation with Ahmad Ward, the executive director of Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park in South Carolina. Mitchelville was one of the earliest freedpeople's towns established during the Civil War. Let's find out what this incredible site can teach us about the transition from slavery to freedom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Brother, what's going on? Welcome to Teaching Hard History.

Ahmad Ward: Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here. Appreciate it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, look, I want to dive right in. Can you explain to the audience what is historic Mitchelville Freedom Park?

Ahmad Ward: Absolutely. Mitchelville is the first self-governed town of formerly-enslaved people in the United States, established in 1862 on Hilton Head Island. At its height, there were 3,000 people that lived in the community in about 500 homes. These families were given a quarter acre of a lot. They developed their own schools, churches, businesses. They were able to vote. And so it was somewhat of a small utopia in the middle of enslavement during the Civil War in the state that started the Civil War.

Ahmad Ward: Originally, there was about 600 acres of Mitchelville. The property that we are managing right now is a fraction of the original community. We've got about 33 acres down on Beach City Road in Hilton Head, and we're trying to interpret the story of Mitchelville with recreations of the property as well as our interpretive center. Currently there are only some facades of buildings and some interpretive panels, some signage where you can click on QR codes and get some more detail. But we've completed a master plan for the upcoming cultural attraction site that will allow us to talk about why Mitchelville in the 21st century is something that we should be talking about, and why this story should be a keystone part of American history. Our tagline is "Where freedom began," because we believe this is the first opportunity that Africans in America had a chance to be citizens of a community that they started, and so we're trying to highlight this important community along the themes of freedom, democracy, citizenship and opportunity. And we'll show that in the interpretation that we’ll have on site.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What type of interpretation do you all do that might be of use to teachers in the classroom today?

Ahmad Ward: Well, besides the tours that we're doing on the site, we have a literacy program for pre-K to third grade called Griot's Corner. We're reading books, we're doing activities around a book, and we make sure that those teachers get a book, because they may not have these kinds of books in their classrooms. And so, of course, they go back to those four themes I mentioned earlier: freedom, democracy, citizenship, opportunity. But also, we're talking about self-awareness, self-esteem, being comfortable in your skin. So we have a lot of books about African and African-American culture. We're trying to broaden the scope of these books, and how they relate to Mitchelville. We're doing books like The Adventures of Connie and Diego, which are bilingual books. They're half English, half Spanish. And we're bringing in people to read them in Spanish for our Hispanic Latino population.

Ahmad Ward: We do a leadership program for high school kids. Well, when COVID is not giving us a problem, we do leadership programs for high school kids. We're teaching leadership along the vein of the Mitchelville story, and we train them to be docents. And so we had kids before COVID shut everything down doing docent tours of the park. We are currently working on a program for middle school kids. It's a history hike that will give them the history, but also talk about the importance of the environment here, and teach them about how they can effectively advocate for the environment where they live, how they can appreciate the nature where they live.

Ahmad Ward: We want Mitchelville to be interdisciplinary, and not just about the history. And so we'll be talking about the math. And so we'll be talking about the science. How does this science work out? And the math of the grid itself, each family getting a quarter acre of a lot. On the back end of our interpretive center will be an event lawn that will be three-fourths of an acre. And we are purposely making sure that we're putting down lines of demarcation on each quarter of that acre, so the kids can see this is how long a quarter of an acre actually is. This is what these people had to work with. This will also show the closeness of the houses. We'll talk about how they painted the houses white to push out the heat from the sun so it's deflecting that's going to keep the house cool. We'll have a garden where they can learn the kind of things that were grown on this site, like okra and tomatoes and sweet potatoes. And this is how they were able to sustain themselves. And so we want this to be an immersive learning experience through the whole property, not just the elements inside the interpretive center.

Ahmad Ward: We're working on lesson plans for K-12 teachers that we hope to have ready to go in the first part of the fall. I know that teachers need things that are going to align with the standards, obviously. But they need things that are going to be ready for them to use without having to work at it. And so that's the kind of interpretation we want to do on this site for regular classroom teachers, for homeschool teachers, for people who are just trying to push a deeper level of understanding for their own children, for higher ed. We're trying to make sure that we're doing all of the things that need to be done.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Who were the folk who are enslaved on Hilton Head and become the free people of Mitchelville?

Ahmad Ward: So for Hilton Head, there were roughly about 24 plantations on this really small 12-mile island. And in the general area, you have countless other plantations. The coastline of South Carolina is absolutely tremendous for rice production. The people who were going to the motherland to kidnap people to bring over here were targeting West African countries like Sierra Leone and Angola, because these people had the knowledge of rice cultivation already. People were sought out and targeted based on the knowledge base that they already had, okay? It's not that they were just grabbing folks and then we're gonna show you how to do this stuff. No, it was very strategic that they were picking people specifically for a task.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that's an important point about who these people are. In other words, Africans are enslaved not because they couldn't do something, but because of what they could do, their expertise was sought after.

Ahmad Ward: Right. Exactly. And so all these folks are brought here, and then as a mixture of those folks, and they are, through the relationships of all these different kinds of folks, Gullah or Gullah Geechee. Gullah Geechee culture is an amalgamation of cultures, and it's created this subset of culture that has its own rich history and language. So the Gullah Geechee corridor reaches from Wilmington, North Carolina, to about Jacksonville, Florida. And we're kind of smack dab in the middle of the corridor here on the South Carolina coast.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, you mentioned that Mitchelville comes into being early in 1862. You know, the Civil War has just begun. How does it come into being? I mean, what are the circumstances that lead to Hilton Head Island becoming this experiment in freedom while slavery and the war continues to go on all around it?

Ahmad Ward: It's a pretty incredible story. At the Battle of Port Royal, which is November 7, 1861, the Union army comes down to attack Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard, bombarding both forts for three hours straight. They just couldn't hold up to the pressure, and so they left. You know, they retreated, which meant that every one of the enslaved people at these plantations are now de facto freed, but really contraband of war as established by the events at Fort Monroe.

Ahmad Ward: And so as contraband, they immediately search out where the army is because they're liberators. You had, like, 400 people come in within a week to this area who had learned about what happened, and they knew if they got to Hilton Head they'd be free. And so David Hunter, who was the commander of the forces, tried to create a barrack system to house people. It was not well regulated. There were a lot of problems with it. And he had this idea to start the colored troops based on the Sherman order number 15, which is where we get 40 acres and a mule. He uses this language to unilaterally say that he will free all colored people who pick up a rifle and fight for the Union army. Hunter does not have this power, and he gets away with it for about two months before Washington finds out. Now Lincoln is friendly with Hunter, so he tries not to destroy his career, so he reassigns him.

Ahmad Ward: The person that comes in is Ormsby Mitchel. Decorated general. He's also an abolitionist, and he sees the conditions and decides that this is a good way to show that Black people can be self-sufficient. This is the underlying question during the war: can Black people be self-sufficient? Can they do things without oversight? And so he has this opportunity to show it here. And so he gifts them about 700, 800 acres of property and says, "This is your land. You build on it, you grow on it." He gives them access to the saw mill. He gives them tools and says, "Hey, we want you to build churches and schools and buildings." Unfortunately, General Mitchel will not see the completion of this project because he contracts yellow fever and passes away around 45 days after initiating this endeavor. It's named Mitchelville in his honor, and the people went to making sure that they could not only take on the task that he laid out in front of them, but create a situation that they felt they could pass down to generations to come.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I've had the honor and the pleasure of visiting Mitchelville not too long ago, and one of the things I did when I visited, you know, I took a moment and just sort of drifted off to a quiet space, and just sat down and closed my eyes and tried to imagine what this place would have been like: the activity, the movement, the bustling, the sense of possibility in 1862. If our listeners could close their eyes for a second, what would they see in 1862, '63 as Mitchelville is coming into being?

Ahmad Ward: They would see rows of houses on a grid designed by the Army Corps of Engineers where these people were able to actually work on the property in the ways they saw fit. They would see women outside cooking, sweeping the dirt around their homes, maintaining their property, growing the food that would sustain not only them, but the soldiers they were selling and trading and bartering to right across the marsh where the army would be. They would see gentlemen grabbing bateaus, which are the traditional Gullah flat-bottom boats, and taking them out to the Port Royal Sound to fish, to get crabs, to shrimp. They would see people creating their own businesses. And so you had this entrepreneurship that was happening in Mitchelville, selling, of course, not just with the soldiers, but with the actual townspeople in Hilton Head.

Ahmad Ward: The churches that would have been there, that would be your town hall, that's your courtroom, that's your school until the school system is directly established in 1866. Mitchelville is the first compulsory school system, mandatory school system in the state of South Carolina. Every child in the community between the age of six and 15 had to go to school, because they also understood that true freedom would have been found in education. And so you would have been seeing these people who were considered inferior not too long ago, who would have been seen as not being able to take care of themselves, not only taking care of themselves, but educating their young people so they could be prepared to reach the next level as these things progressed.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We also know that there were some pretty famous people who passed through Mitchelville.

Ahmad Ward: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. William Lloyd Garrison, foremost abolitionist of his time, knew about Mitchellville, and on a trip to commemorate the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter, he was visiting Savannah—which is not that far from us—and requested to come to the Freedman town he had heard so much about. And so he comes to Mitchelville and speaks at First African Baptist Church. Sister Harriet Tubman was here in the area, brought in to help Black women to kind of get into this mode of being self-sufficient, training, teaching them about trades and things of that nature to integrate themselves into regular American life. She was here as a nurse and also a spy for the Union army. And so during the Combahee River Raid, where they freed 756 people, which depending on what scholar you listen to, she either co-led or she was there. Some people try to, you know, mess around with her importance with this battle. But at any rate, out of that 756, she personally leads 100 of these individuals back to Hilton Head, and they settle at Mitchelville. And most of the men end up joining the Union army.

Ahmad Ward: In addition, Clara Barton, who starts the American Red Cross, is here during the war working as a nurse. And Clara Barton comes back in 1893 after the Great Sea Islands Hurricane, and she basically single-handedly helps to repair not only Hilton Head, but the Sea Islands, because the government was slow to act to repair it. At that time, this hurricane was, like, America's worst natural disaster. And she raised the money through, you know, private donations. She's the one who cracked the whip to get this area re-established.

Ahmad Ward: So there's so many people that were coming through this area. There are newspaper articles from Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Washington. People know about Mitchelville because this is basically a rubber-stamped project by the Union. And now here we are in the 21st century, and your average citizen has no idea what Mitchelville is.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I like about Mitchelville in terms of teaching purposes, is that it does provide these points of entry for this broader discussion. Points of entry for talking about the life of a William Lloyd Garrison or a Clara Barton. The same thing with Harriet Tubman. You know, I wonder, Ahmad, what were some of the challenges that this first generation of residents of Mitchelville residents will face as they transition from enslavement to freedom, and build up this free Black community?

Ahmad Ward: Well, I think one of the major challenges is, of course, there's no pamphlet, you know, there's no primer, there's no thing you could go read about how to act after you've been, quote-unquote, "freed." And so there was a learning curve that had to happen as they were trying to establish this whole situation. Now you did have people like Edward Pierce, who was assigned to this area to help oversee the transition for them being self-sufficient. There was a direct council, and the mayor Abraham Murchison, they were working in tandem with the Army to make things happen. However, one of the largest problems they would have faced would have been that every man in the Union Army was not for this. You know, there were definite instances between soldiers and townspeople: unruly activities, sexual assault, things of that nature. You had situations where Union soldiers were actively trying to sell people back to their slaveowners. And so this was not all peaches and cream with the folks who supposedly are fighting for the cause. Those interactions would have been some of the biggest impediments to them moving this forward. But even with that, you still had the overall power of the government really pushing for this thing to happen. And so there were some things put into place. One of the just incredible things I found out during this research is Mitchelville residents had the power to turn away white men in uniform from entering into the community.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow.

Ahmad Ward: Like, you had to have a pass. And if your pass was not squared, it was not up to date, if it was not right or you didn't have one, they could physically turn you around and tell you you can't enter. I mean, you're not going to see that in the South in 1960, you know?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: [laughs] Right. Right.

Ahmad Ward: Let alone 1862, 1863. The notion that they had that kind of autonomy over the community is amazing.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Policing power. They had their own policing power.

Ahmad Ward: They had their own policing power.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I was thinking immediately back to South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740, a new slave code passed on the heels of the 1739 Stono Insurrection. And one of the measures in that new Negro code is that any white person can stop any Black person and demand of them identification, proof that they are supposed to be where they're supposed to be, whether they were enslaved or free. And if that Black person resisted, then that white person had the authority on the spot to take the life of that Black person, to kill that Black person without any consequence. So that's South Carolina, right?

Ahmad Ward: Right. Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, that is in the culture, that is in the soil of South Carolina, how the color line is going to be policed. And so for you to say then that these folk in Mitchelville, you know, could flip that on his head completely is really just stunning.

Ahmad Ward: Oh, absolutely.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What happens to Mitchelville? You mentioned the devastation that was wrought by the hurricane of 1893, destroying much of the physical infrastructure of Mitchelville. What's the story leading up to 1893 and then after that?

Ahmad Ward: So the war's over in 1865, a lot of people leave to try to find people that they have been separated from during the war. And so during the period of 1865 going into the late 1880s, the population would shrink. It turned to a more subsistence form of living, so the things that they were growing to sell, the things they were building and creating to sell, stayed internally so they can reinforce the community itself. Unfortunately, because the resources were low, they started to dismantle some of the old schoolhouses to help to undergird homes and structures that were very necessary. You would still have education that's happening at the site, but it would be a lower, lower scale.

Ahmad Ward: And of course, 1893, you have this hurricane which takes out everything. But people do come back, and folks are able to maintain their property. However, then you had people coming in who saw the opportunities in Hilton Head in the early 20th century, and started buying up property to make it a hunting and fishing refuge for wealthy white men. And so the population of Hilton Head in 1900 would have been close to 3,000 people, and they all were of African descent. By 1930, that's down to 300 because property's just been sold out from under folks. In the '50s, you had Charles Frazier that comes in. He revitalizes the South End, and makes the south end of the island the place to come and vacation. And the rest is history. In the mid 20th century, Native Islanders, the Gullah population on the island, Black people on the island refer to themselves as Native Islanders, they own 3,500 acres of property on Hilton Head. And at this present moment it's now under 800 acres of property that they actually own.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What leads to the land loss, and then when do we really begin to see that?

Ahmad Ward: Well, early 20th century, it starts with Loomis and Thorne coming in and buying up all that property to make into this refuge. But then it accelerates late 20th century, specifically after the island becomes a municipality, which is not until 1983. Heirs property and the lack of wills and deeds, that's the main reason you see this land loss. And so you've got people who have had land in their family for three, four, five generations, and now it's gone because there was one brother, one sister who sold to somebody who showed them more money than they'd ever seen in their entire life. You have these parcels of land that are worth, you know, a million dollars, but somebody's dangling $250,000 in front of folks who had never seen real money. So they sell.

Ahmad Ward: And so what happens, is the person from outside of the area who's bought this, now they have paperwork and they can force the rest of these people off of the property. Also because people have moved in and they're building these multimillion dollar homes, the property taxes for their neighbors have gone through the roof, and now they can no longer afford to pay the taxes on their property. So it goes up at tax sale, and people have been able to swoop in and take it away.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What was driving and continues to drive the land developers to purchase the land on Hilton Head?

Ahmad Ward: It's a resort island. Hilton Head sees 2.6 million tourists a year. The amount of money can almost not be calculated. And so developers are coming in to build hotels, to build amenities, to attract all of that tourist money that's coming in. That's why people would go to great lengths trying to secure land because they can get that money right back. And most of the open land on the island right now belongs to Native Islanders.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Could you say a little bit about the effort on the part of the federal government to preserve historic African-American sites of significance that are connected to Reconstruction?

Ahmad Ward: Well, I would definitely say one of the key things that is helping our efforts out has to be the establishment of the National Reconstruction Era Monument—now park, but it started as a monument—by President Obama right before he left office. That has really directly helped Mitchelville's development, because it placed a premium on the importance of Reconstruction. Your average student is not getting any long history on Reconstruction in school. But what I saw that monument do was elevate Reconstruction to the forefront in this area. And so the people who are doing the kind of work that I'm doing saw an opportunity. And then there's also other people who—and I'll be delicate—who are not doing the work that I'm doing, who also saw opportunities to capitalize on this newfound spotlight on Reconstruction. You see people really pushing to get what they believe are important aspects of Reconstruction out for the general public to come and see.

Ahmad Ward: But when you talk about Reconstruction, you got to be prepared to talk about the sabotage of Reconstruction, that's at least how I—these are Ahmad's words. [laughs] You know, I freely say that Reconstruction was sabotaged by the compromise back in 1876, 1877, or else who knows where we would be? Like, Mitchelville should have been a template for all freedman towns.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right. Right.

Ahmad Ward: That would have been established if Reconstruction could have been allowed to continue. But of course, when Reconstruction is bombed, the Black codes are almost immediate. And then Jim Crow just pops up right out of that. That's a natural progression. And so we sacrificed a hundred years of positive social growth, and so that takes us until the 1960s to get rights that were supposed to be put in place during Reconstruction.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right.

Ahmad Ward: When we have people who are actively trying to erase the telling of some of these sites, you've got to counterbalance that notion with facts to show, no, this is precisely what we need to be talking about, because this really shows the American condition. I know people are scared of that, but if we want to really understand where we live, you can really see it in these African-American sites, especially these sites that are tied into enslavement, because it gives a full story of the country.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mitchelville, Hilton Head, South Carolina, where we can examine freedom and democracy and citizenship and opportunity, because this is the place where freedom began. Brother Ahmad Ward, thank you so much for joining us, man. And most importantly, thank you so much for the wonderful work that you are doing to preserve this story, preserve this history, and make sure we all know it.

Ahmad Ward: My pleasure, sir. For more information folks, go to ExploreMitchelville.org. Mitchel has one L.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ahmad Ward is the executive director of Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, located on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. He is the former vice president of education for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Association of African-American Museums.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Dr. Masur and Mr. Ward for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding, and Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University—and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Kate Masur, History, Northwestern University
• Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
• Zinn Education Project, March 1, 1874: White League Formed
• Smithsonian Magazine, The 1873 Colfax Massacre Crippled the Reconstruction Era
• Teaching American History, United States v. Cruikshank
• Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs (co-editors), The World the Civil War Made
• The National Constitution Center, 13th Amendment - Abolition of Slavery
• Annenberg Classroom, Article IV, Section 2
• The Washington Post (Kate Masur), The lack of federal voting rights protections returns us to the pre-Civil War era
• Learning for Justice, Dred Scott v. Sandford
• Teaching American History, The Civil Rights Act of 1866
• Learning for Justice, 14th Amendment
• Congress.gov: Constitution Annotated, U.S. Constitution - Fifteenth Amendment
• Library of Congress, December 25, 1868.- Granting full pardon and amnesty to all persons engaged in the late rebellion.
• The American Yawp Reader, Mississippi Black Code, 1865 
• Freedmen and Southern Society Projects, Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention
• BlackPast, Historic African American Churches
• Penn State University, Teaching the Colored Conventions Project
• U.S. History, Radical Reconstruction
• BlackPast, (1867) The Reconstruction Acts
• History, Art & Archives United States House of Representatives, 40th Congress
• BlackPast, Union League (1863- )
• Encyclopedia Virginia, Electioneering at the South
• U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, “The First Vote,” illustration by A.R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867
• U.S. Senate, The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871
• Learning for Justice, States' Rights and "Historical Malpractice"
• Zinn Education Project, Jan. 14, 1868: South Carolina Constitutional Convention
• Internet Archive, Proceedings of the Constitutional convention of South Carolina, Charleston, S. C. (1868)
• NPR: Code Switch, 100 Years Later, What's The Legacy Of 'Birth Of A Nation'?
• Library of Congress, Colored rule in a reconstructed state (The members call each other thieves, liars, rascals, and cowards)
• Zinn Education Project, Oct. 19, 1870: First African Americans Elected to the House of Representatives
• Liberty Street Economics, Crisis Chronicles: The Long Depression and the Panic of 1873
• Encyclopedia Virginia, The Readjuster Party
• The Washington Post, Mississippi kept Blacks from voting with a Jim Crow state constitution in 1890
• The Atlantic, The Lost History of an American Coup D’État (Wilmington Massacre)
• Information Wanted, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery
• National Archives, African American Records: Freedmen's Bureau
• BlackPast, Historic African American Churches
• NMAAHC Smithsonian, 5 Things To Know: HBCU Edition
• Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, DC
• Kate Masur (co-editor), The Journal of the Civil War Era
• Ahmad Ward, Mitchelville Freedom Park
• Mitchelville Freedom Park, Our Story
• Maria Garcia, The Adventures of Connie and Diego | Las aventuras de Connie y Diego 
• Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, The Gullah Geechee
• Essential Civil War Curriculum, The Port Royal Experiment
• Mitchelville Freedom Park, A Better Day Dawns: Mitchelville is Founded (General Ormsby Mitchel)
• The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Agitator: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionists
• Harriet Tubman Byway, About Harriet Tubman
• BlackPast, Combahee River Raid (June 2, 1863)
• American Red Cross, About Clara Barton: Red Cross Founder
• New Georgia Encyclopedia, 1893 Sea Islands Hurricane
• Economic History, The Sea Island Hurricane of 1893 (PDF)
• Lowcountry Gullah Newsletter, Hilton Head's Gullah Religious Traditions (Rev. Abraham Murchison)
• Grist: Fix, What is heirs’ property? A huge contributor to Black land loss you might not have heard of.
• National Park Service, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park

 

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Resources

• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Looking at Race and Racial Identity in Children’s Books (grades K-2, 3-5) 
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Examining Stereotypes in Books (grades 3-5)
• Learning for Justice: Article, It’s Never Too Early to Talk About Race 
• Learning for Justice: Article, Partnering With Families to Support Black Girls National Museum of African American History & Culture: Article, Historical Foundations of Race

Transcript

Bethany Jay: When I started graduate school at Boston College back in 2001, a field known as Whiteness Studies had gained significant interest among scholars. Books like Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South and Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White had recently been published. And they were just two of many different monographs written on the subject. By the way, if you want to get a lot of funny looks in Boston while you’re riding on the T, try reading Noel Ignatiev’s book, How the Irish Became White, when you’re on your commute.

Bethany Jay: But studying whiteness wasn’t new. As is the case with a lot of great work on race and racism in the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois did it first. In his 1910 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois wrote: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing,– a nineteenth and twentieth-century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.” He goes on to say, “Today we have changed all that, and the world in a sudden, emotional conversion has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful!”

Bethany Jay: In the 1990s, this new generation of scholars was expanding on Du Bois’ analysis. Their work examined the process of white racial formation. And they identified ways in which different groups of Americans were able to claim that identity—or were excluded from it. One of the most influential works of this generation was The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger. The title itself is a reference to Du Bois’ book, Black Reconstruction in America, in which he asserts that whiteness paid a “psychological wage.”  Using Du Bois as a foundation, Roediger outlined how white race consciousness helped shape the identity of the working class in America.  And he provided examples of the ways that new immigrant groups participated in anti-black violence as a way to stake their own claims to whiteness.

Bethany Jay: My time at Boston College came towards the end of the Whiteness Studies boom. But that resurgence of historical attention to whiteness—based on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois—still continues. Du Bois’ observations were shaped by the transformation he witnessed in decades following emancipation. Born during Reconstruction, he witnessed how the full rights and privileges, which were restored to Black people, were violently and systematically stripped away. He saw the role that whiteness and white supremacy played, and the cost of that racial binary. 

Bethany Jay: As we think about the importance of race during Jim Crow, it’s important to remember both Du Bois and those Whiteness Studies scholars of the 1990s, who reminded us that whiteness is not the natural racial identity. Whiteness is a social construction that was remade during Jim Crow and used to maintain white supremacy.

Bethany Jay: I’m Bethany Jay, and this is Teaching Hard History. We’re a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we’re offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. 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.

Bethany Jay: During Jim Crow, whiteness could no longer be defined by freedom from enslavement. And white Americans worked hard to maintain its power in the post-emancipation world. In this episode, we’re going to talk with historian Edward Baptist about the centuries-long political, social and legal decisions that not only defined whiteness as a racial identity but also imbued it with power, fought to police its borders, and later, worked to maintain its potency in the post-emancipation world. 

Bethany Jay: But first, in order to have these conversations in the classroom, it’s important to think about the ways we talk with our students—particularly our younger students—about race. So we’re going to hear from Aisha White, the Director of the Positive Racial Identity Development in Early Education Program, or P.R.I.D.E., at the University of Pittsburgh. She spoke with my co-host Hasan Kwame Jeffries about how to have positive race conversations with your students. I’m so glad that you could join us. Let’s get started.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I am really excited today to welcome to the podcast Dr. Aisha White, who is the director of P.R.I.D.E., a program at the University of Pittsburgh in the School of Education. And we're going to dig deep and talk about the importance of teaching kids and talking to kids about race and racism and positive identity. Dr. White, thank you so much for joining us.

Aisha White: It is a pleasure and an honor, trust me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, we're excited, we're excited. I've been thinking about this conversation since we began planning this season, so I'm honored that you are with us. I want to begin by asking you to explain to our listeners just what is the P.R.I.D.E. program at Pitt?

Aisha White: Okay, so P.R.I.D.E. is an acronym for Positive Racial Identity Development in Early Education. And we do that by providing the important adults in young children's lives with the knowledge, resources and skills to actually engage in conversation and activities that do support children's development of a positive racial identity.

Aisha White: The program actually emerged out of an environmental scan, where we did a study, collected lots of data, we did multiple focus groups. And teachers told us we want resources around talking to kids about race. We did not learn about how to talk to kids about race through our educational careers. And we need some examples and maybe some models that we can see so that we can actually do this work.

Aisha White: So if you're interested in learning more about P.R.I.D.E., you can find more information about our program at www.racepride.pitt.edu. We've been doing virtual trainings since the pandemic started. We have a core curriculum, and we want people to learn about the history of race and racism in America. We think that that's very important. Even as an educator, we're not just going to talk about children and race, we're going to talk about the history. And then we also want them to learn about the history of race and racism in their profession, the history of race and racism in the education system.

Aisha White: We also want them to do internal work, so we have a module where they have to explore their own racial narrative. And then we get to the point where we talk to them about how children experience race. So that is what our professional development model looks like, and that's what we offer to anyone who's interested in it. And then our parent village component, which is where we engage with a small group of parents, maybe around 10 or less parents over the course of six weeks. And we cover a series of topics. So helping them understand the history of skin color prejudice, and how they can help their children feel good about their skin. Talking about Black hair and discrimination against Black hair, and how they can help their kids feel good about that.

Aisha White: We also talk about using words to help their children defend themselves against racial bullying, for example. And we also include information about Africa, about the diaspora, and then how to become resisters. And the way we describe that is they are actually engaging in resistance, in our opinion, if they do something as simple as advocate for their child through the education system.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, when I have conversations with folk about the importance of race and racial identity and racism in society, you get from those who will push back, why focus on race at all? How come we just can't be colorblind? And I'm sure many of our listeners and teachers who want to engage in this work in thoughtful, honest ways hear that as well. What is your response when folks say that to you?

Aisha White: My first response is sort of like a gut reaction, which is you're not even being real. You do see color. But in thinking more about what we do at the P.R.I.D.E. program, my response is that the research has shown that when teachers take on this colorblind approach, it can be as damaging as actually being racist towards children. If you claim that you are colorblind and there are circumstances in a classroom, for example, where a child is harmed racially, what do you do? Because you're not prepared. Because you've said that nobody has color. I don't see color.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Why shouldn't we wait until kids are in middle school or high school, a little bit older, a little bit more mature to talk about these issues?

Aisha White: At three months, kids are already noticing skin color differences. Three months old. The research says that at three months old, a child will tend to an image that is similar to their primary caregivers, mom and dad. So if mom and dad are white, the child's white, show them pictures of somebody who's white versus somebody who's African American, they'll tend to the white face. That kind of flips, and they'll begin to be a little more engaged in looking at images and better able to see at six months. And so they'll tend to a face that is darker. They begin to look longer at the Black face now. And both of those things are fine, because it's just kids actually noticing things. But very quickly that changes, and the research says that by two and a half years old, they're starting to embrace some of the ideas and attitudes around race that are common in America. And those are commonly bad.

Aisha White: And by two and a half, if you ask a child to choose a playmate, and you show them a picture of somebody who's the same race or somebody who's a different race, they'll choose the same race. That's something that happens across the board, whether it's a white child, an Indigenous child or a Black child. Something happens by three, and the majority of children of color begin to prefer white.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm!

Aisha White: Yeah, so by three years old, I think the literature, and it's from Katz and Kofkin, says that about 70 percent of the children begin to prefer white. But then it starts to get even worse. And the literature says that by the time kids are in kindergarten, they have pretty much absorbed and embraced the prevailing attitudes around race in America.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow. Before kids get to the first grade, all that has already sunk into their consciousness.

Aisha White: Yeah. We just recently in our team read an article about both gender and racial bias among four-year-olds who, they all had a bias against Black boys. By four years old. So they're already expressing these biases even before kindergarten. So, you know, that's a reason to not wait. Why would you not help a child understand something that causes so much harm to so many people in the country? If you're going to help your child understand other things and help them be better prepared to get along with other people and that sort of thing, then why would you not help them understand race?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, we can understand racial identity. We see it, we can identify it. What do you all mean by positive racial identity? What is positive racial identity, especially when it comes to Black children?

Aisha White: Mm-hmm. So for Black children, you know, the great fear is that they will develop ideas of racial inferiority. Children can easily develop negative attitudes towards their race based on what they see and hear in America. And so what we want to do is counter that. We're not able to prevent them from being impacted by it, but we can prevent the level of impact. So building capacity in children to deflect those messages that they receive. Because you can't stop them, you can't shield them from getting the messages. So when they have a positive racial identity, they feel okay with their skin color, they don't wish that they were a different skin color. They feel okay with their hair texture, which is a really big issue with Black girls. They feel good about their history because it's full of positive things and people. And we want them to also know about their culture, their culture originating in Africa as well as the African-American culture, and feel good about all those things, experience those things, so that once they do that, then they're able to embrace anybody else's culture because they already understand their own, they know their own and they feel good about their own.

Aisha White: The way we view supporting children in developing a positive racial identity is through it being a core need that children have, and not an add-on. So we're not asking teachers to add on a little bit at the end of the class or once or twice during a year, but make it central to what they do. So I always suggest that teachers begin working on themselves. And parents as well. So that means not going and grabbing a book and reading a book about race. It means taking time to reflect on their own racial experiences, their own racial history, their own racial—what we call racial narrative. So we have a series of questions that we offer people that they can use if they want to on their own. So we ask them, you know, what did you learn about race when you were younger? Where did those messages come from? What kind of impact did those messages have on you? Have your views about race changed over time? If so, what has caused that change? What things do you want to learn more about?

Aisha White: And I've done those, and it's been really eye-opening for me. So just to give you an example of what it might sound like, you know, we ask the question, "What messages did you get?" Well, I grew up in an all-Black community in the projects in Pittsburgh on the Hill, so I didn't see a whole lot of white people. And so the messages that I got were from television. So I watched the news when civil rights activists were being hosed and beaten and dogs set upon them. And that was one of my earliest memories of race. And what I felt was, one, people don't like Black people. There's something happening here. And second, they don't really have an interest in Black people. So the other part of that learning from the media was watching television and seeing very few Black people on television. So those were the two original things that kind of informed my understanding of race. And I never talked to anybody about it. My mom and dad never explained it to me. And so for me, what I felt was a need to always talk about it with my children, because I know that they would probably have questions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What suggestions do you have for teachers for beginning these conversations in the classroom, beyond sort of the introspection, understand and ask those questions, figure out where you are in this, but then how do you then bridge, or what's that bridge to then engaging in the conversation with students, with young people?

Aisha White: Yeah. Picture books, picture books and picture books. I am a strong component of it. It makes it a lot easier. You pick a book that is—I'll describe it as benign, that simply shows a family that may be different from the mainstream. So first is just exposure. So I'm a big fan of Ezra Jack Keats's books. He wrote Whistle for Willie, Peter's Chair. He was a groundbreaker because he was one of the first people to write a picture book that portrayed a Black family. I think his first books were written in 1969. And you can use a book like that that is just about an ordinary experience. So Whistle for Willie is about a little boy who's trying to learn how to whistle. He happens to be Black. And so a teacher may not be prepared to talk about the fact that he's Black, so she can just expose the children to the book and let them look at it. And she can also ask them to describe what they see, and see if the children are ready to talk about the fact that the main character is Black. If they feel that they can begin to have these conversations, then they can intentionally talk about the fact that the child is Black, and ask the kids what they think about that, and give them some kind of other extended activities to do to sort of celebrate what that child looks like.

Aisha White: Teachers can begin to use books that include within them some kind of conflict around race. So an example of a book like that is a book called Amazing Grace, where it's an Afro-Caribbean girl who is very creative, expressive and she's always pretending to be different characters. And there's an opportunity for the children to be in a play, a Peter Pan play. And she wants to be Peter Pan, and they tell her she can't be Peter Pan because she's Black and because she's a girl. And she has a conversation with her grandmom who encourages her. She practices positive racial socialization by showing her a Black ballerina, and Grace is convinced that she can try out for the part. She tries out and she becomes Peter Pan. Teachers who are prepared can talk to children about this conflict that's in the book, Amazing Grace. Was it fair for them to say Grace couldn't be Peter Pan because she was Black? Because she was a girl? What do you think about that? And then the kids will have a whole lot to say, I'm sure.

Aisha White: One other book that I would recommend, it's called, All the Colors We Are: The Story of How We Get Our Skin Color. And I think it's a great starting point book for teachers because it provides an objective and really scientific explanation for where we get our skin color. It has lots of great activities in the back of it, and it's a great way to start the conversation with young children.

Aisha White: Another resource that I think would be really great for teachers, it's called A Kid's Book About Racism. It's part of a series. There are lots of A Kid's Book About, but this one just happens to be about racism. And the author is Jelani Memory. So let me read a few pages from the book. So the first page reads, "This is a book about racism. For reals. And yes, it really is for kids. It's a good book to read with a grown-up because you'll have lots to talk about afterwards. Now to introduce myself. My name is Jelani. My skin color looks like this"—and the word "this" is in all brown—"because my dad is Black and my mom is white." And so those two words are in black and white. "Which makes me mixed." And then the word "mixed" is in brown. He goes on to talk about him being biracial, and how proud he is of his skin color, and how he sometimes gets called names, and how people hurt him by doing that. And then he talks about the need for us to be kind to each other, and he explains what racism is and how it kind of plays itself out. And one of the things that I really like about the book is how he describes what racism could look like, because we always think about it like this terrible person who does something violent and terrible to another person, but in the book, he describes it as being a look, a comment, a question, a thought, a joke, a word or a belief. I highly recommend it.

Aisha White: I'll give you another that's really, really close to home for me, because I started the P.R.I.D.E. work four and a half years ago or so. I would try to use my grandkids as experiments, so as guinea pigs. And so I would bring some books home and I would read them to them and ask them questions about it, have a conversation with them. And so I decided that I was going to pick this one book, it's called Shades of People, I believe. And it's a photo picture book of children of all races, ethnicities.

Aisha White: And I asked my grandson, who at the time was six, to find for me the person in this book whose face you like the most. And so he found a very, very pale white girl who had stark blue eyes and jet black straight hair. And so I said, "Okay, and let's look and see if we can find anybody else that you like." And we turned some more pages, turned some more pages. And I got to a picture of this really cute African-American girl. She looked like she was around three years old. She had a big dimple and she was holding her arm—I can still see the picture. And I said, "Oh, what about her?" And he said, "She's too dark." And I thought I was going to die.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Aisha White: I don't know if you're familiar with the French film Amelie, but there's a scene where she is in a restaurant, and something happens and her whole body becomes liquid and she splashes down to the ground. That's the way I felt when that happened with my grandson. And I just wanted to cry. But I was cool, calm and collected, and didn't react in a way that showed him I was upset, how upset I was.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right, right.

Aisha White: And then about a week or two weeks later, he and his older brother came over and I had the book again. I said, "Do you remember what you said when I showed you this picture of the girl?" And he said, "Yeah, I told you that she was too dark." And then I had his older brother come over and put his arm next to the girl's picture to show that he was as dark, if not darker than that girl. And I said, "Wow, look, he's just the same color as her." And my grandson didn't say anything. He thought for a moment, and then he just looked at me with this slow smile on his face, like he understood the message that I was trying to present to him. I use that as an example all the time for teachers because I was stuck like a deer in headlights. And they need to understand that that's going to happen, but that you can always go back and revisit whatever happened, because kids don't forget, and you can sort of keep building on that so that you do make up for what you think you may have missed earlier on.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The times in which we are living today are unique, to say the least. We're in the midst of this hysteria surrounding critical race theory. I imagine that there are more than a few white folk who, if they knew about the work you were doing, they would burst into flames. Could you share a thought, a word or two with our teachers specifically who are headed back into the classroom in this charged environment where you have people mobilizing around not saying anything, not teaching, not talking about race and racism?

Aisha White: Yeah, so the first thing I would say is to be careful and watch out and take care of yourself. So I would never encourage teachers to engage in practices in the classroom if it means that they're going to be fired, because I don't want that to happen to teachers.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right.

Aisha White: But I would also suggest that they try to be as creative as possible in introducing this content in ways that won't get them fired, but will still support children in learning about race. And I think part of what will help them to have sort of the fortitude to do that is in understanding the benefits that come from this. So when I describe sort of that continuum of children at three months old, you know, noticing someone who looks like them, and then once we get to kindergarten, here are kids embracing the biases. But there's also literature that says that when kids are engaged in ongoing conversations about interracial relationships, it can change their attitudes within weeks. So they can feel positive about being connected to other people who are different from them if you present it in the right way and you do it consistently. And children are open to that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wow.

Aisha White: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You can see change within weeks. I mean, it doesn't take a lifetime necessarily to begin to move the needle if you're doing this right.

Aisha White: Right, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well look, Dr. White, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you so much for the work that you are doing, and really modeling how we can create and foster and develop positive racial identity among our Black children, but really among all children. Thank you so much.

Aisha White: Oh, you're so welcome. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my daughter, Jamilla Rice, is a huge fan and she told me that I better mention her during this interview. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ah, shout out to Jamilla. [laughs] Wonderful. 

Bethany Jay: Dr. Aisha White is the Director of the P.R.I.D.E. program, which is part of the Office of Child Development at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. White is also the Executive Director of Rights & Responsibilities, a human rights organization creating awareness about issues impacting people of African descent. And of course, she is the proud mother of Jamilla Rice, who is also an educator in Pittsburgh. 

Bethany Jay: Next up is our conversation with historian Edward Baptist about whiteness in the Jim Crow era. Here’s Hasan to welcome him to the podcast.  

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the podcast one of Durham's finest sons, Ed Baptist. Ed, welcome aboard. So glad you could spend some time with us.

Ed Baptist: Thanks, Hasan. It's an honor to be here. And I know you spent some formative years in Durham as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The formative years, in which I learned that it's properly pronounced Durm.

Ed Baptist: Durm, yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And not Durham. So I've been working on that ever since then. Look Ed, we wanted to have this discussion with you because we very much appreciate the depth of your understanding, not only going back into the era of slavery, but then also in the post-Emancipation era as well. And we wanted to have a conversation with you about whiteness. We're trying to wrap our minds around race and racial identity, and specifically whiteness. So let me ask you this, Ed: what is whiteness?

Ed Baptist: Yeah, I can start with a really short story from Durham, from third grade in C.C. Spaulding Elementary School. Had a good friend named Patrick. Patrick was Black, I was white. And we figured out if we held our breath long enough, we would each change a slightly different color. I would get really dark red and he would get purple. And when we figured this out, we fell out laughing, and we did it over and over again until the teacher made us stop because we were being very annoying. So we're not talking about really what color my skin is, what color my skin turns when I hold my breath or anything about Patrick either. What we're talking about is not phenotype, it is not biology. We are talking about political meaning. We are talking about what people mean when they say, "White people are going to be a minority in the United States in 2040 or 2050," or whatever. We are talking about the ways in which discussions about white people, their place, their privilege, the supposed threats to them, are used as ways to organize politics at both the daily level, so the exercise of power in daily life, or on the mass scale, as we've seen again and again in US history from the earliest days of the republic up until the most recent days of the republic as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things that we often get wrong about the evolution of whiteness in American society is that whiteness—and particularly notions of white supremacy and racism are fundamentally Southern in origin, are fundamentally Southern in their evolution. But when we look at that early 20th century, late 19th century, we're seeing these scientific rationalizations for white supremacy, for racism, not coming out of the South, but coming out of the leading intellectual institutions of the North. Could you say something a little more about that?

Ed Baptist: Sure. So much of the discourse about race, particularly since the 1960s, has been built on this sort of foundation of the argument that Black Americans are especially prone to commit crimes. This claim is written into the consciousness of America with the kind of bold letters of science, right? Capital-S Science. This is science. You know, well-meaning people might want to think otherwise, but science proves that, in fact, there's a tendency to Black criminality.

Ed Baptist: The people who are establishing this claim in the new, quote-unquote, "science" of criminology that's emerging in the late 19th century, yeah, they're based at Harvard, they're based at Columbia, they're based at places like that. It's not hard for us today to see that the Black critics of that work like W.E.B. Du Bois and others were right in that the statistical claims and the way those claims are framed are quite shoddy, right? You cannot say that the quantity of crimes committed is a statistical fact unless you can establish that crimes are being recorded in the same way for everybody, and with the same frequency for all groups of people. That's one of the most basic criticisms that Du Bois and others make of this kind of work. But this work is coming out of a Northern-focused elite, a new industrial and financial elite that wants to govern what it's afraid is going to be an ungovernable country, right? A country with an enormous, increasingly urbanized industrial working class that these folks at Harvard and the people who are donating their money to Harvard and the folks at Columbia and so on—and at Cornell—they can look to Europe and they could see that socialist parties are rising in power in Europe in the late 19th, early 20th century. They're worried about that. They're worried about the possibility of a revolution, whether Marxist or otherwise. And they are trying to come up with both techniques and justifications for establishing ever more powerful muscles for the state to use in controlling unstable people. And so creating a science of criminology allows you to justify new kinds of policing, new kinds of imprisonment and so on and so forth.

Ed Baptist: So this claim that there's a scientific difference in the propensity to commit crimes among African Americans as opposed to European Americans confirms things that lots of white Americans wanted to believe in the late 19th century. Now what we know from at least my understanding of DNA is that the genetic differences between people in Africa and people in Europe are extremely small. Probably not surprising—we all have the same ancestors. But because slavery and the slave trade taught us to focus on certain aspects of phenotype, we tend to focus on them. And so we assume that social behaviors and social facts, which may not actually be facts, but these become encoded in many people's minds as genetically determined, right? Because we've been taught from a very early age to at least consider whether or not maybe these things are genetically determined.

Bethany Jay: Can you give us a few sort of moments or events that allow us to kind of understand how whiteness is constructed in the early days of the republic?

Ed Baptist: Well, I think if we're looking at some of the very earliest days, we actually have to go back before there was a republic to the first decades of the settler colonies that emerged in North America. And many of the legal institutions that the colonies set up, and some of the legal definitions that the colonies set up in the 1600s, they are taking land from and often killing on a mass scale Indigenous people. And they are also importing large numbers of enslaved Africans. But these colonies in North America don't start to write the words "Black" or "Negro," if I could use one of the most common terms that they used in the 17th-century laws, and they don't start to write the term "White" into the law until they actually start to work out in law the ways in which enslaved people and Indigenous people are going to be policed, right? Where are they going to be allowed to move? Are Indigenous people going to be able to come in and out of the colonies, which, of course, were their homelands originally. How are enslaved Africans going to be prevented from running away, setting up Maroon colonies in the woods, escaping to other colonies, et cetera, et cetera? That's when we start to see this word "White" come into the law as ways to distinguish how white people, if they are of lesser status like indentured servants or something like that, how they're going to be policed differently from enslaved Africans, and how they're going to be policed differently from Indigenous people.

Ed Baptist: And often, this actually comes down to a matter of life and death. Who can you kill, and who can legally do the killing? And so white people from very early on are given by law the power to police the movement, and even to take the lives of those of African descent, whether they're slaves or not. And there are certain aspects of those patterns which play out, not just through the colonial years, but far, far beyond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, in 1739, of course, there is the Stono Rebellion, and then in 1740, South Carolina rewrites its slave code, its Negro Act of 1740. And they include in that very clearly the empowering, just as you were saying, of all white people to stop, to question and to kill if necessary, without repercussion, any Black person enslaved or free, doing exactly what you were saying: empowering white people to police and patrol the color line.

Ed Baptist: Yeah, and I just want to emphasize that as we've seen with the discussion of policing in recent years, policing is about politics, right? It's about effectively who can participate as a full member of the political community. If you're policed in one way, it becomes very difficult for you to participate as a full member of the political community. If you are allowed to police the movement and the behavior of others, you've been trusted with this immense amount of power.

Ed Baptist: You know, one of the things that's happening in the 18th century is folks who are really very different from the English, and even folks from England who are very different from upper class and these sort of elite English settlers, they are starting to make the claim to be part of this same group because after all, they've been entrusted with this enormous kind of power, right? And they are then saying, "And therefore, we deserve the right to participate on an equal basis in the political community."

Ed Baptist: And that's a constant churning conflict within white America even before the revolution, right? And in the wake of the revolution, that becomes one of the key dynamics of politics in the young United States: white men standing up and saying, "I don't own property, but I am as good as every other white person. I'm in the militia, or I'm eligible for the militia to go fight, to take more land from Indigenous people, or to defend the land that we've already taken, that we've rightfully stolen from Indigenous people." Or to put down slave revolts as they had done in 1739, as they would do again and again in the antebellum era.

Ed Baptist: So these different groups of people, like I said, had been accounted as significantly less than back in the old world. Great example is the Irish, of course. When Irish immigrants start to arrive—and many of them not even speaking English, they're not even Protestant, you know, which was such a key part of North American colonial identity. And they figure out the rules of the game really quickly. They make the claim, "We are equal members of this political community because we are white."

Bethany Jay: If whiteness is afforded all of these sort of privileges and power, then really knowing who is white and who is not becomes important. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about some of those early colonial laws is how many of them try to police interracial sex. Of course, with absolutely no real success. But the idea that you need to keep these color lines very, very distinct in order to make the privileges of whiteness clear and distinct.

Ed Baptist: Yeah, it's so fascinating, obviously. The story of this interracial sexuality is the vast majority of the history of that before 1865 is white men committing sexual assault against Black women. The children who are born obviously trouble all these binaries that the law and that custom and that political power and political structures are trying to implement. Folks decide "Well, we have to write something down in law to resolve this," right? So one of the key examples, of course, is what we now know is the one-drop rule, which is at first just an argument that free people of color, that they fit into the category of those who are policed in this particular way, policed in the same way effectively as the enslaved. But one of the interesting things that seems to happen is that the attempt to enforce this binary is a really powerful force, both in organizing white politics and in organizing Black politics, right?

Ed Baptist: And so I don't want to say it's just because in the US and in the colonies that become the US, there's a decision made more or less collectively in the late 17th century by white people that we're going to exclude all people of visible African descent from full membership in the community. We're going to treat them all as if they're assumed to be enslaved until they prove otherwise. I don't want to say that that is what organizes Black politics, but it creates a space in which the response among people of African descent is to say, essentially, we're in the same boat. We're in the same boat together. And so, you know, while we're talking about whiteness as one of the most dangerous forces in the history of the United States, if not beyond, we also have to pay attention to the ways in which Black solidarity as it emerges in the United States is one of the most powerful political forces in the history of the US, just as surely.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The founders of this nation, the framers of those founding documents were white men who came of age in the era in which you are speaking, an era in which whiteness is taking shape, in which people who weren't white are now white. I wonder to what extent we see whiteness inscribed into the Constitution?

Ed Baptist: So whiteness is inscribed in the Constitution. It's not written in the sort of black letter law of the Constitution, yet it's there in virtually every section. Article Four, Section Two, the Fugitive Slave Clause, right? They don't specifically say "We're setting up this system in which anybody anywhere in the country who is accused of being enslaved can be seized and brought to trial and forced to prove that they're not a slave." It's not written, right? But that was the intent. That was the intent.

Ed Baptist: When you look at the notes of the debates that various members of the constitutional convention took, when they're talking about Article Four, Section Two, the only debate is about who's going to enforce the sort of grabbing up of fugitive slaves from the streets of Boston or the streets of Philadelphia or the streets of New York, right? These places where slavery was, in the case of Boston at that time, already eliminated from law and from state law, and Philadelphia, where it was on the way out as a sort of gradual process of abolition. The Massachusetts and Pennsylvania representatives do not deny that they are setting up a system in which slavery for some extends across the entire country, and in which those who can be accused of being enslaved, of committing the crime of trying to behave as if they're free, can be grabbed up by any white person who claims to be empowered to do so as their enslaver or as the agent of their enslaver. That's what the fugitive slave clause does. Everybody knows it. You see that from the records of debates. But it doesn't say, you know, "We are setting up this clear difference between whose lives matter, right? Black versus white. And who gets to take whose life." It's not there in the black letter law.

Bethany Jay: Can I ask you to speak to what I think is a common misconception in the reading of the Constitution about the three-fifths clause, and the idea that Black people are counted as three-fifths of white people. Can you speak to that, just in case anybody is confused as they're listening about how that kind of jibes with the conversation we're having?

Ed Baptist: Yeah, so the three-fifths compromise, they're not saying, "Okay, Black people are only 60 percent of a person." What they're talking about is who's going to be counted for representation under the Constitution. So you've got a process set up to take a census of all the inhabitants of the country. And "inhabitant" is a slightly different word from "citizen." It was used effectively as "citizen" in earlier times, and as of the 1780s, the New England and middle states see that if enslaved people are counted in the census and then are counted as one full person for representation, they're going to be close to outnumbered, and maybe actually outnumbered in the first House of Representatives.

Ed Baptist: And they're not sure that their interests are going to be best protected in that way. So they say, in effect, "Slaves are property. We don't count our property in an enumeration of persons for representation in our legislatures. So therefore, slaves should count as zero-fifths." And the Southern states, you know, who are seeking their own power say, "Oh, no, they should count—each one should count as five-fifths," right? And so the three-fifths compromise is driven by political interest. This is a compromise that's about political power, and how they can keep the political balance between North and South that's already emerging as a problem in the new nation.

Bethany Jay: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Bethany Jay. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources—like "How to use Children’s books to talk about Race and Racial identity"—as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at learningforjustice.org/podcasts. Let’s return now to our conversation with Ed Baptist. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What are the politics, Ed, of the Declaration of Independence, and specifically Jefferson's insistence upon including this phrase that we cling to to this day, that all men are created equal, in a world in which there is such racial inequality?

Ed Baptist: Yeah, I don't know what Jefferson thought in his heart and mind. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You don't want to get into the mind of Jefferson, man? Come on!

Bethany Jay: That's a dangerous place to be.

Ed Baptist: That's a whole industry, right? A whole publishing industry. And there's been some great books. You know, he includes this nice set of Lockean phrases that's a kind of a philosophical claim that says the real basis of authority is the will of the people, right? That's what he's sort of getting at there, you know? If everybody's got the right to decide what form of government they want to live under, well, we as the people of America—you know, the people that he wants to speak for anyway—we have the right to say "No more king," right? That's the purpose of that preamble, I think. This is a man who enslaved the mother of his children. You know, eventually, most of his children by her go free, they're able to obtain freedom, but they spend an awfully long time in slavery. And he writes this stuff repeatedly throughout his life about the possibility that a slave revolt or an organized political movement by free Blacks if slavery ends, would inevitably lead to some sort of race war, some sort of genocide. And he makes it clear that if that happens, he's on his side, right? He's not on his children's side. He's not on his children's mother's side, right? So he makes that very clear. So, you know, when we read the words, we have to read it in that context. And it's hard for me to see them as more than a philosophical preamble that he intends to use to kind of set up this claim for independence that's made by white colonists for a white country that's going to be run by white people, that is going to expand into and take land from Indigenous people, and which is going to have slavery for the foreseeable future.

Bethany Jay: And of course, Jefferson will then go on to write Notes on the State of Virginia, which has a good example of sort of early "scientific" in quotes, racism in terms of his descriptions of the difference between Black and white people, which I find to be a great teaching resource for my students as we talk about this era. But moving on, you know, Jefferson's ideas will become part and parcel of an antebellum entrenchment, of pro-slavery ideology, these arguments that continue to sort of elevate whiteness. And then on the other side, sort of critiques of that narrative from abolitionists, both Black and white. And I was wondering if you could talk with us a bit about that antebellum period, and where we see whiteness sort of hardening or adapting or being challenged.

Ed Baptist: Yeah, so the ways in which it's getting hardened in the antebellum period, and one of them said something pretty explicit about before in terms of the widening of the house of whiteness, right? Adding on more rooms to incorporate new immigrants, poorer white people as political equals. And so that's going on, and that's going to really intensify whiteness in certain ways. It's going to get connected with popular culture in certain ways. You know, there's minstrelsy, and white people who are kind of on the fringes of whiteness, mocking Black people as a means of incorporating themselves into whiteness.

Ed Baptist: And, of course, you know, at the same time revealing that they're much more fascinated with Blackness than they want to admit. So that's happening. The other thing, of course, that's happening is the expansion of the country, and the expansion of the country is predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous people, the genocide of Indigenous people, and an expanding, rapidly developing system of slavery on half of that land. And of course, we know the debate about whether it's going to be half of that land or none of that land or all of that land, you know, that ultimately leads to the Civil War.

Ed Baptist: There are coherent movements by the late 1830s, interracial movements of Black and white abolitionists who are seeking to make this question of expansion a moral question, and a moral question about whether or not the United States as a country is investing every single one of its citizens with a moral responsibility of expanding the depraved system of slavery. They create an enormous amount of political turmoil, and this is part of the process that leads to the so-called brothers' war, the Civil War, which is definitely two white brothers fighting in that conception.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How does understanding whiteness help us understand the Civil War, the great conflict, what it was about, and why you had this taking up of arms?

Ed Baptist: It's never the case that there's a kind of universal shift among Northern whites to seeing the war as a war for emancipation. It does become that, but not because Northern whites universally get religion on this subject and say, "You know what? Whiteness is a construct. What we're really about here is democracy and anti-slavery and so on and so forth." It's obviously far more complicated.

Ed Baptist: Initially, because there's such an intense commitment among Northern whites to the distinction, the political distinction between white and Black as just a way in which they themselves get meaning in their lives, understand their own status, understand their own privileges, their own rights, right? And because the North is divided almost 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, the Republican president intentionally projects the war in rhetoric as if it's a war that is not about slavery and is not about race. It's about the outcome of the election of 1860, and it's about the question of how the territories are going to be divided up, the Western territories, which have been taken from Mexico and from Indigenous people and so on.

Ed Baptist: And of course, all those questions involve slavery and race, but perhaps if you don't speak them out loud, they won't exist. But this leads to some really unsustainable policies that both Lincoln and his generals attempt to implement in the first year of the war in 1861, to fight the war without making it a war against slavery. So they want to prevent the war, or they at least say they want to prevent the war from becoming an all-out war against slavery itself that's going to bring the house of cards tumbling down from inside. So you have generals in Virginia in May and June of 1861 arresting enslaved people who are liberating themselves by coming to the Union lines and giving them back to their slaveowners who come to claim them. And you have these public proclamations in places like Kentucky and Missouri in which Lincoln countermands—in Missouri, for instance, he countermands a statewide emancipation order that a Union general attempted to implement as a kind of war tactic to destabilize the power of the Confederates. Of course, this can't stand. This doesn't last, not just because the ways in which it's probably objectively bad strategy, but because African Americans refuse to let it stand. They keep coming over, right? They keep coming over. They keep trying to enlist in the Union army from the northern side. Frederick Douglass and other northern African Americans who by that point had built up an entire set of media, right? You know, they've got newspapers, they've got orators traveling around. Their message is getting out through Black churches across the North. And they've got links to white abolitionists who can put the same message out. The message keeps coming: look, it's crazy to fight this war as a war to protect slavery. This should be a war to destroy slavery, which is the main power that the South has.

Ed Baptist: So partly because the North is really struggling militarily, Lincoln agrees in the fall of 1862, he issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, probably the most momentous executive order in US history. And that, in effect, makes the war also a war to end slavery.

Bethany Jay: If the crux of whiteness pre-Civil War rests on the difference between enslaved and free, you know, emancipation really disrupts that. And so I was wondering if you could speak to how the mechanisms of the post-Emancipation era preserve the power of whiteness.

Ed Baptist: Yeah, if whiteness is created out of the attempt to build consent to elite white rule, that system of political whiteness depends on saying there are white people and there's everybody else. White people have the power to kill, to dispossess, to take. And conversely, you cannot kill or dispossess or take from them. And especially enslaved people and those who we can treat as if they're presumed to be enslaved, which is all people of apparent African descent in the United States, even those in the North. So that's the situation in 1860. And that, to some extent, it depends on this really violent system of slavery, because that's one of the justifications. Well, we can't take away the power of ordinary white people to stop, question, search, seize, if necessary, kill anybody who's presumed to be enslaved. We can't take away that power because then the system of slavery falls apart, right? Or then Black people might organize a slave revolt. If we cannot use that as the just-so story, that this is why we have to have this system, because ostensibly everybody's equal now, everybody's free now, then what do we have? You know, what is it to be white?

Ed Baptist: And so immediately as the Confederacy falls, and as formerly enslaved people are effectively freed, as the system of slavery crumbles, there's an effort on both the local level to reconstitute something that has as many of the features of slavery as possible. And there's also that effort on the national level, because Andrew Johnson has become the president. And Johnson immediately begins to spout a rhetoric which may sound very familiar to us, particularly from 1965 onward, if we know something about Southern politics and Southern political rhetoric, or perhaps even more recently on the national level, which is a rhetoric that says if the federal government does anything to enforce the rights of formerly enslaved people, what the federal government is actually doing is taking rights away from white people. That by taking away the power of whiteness, they're actually actively hurting white people, and they need to be stopped. And the best way to stop them is to violently put African Americans back in their place, or certainly that's what a lot of his Southern listeners seemed to conclude.

Ed Baptist: 1865 and 1866, you have this wave of mass violence against formerly enslaved people in the South. In 1866 in New Orleans, over 50 people are killed in the so-called New Orleans riots, which really is a massacre of people who have come to hear speeches by pro-emancipation Louisiana politicians who are speaking outside a constitutional convention that's going to decide what kind of constitution the state of Louisiana is going to have. Is that constitution going to allow any political role—voting, the ability to run for office, the ability to serve on juries and so on and so forth, any political role for Black people along the lines of what white people have enjoyed in the United States since 1787. And the white people who roll up on these speeches and these gatherings of African Americans, they pretty clearly are voting no. There's going to be no political role. They kill over 50 people. In Memphis, similar death toll, the same summer of 1866, very similar set of circumstances.

Bethany Jay: You know, as we're thinking about violence as a reaction to the potential of Black political power, you know, that makes me think of white womanhood sort of during this period, and I'm reminded of Rebecca Latimer Felton. 1897, she's speaking at the Georgia Agricultural Society, and she says, quote, "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary."

Ed Baptist: Right, right. The reunion between the white North and the white South is in part accomplished by deploying these ideas in the popular press of white womanhood as imperiled in the South, right? So the claim that if you free Black men, the first thing they're going to go do is rape white women. That justifies killing Black men. Now we know from Ida Wells-Barnett and others who researched lynchings, that lynching very rarely was in response to an actual rape. And so white women, sometimes with their active participation, are constructed as the kind of repository of morality in the political community, which is why they're not supposed to vote in the 19th century.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Ed Baptist: We'll put them over here to the side, and they're going to advise their husbands and, you know, pray for them and so on. And therefore, they could be effective actors in the political system without making the republic unvirtuous. It can sound like white women are just sitting there, and white men are saying all this stuff and, you know, doing all this killing, but white women aren't really actively involved. But what we actually see is that white women—especially elite white women in the South—go on a sort of a 50-year campaign to enshrine the memory of the Confederacy as a defeated but morally victorious force in history. And so they are actively involved, and in some cases actively leading campaigns to create these Confederate monuments all over the South. They provide enormous amounts of financial resources for that, organizational resources. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy provide opportunities for women who technically can't participate in politics to actually participate in something that is very political, which is this sort of justification of the Confederacy and of slavery and so on and so forth. And so they are actively involved in this kind of reconstitution of whiteness in the South.

Bethany Jay: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, You can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to learningforjustice.org/Podcast PD. PD for professional development. That’s podcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: binary, all lowercase. You’ll also find a link in the show notes.  It’s a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, the Reconstruction Acts are intended—one read of them—to make it possible to bring in African Americans into the body politic—certainly the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments. While they eliminate slavery, Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments don't eliminate whiteness, and certainly the political usages of whiteness. Why is that the case? Why are they ineffective in eliminating those political usages of whiteness?

Ed Baptist: I think they're ineffective ultimately because the federal government and Northern whites choose not to enforce the law that they have written. And while Reconstruction certainly had plenty of white defenders in the North, support for it is never quite as strong as even the votes for something like the Reconstruction Acts would suggest. You have all kinds of political dynamics that drive those votes, right? You have the opposition to Andrew Johnson among more conservative Republicans. So white support in the North is just never that strong. And Northern politicians, national politicians who are charged with the responsibility to enforce the law simply didn't do it. They briefly do it from 1867 to basically 1872 or '73.

Ed Baptist: And when the Klu Klux Klan emerges, and it creates this huge wave of violence in the late 1860s in the South, they pass three different enforcement acts which give power to the federal government to break up criminal conspiracies, to try individuals who are abrogating the Fourteenth Amendment rights and Fifteenth Amendment rights of individuals, to try them at a federal level. But the Supreme Court, in the wake of the Colfax Massacre, 1873, over 100 African Americans, members of a militia who were defending a courthouse from a white militia which charged that the election which Republicans had just won was corrupt, and mostly because they didn't like the result, as far as I could tell, so over 100 members of the Black militia are killed. Probably the majority of them are tricked into surrendering, then are held overnight and are executed, murdered in cold blood. And the Supreme Court rules that, in fact, the federal government does not have the power to enforce the Enforcement Act of 1870 against individuals, only against state governments. So in effect, what the Supreme Court is doing is allowing this sort of state outside a state to exist, right? And to effectively determine who's going to be the state government. Who's going to have the official power, that's going to be determined by a kind of state outside of the state. And the state outside of the state is armed white people. It's a kind of a parish state or a real state, you know, a greater America or something like that. A great again America. A great again Louisiana, great again South. And that is a force that's set free by the Supreme Court.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You've laid out quite brilliantly for us the ways in which colonial-era whiteness informs revolutionary-era whiteness, and the way revolutionary-era ideas of whiteness inform antebellum-era ideas and then manifest during the Civil War, that then change and are reapplied in new ways during the postwar era, post-Emancipation era. I'm wondering if you could share a word on the ways in which this Jim Crow-era whiteness inform the world in which we live today. I mean, what's the legacy of that articulation of whiteness today?

Ed Baptist: Yeah. I mean, that's obviously a really complex question. I mean, we can find lots of demonstrations of the lightness is better idea among and between African Americans. It seems to me that it is impossible to pull that out from the ways in which that's about access, at least in some part, to some of the privileges and benefits that white people might be more willing to share with those whom they've been taught to think of as looking more like them, right? And so I don't think we can consider that question outside of the everyday grinding impact of racism on Black people's lives and their material circumstances and so on and so forth.

Ed Baptist: And obviously, there's a psychic dimension to this as well. You know, the repetition of images and so on, the extent to which one does or doesn't resemble a supposedly highly-valued phenotype. But that being said, the hegemony of whiteness in the political scale is no longer assured because the number of people who can plausibly identify as white, and who are willing to make that be the basis of their political identity is declining. And so instead of deciding which group of white people are going to rule, we're now in a moment where the question is: are white people going to actually rule in the United States? Or are we going to actually finally after centuries have democratic politics, small-d democratic politics? And so that's the moment we're in.

Ed Baptist: You know, that's the question behind so many of our divisions and debates right now. If this question gets answered in this way, no, white people acting on the basis of whiteness are not going to make the core decisions in the US in the future. If that becomes clear that that's the case, then we will have a transition in history that, you know, rivals in certain ways Emancipation. Yeah, I think that's a momentous shift that is potentially in the wind. And that drives, obviously, right? This is obvious, right? This drives all the attempts to restrict voting. It drives all the gerrymandering. It drives the debate not just between the Democrats and the Republicans. It drives debates within the Democratic Party. It drives debate on the left where you have white leftists who are not really comfortable being part of a movement in which they're not only the minority, but they don't have an outsized vote. These are uncharted waters for white Americans.

Bethany Jay: We've had such a wide-ranging discussion and, you know, as teachers in the classroom, it's always best to have our students kind of discover this history for themselves in the sources. Do you have go-to sources that you can use for examining this kind of topic in the classroom?

Ed Baptist: Well, I'm definitely going to bring up "Freedom On the Move," which is a project that both Hasan and I work on. It's this archive of "runaway" ads, so-called ads placed by enslavers who are trying to get people recaptured and brought back into slavery. And it's a great opportunity for students to learn how to read things both with and against the grain, right? So with the grain, you know, what are the assumptions that are sort of built right into the legal system that makes these ads reasonably effective as a way to catalyze the system of policing that existed in the South and elsewhere in the United States in the 19th or 18th century?

Ed Baptist: But I would recommend reading those alongside some of the slave codes, like in South Carolina and in Virginia as well. And if possible, dig up some of the ones from colonial New York, so students understand that the policing of enslaved people's movement, presumed enslaved people's movement, was a major concern of people who were passing laws in the 1700s. And of course, if you want, you can compare the 19th century updates of those as well, if your ads are from the 19th century. But I think they're going to show you the evolution of a system that also has a great deal of continuity from the 1700s onward. So that's one thing. Another thing that's interesting, Bethany, you brought up Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Ed Baptist: Yeah. So if you pair that with I believe it's William Hamilton's speech. I mean, you can find this at Blackpast.org. It's about 1810. It's one of those occasions when they're, I think, marking the abolition of the international slave trade. And so these are Black activists in New York City, and he gives a speech where he just absolutely roasts Thomas Jefferson's arguments in the Notes on the State of Virginia, and he says, "Look. First of all, the argument that there's a physical superiority?" He says, "This is too ridiculous. You know, every day we see there's no difference," right? It's great to see the contestation of it right there as a centerpiece of Black political organizing, just the destruction of those arguments from so early on.

Bethany Jay: And of course for the listeners, all of these will be linked in the show notes to this episode, but I recently came across a source by—it was a pseudonym published under the name Ethiop, who was William Wilson, "What Shall We Do With the White People?" And it was published in 1860. And it's great. It's just this very satirical, turning all the questions that have been asked, you know, are they fit for self-government? You know, we need to consider this very grave question. In the same vein as the speech that you're talking about, just a great example of this very clear argument against all of this sort of nonsense that's being parroted.

Ed Baptist: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: Well, Ed, thank you so much. Obviously, the tendrils of the Jim Crow era, the implications of these constructions of whiteness extend into today and have continuing implications. And we're so happy that you could come here and talk with us about this very long history. Thank you so much.

Ed Baptist: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Bethany Jay: Dr. Edward E. Baptist is a Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, which won the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Baptist is also the co-editor of New Studies in the History of American Slavery, and he is the co-creator of Freedom On The Move, a database of runaway slave advertisements. We’ll put the link in the show notes.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at learningforjustice.org. 

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight—examining its history and lasting impact.

Bethany Jay: Thanks to Dr. White and Dr. Baptist for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. “Music Reconstructed” is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond. 

Bethany Jay: If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Bethany Jay: I’m Dr. Bethany Jay—Professor of History at Salem State University—and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South
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• United Daughters of the Confederacy, History of the UDC
• BlackPast, (1867) The Reconstruction Acts
• U.S. Senate, Landmark Legislation: Thirteenth, Fourteenth, & Fifteenth Amendments
• Smithsonian Magazine, The 1873 Colfax Massacre Crippled the Reconstruction Era
• U.S. Senate, The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871
• Freedom on the Move
• BlackPast, (1809) William Hamilton, “Mutual Interest, Mutual Benefit, and Mutual Relief”
• The Guardian, The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
• Ethiop, What Shall We Do with White People?
• National Museum of African American History & Culture, Talking About Race: Whiteness
• Dr. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
• Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (editors), New Studies in the History of American Slavery
   

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Constructively Engaging in Digital Communities (grades 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Reflection: What’s Your FRAME? (grades 6-8, 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Article, Making Space for Tough Talks in Class
• Learning for Justice: Article, Checking Yourself for Bias in the Classroom

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most people have probably never heard of Ella Baker, but she was one of the most important civil rights activists of the 20th century. During the 1940s, Miss Baker, as she came to be called, served as the NAACP's Director of Branches. In this capacity, she helped grow the organization's membership from 150,000 to 600,000.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In the 1950s, she helped organize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She also spearheaded a major voter registration campaign for them called the Crusade for Citizenship. And in the 1960s, she guided the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She brought together sit-in activists such as John Lewis and Diane Nash to form the group, and was the organization’s most influential adviser.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Miss Baker was a skilled grassroots organizer who believed that everyday people were fully capable of making the decisions that impacted their lives. Miss Baker was uninterested in telling people what to do, and fully invested in providing people with the knowledge and skills they needed to bring about the change they wanted. Miss Baker was fond of saying, "Give light, and people will find the way."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And while the results of her organizing always differed depending on the people's vision of their own future, she always began in the same place. To all who would listen, Miss Baker advised: "Start where the people are," with what they know and what they think they know, and with what they understand and what they misunderstand. And then you build from there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Two years ago, I participated in a keynote conversation on teaching hard history at the annual conference of the Virginia Council for the Social Studies with elementary school educator Chris Mathews.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: After our chat, a teacher approached me. She informed me that she taught fourth grade at a predominantly white elementary school, and had recently reached the disturbing conclusion that her students—and by inference, all those of their generation—lacked empathy. A startling statement to say the least.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I pushed back, saying that her conclusion was overly broad. But she insisted, explaining that she had recently shown her class images of immigrant children forcibly separated from their parents, being warehoused at the southern border. And the students were unfazed; they had almost no reaction.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I tried to explain that there was more to it, but she stood firm. These students lacked empathy. Period.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We were at loggerheads, so I asked her to do me a favor the next time her class met. I asked her to show her students one of those ASPCA commercials that air at two in the morning—the ones featuring Sarah McLachlan singing "In the Arms of an Angel," while images of a puppy missing an eye and a cat short a couple of legs flash across the screen—to see how her students reacted. The teacher looked at me quizzically, but promised to do so.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Not long after that, I heard from the teacher. She did as I had asked, and was shocked by her students' response. Within moments of playing the commercial, her fourth graders—the same ones who had been totally unmoved by the child crisis at the border— were fully animated, upset that animals could be treated so cruelly. Her students didn't lack empathy or compassion—they fully felt the pain of suffering animals. They just lacked compassion for children of color who were suffering.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: While shocking, this is not surprising. We condition children to be compassionate toward animals. We tell them to treat dogs and cats kindly, that they are deserving of our love, and we model this behavior for them. But we fail to provide equivalent instruction when it comes to children of color. In the absence of those specific conversations, kids default to the dominant view that children of color—even those in crisis—are somehow not deserving of our care or concern.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ella Baker was not a teacher—she was an organizer. But she understood that effective teaching was just like effective organizing: you have to listen; you have to be honest; you have to be open to new ideas; you have to be bold in your instruction; and most importantly, you have to start where the students are. Start with what they know and with what they think they know; start with what they understand and what they misunderstand. And then you build from there.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow, starting with Reconstruction. 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.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We hear a lot about creating "safe spaces" for our students. But safe does not necessarily mean comfortable. As high-school English teacher Matthew Kay explains, "You can be profoundly uncomfortable and still feel safe." After all, that's where learning takes place. Matthew is the author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations. In this episode, he talks with my co-host Bethany Jay about how to create classroom environments where students are willing to take risks, to share their experiences and to be vulnerable enough to admit what they don't know. I'm so glad you could join us.

Bethany Jay: We're talking with Matthew Kay, whose book Not Light, But Fire, made a big splash in my own classroom this past year. And so I'm really excited that you're here to talk with us about it.

Matthew Kay: Thanks for having me.

Bethany Jay: I thought we might begin by addressing the elephant in the room and thinking about these different pieces of legislation about critical race theory. What do you think that actually does and doesn't mean for real classroom instruction?

Matthew Kay: Well, I think leading race conversations for teachers always took skill, but now it takes bravery, too. My biggest concern now is that on top of all that it takes to do it well, now it requires a teacher in some communities to be brave enough to even try. Because one of the worst things about these laws is it gives parents and community members who may be of ill will, ammunition to go after teachers for anything. Because it's all interpretations. Like, I taught a lesson about Martin Luther King. "Oh, you're trying to indoctrinate," you know? The definition of critical race theory is so nebulous and it's all over the place, which means that every single lesson, every single unit that someone doesn't like, they now will start inquiries about it, they'll now be throwing it up on social media. And so I'm concerned that even if a teacher does what they need to do to keep the law, to abide by it, they need bravery to even attempt the process at all. Because even doing it the right way, you're still going to get in trouble.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, the way some of the laws are written, it appears that discussions in any classroom that takes historical actors' or literary figures' identity into consideration, racial identity, ethnic identity, gender identity into consideration, the laws are written so broadly that it almost precludes conversations of that kind, or makes them, as you say, dangerous for teachers, requiring some bravery.

Matthew Kay: Well, it seems like they're written for that purpose: for them to be just broad enough to hobble all discussion about race because, you know, if you squint your eyes and look sideways at it, everything is going to be critical race theory that mentions race.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, and I worry teachers are going to make the understandable choice to say, "I've got to keep my job." And then the flip side of that, the potential sort of brain drain, you know, from teaching, of those who say, "Well, forget it." This is no longer what I intended to do. And having some of our best people decide that this profession in certain places is no longer viable to them, which is an equally terrible outcome of these kinds of laws.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely.

Bethany Jay: You have certainly, in your own classroom, made it practice to facilitate these honest race conversations. And so as we're talking about teachers needing some bravery to approach these conversations in the coming year, can you talk a little bit about the benefits that you found for your students, for your classroom, when you're really able to engage in these very difficult learning experiences?

Matthew Kay: The most basic benefit is the students like the units better. I think there's this assumption that because we're talking about race, we're talking just about hardship, or we are putting these kids through struggle. And that's inaccurate if you're doing it right. My students like Lord of the Flies better because I bring a racial lens to it. That makes it more interesting. Other than that, it's dry. And for my colleagues who teach history, it's the same kind of thing. That particular lens gives you more to talk about. It gives them stuff to debate. It gives them stuff to connect to how the world is now. And that makes kids like units better. And that's the biggest thing I sell to my student teachers. Like, if you want your kids to be more plugged into your units, don't ignore race. It's not even add race to it, it's just don't ignore it when it's obvious. Don't ignore it. Engage it. It's there. Yes, occasionally, if you learn something about privilege and you have white skin, that could be an uncomfortable class, right? But uncomfortable doesn't have to mean not safe. Like, it just means, "Oh, oof!" You know? "I learned something and it made me uncomfortable. I'll survive that." Which by the way, is one of my biggest a-ha moments about all of these laws being passed is that it assumes the worst about their kids.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Matthew Kay: They're like, "My kids can't handle this." And I'm like, "My kids can."

Bethany Jay: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Matthew Kay: Like, "Why can't your kids handle this? I don't understand why your kid cannot wrap their mind around the idea that someone can be an objectively bad person for owning enslaved people, and also be a brilliant mind on how to design a country." Like, those two truths can be true. And I don't understand why you think that your kids can't wrestle with that, because mine can. My kids find it an intriguing thing to talk about. Apparently, your kids are going to crawl into a ball and quit. Like, I don't understand. It's like, I believe more in your children than you believe in your own.

Bethany Jay: Right. And the other thing that it assumes is that our students aren't encountering that information elsewhere, right?

Matthew Kay: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: When, if we don't talk to our students about privilege in classrooms, they're still encountering the same kind of information, we're just giving them less tools to process and make sense of it by avoiding it in the classroom.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely. The history of keeping stuff from children is not a particularly successful history. The history of, like, abstinence-only education or, like, the DARE program or—like, these are not roaring successes.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: And why people think that this particular attempt at censorship is going to be any better. The era of being able to lock your kids up in your own little information bubble is quickly ending. As connected as the world is, they're going to be encountering ideas on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and whatever they invent next year. If anything, it would make sense for you to actually want your local school to be kicking the ideas around, because other than that, they're going to get it on YouTube.

Bethany Jay: And the internet is probably the worst place for students to be encountering these ideas without any tools to understand them or to process them. We all know that the internet is the absolute opposite of a safe space.

Matthew Kay: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: So that leads me to thinking about another benefit of doing this in a classroom is that teachers like you can make the classroom a safe space for students to explore these ideas with an authority figure who's there to guide them. What does safe space mean in your classroom?

Matthew Kay: I think first it's important to address the myth-making around safe space. When both bad actors and just confused people misinterpret the term "safe space," they think that it just means everyone's comfortable, they think that no one feels challenged in, like, this, t-ball, everybody wins kind of scenario. Everyone gets a trophy.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Kay: That's what they think it is, but safe means safe. Safe means this curriculum, this teacher, my classmates, the structure of this room is not meant to do me harm. And I think anyone who disagrees with that, I really have to question why they're around kids. You can be profoundly uncomfortable by the things that you learn and still feel safe. My daughter looks out the window when we're driving and she sees a truck and she says "Car." And I will say, "No, baby, that's a truck. It's not a car." And she's uncomfortable in that moment as that schema is—as those new connections are being made in her brain. She's uncomfortable. She's like, "I thought I had the road all figured out. And apparently…"

Bethany Jay: It's got wheels. It's on the road.

Matthew Kay: "It's got wheels. Feels like a car to me. I don't understand what the issue is." She's uncomfortable, but she feels safe with me. You know, your students should feel uncomfortable, and if they don't, they're not learning anything. When I say "safe," I mean that in being uncomfortable, you're in a space where you feel willing to take risks. You feel willing to be vulnerable. You feel willing to say, "I don't know," to ask somebody else, those kinds of things. And in a lot of classroom environments, that's not the case. Kids are in a state of constantly protecting themselves from the second they walk into the room. Instead of being in a space of, "I am willing to be vulnerable in this learning space. I'm willing to admit what I don't know publicly." When I say "safe space," I mean a space where that happens.

Bethany Jay: So as teachers, how do we actually create a safe space in our classroom? How do we make our classrooms safe for our students who are in it every day?

Matthew Kay: There are two things that I focus on. The first one is creating a house talk environment. The phrase "house talk" comes from when I was growing up, you know, there were some things where if I overheard my parents speaking, they would say, "Hey, boy, this is house talk." And that meant, you know, don't talk about it outside this house.

Bethany Jay: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Matthew Kay: Exactly.

Bethany Jay: Kind of discussions.

Matthew Kay: Exactly. This is meant for the family. Like, don't go out there saying you heard Mom say this. But when I'm describing house talk relationships and house talk environment, I am definitely not referring to this bunker mentality that some teachers can form with their kids where it's like, "It's me and you on the inside and it's us against the world." That is not at all what we're speaking about. It's about making sure that students feel like people in this room, in this space, in this moment, care about them as people, not as their algorithmic potential to get As and Bs and Cs, but as like, "I am a human with interests, and this person who's leading this conversation knows that I'm a human with interests. I'm not some bot that you're throwing discussion prompts at to get certain responses." Which, to be frank, a lot of kids navigate school as if that's the case. Which is troubling for us as teachers sometimes because we're trying to engage them in conversation, and they're like, "Whoa, you're asking me this question that requires vulnerability. You want me to unpack my privilege or talk about this racialized violence that I went through, and you don't know me. You know, you don't know me at all. Why would I emote in front of you? Why would I admit weakness or admit frustration or admit confusion in front of you?" And so the first part is creating activities that deal with that directly, and trying to create more of that family environment so that kids are a little bit more willing to go there with you.

Bethany Jay: What kind of activities do you do? Can you bring us through one or two?

Matthew Kay: Yeah, there's no shortage of them. I stole two of them—good news and high-grade compliments—from a brilliant colleague I had, Zac Chase. In my class, I noticed that my kids loved me, and in his class, I noticed that they loved each other. And I would look and I'd be like, "I want he's got. Like, I want that. That's sustainable. As I get less and less cool and more and more corny, as I get older, that's going to remain. So what's he doing?"

Bethany Jay: Once the dad jokes come into the classroom.

Matthew Kay: Exactly. It's really easy when I'm 22 years old, but now at 37, if it was just me, that would not get the job done. But his stuff was sustainable. And so good news and high-grade compliments, I always want to make sure I publicly give credit to him because I saw them in his class. Good news is where at the top of the week, they share something good that's going on in their lives. And it could be something as small as I had a good breakfast, or as large as my cousin is out of prison. And we encourage them to share amongst themselves, and ask each other questions and those kinds of things. And high-grade compliments is where, you know, you have the kids think about or journal about something that they appreciate about a classmate, and then they share it publicly.

Matthew Kay: The one from my class that I didn't steal is "Burn five." It essentially means I spend the top of every class speaking to them human to human, not teacher to student. Whether it's 30 seconds, 90 seconds, five minutes, 10 minutes, depending on whatever's planned that day. We'll talk about, like, who won the Sixers game, or how did the prom go, et cetera, et cetera, those kinds of things, so I can make sure that interpersonal stuff isn't happening in a garbage time. It's happening at the top of the lesson. It's the most important thing. Okay, now let's do some teaching and learning. We need to build a space where kids feel comfortable in a world of social media where all of their flaws can be put on blast immediately. "How dare you have a question about this? How dare you be confused about this? Shouldn't you know all of these things? Shouldn't you, blah, blah, blah."

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: That's their existence. You make a mistake, you ask a quote-unquote "dumb question" in class, someone tweets about it and thousands of people know about it by noon.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: That's terrifying.

Bethany Jay: Is the assumption with house talk that what a student says in moments of vulnerability or just in general in your classroom is not going to be sort of thrown back at them later in the school day or on social media? Like, is that an assumption that is implicit or explicit as you're creating the safe space in your classroom?

Matthew Kay: It has been more implicit than explicit. My biggest thing isn't "Don't do it." I'm trying to change the relationships amongst the kids so kids don't want to do it.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: You don't want to put that kid on blast because they didn't put you on blast when you were confused about something. Let's say if a kid shares for good news, "Hey, I'm celebrating the Eid holiday with my family." And a kid raised their hand who's not familiar with that, and he says, “I don't know what that holiday is." And they share. It's a little bit harder 20 minutes later if one of those kids makes—you know, if they speak inelegantly about a specific race issue or whatever, it's just a little bit harder for that other kid in that exchange to not give them the benefit of the doubt.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: They're like, "Well, we just kind of bonded over this. I know that's a good dude." So they're in a space where, like, I don't really want to own you. Like, on social media so-and-so owns. I don't want my kids to want to own each other. And that's why I think house talk is necessary if you are trying to have race conversations and other sensitive conversations in class because the outside world is teaching them the exact opposite: to own each other, to embarrass each other, to put stuff out there. In a house talk environment, it's kind of like we don't want to do that to each other. We want to take care of each other. We're all trying to learn here.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Matthew Kay: If you're doing all of that, you're making great gains towards a safe space. Unfortunately, that's only half of it. The other half is an environment that celebrates and encourages authentic listening. The focus has got to shift from, "What can I say? How often can I say it?" to, "What can I hear from my classmates? How can I analyze that? How can I make sure that everyone in this space feels like they're being listened to?" The adult world is really not geared towards listening, and a lot of school is really not geared towards listening. So I need to not make assumptions that these kids know how to listen to each other before they come to my class. And I have to realize that it's not something I can punish my way into. I've got to teach them how to be better listeners.

Matthew Kay: I take a skills-based approach to listening. So I have three skills that we work on. The first is listening patiently, and that means making a conscious effort to show the person that is speaking that I am listening to you. So when we work that skill, we talk about nonverbals. What nonverbals are we giving the person who's speaking? We talk about, you know, stuff like eye contact and those kinds of things. And we talk about what things shouldn't we do, like raise our hands when other people are speaking, interrupt, stuff like that. And we have a lot of reflections on what we consider to be our strengths with listening patiently, and what we don't.

Matthew Kay: The second one is listening actively, and that means not only showing the speaker that I am listening to you, but also directly engaging the ideas that they are saying. And so, I'm not just looking at you and smiling and nodding to be "good," quote-unquote, I'm actually dealing with the things that are coming out of your mouth. And some ways that I help kids do this is I will, for instance, have them take notes on what their classmates are saying, or I'll give them sentence starters to show "I have heard what you are saying, and this is how I respond." "I disagree," or "I'm not sure if this holds water," or "I'm going to build off what so-and-so just said."

Matthew Kay: And the last one is to police your voice. And that means you are aware of how much space you are taking up in any given moment in a conversation. In a lot of classrooms, before they get to me, they have been rewarded for talking a lot, for raising their hand a lot, for dominating the classroom. And that's understandable, because a lot of times teachers are like, "Any time a kid raises their hand, I'm happy." And so they've been rewarded for that for their entire school career. But then when they get to me, they're in a space where they're not just rewarded for raising their hand, they need to raise their hand, say their piece and get out, get back to listening.

Matthew Kay: And a second thing that is important is this idea of whose voice gets to be centered for certain conversations. And I want to build an awareness in kids of, like, in this particular conversation, we have to make sure that this kid is heard. I still can speak, I still can share my opinion, but this kid's voice needs to be heard—if they want to, of course. If they want to share. The example that I could give is a student who has an immigrant experience, and we're discussing immigration, they should get a chance to speak. That doesn't mean they should be forced to speak, but students should be aware that if they're speaking so much and this kid hasn't had a chance to speak, or this kid raised their hand and they get frustrated because they never get called on, that's not good.

Matthew Kay: Taking that skills-based approach, that allows us to get really meta about it and talk about, like, how well did we listen to each other just then? It's like, "Oh, actually, I wasn't so good. My brain was somewhere else." Like, try to encourage those kinds of conversations among the students so that when we start talking about tough stuff, kids are aware, "Hey, if I share my story, it's probably in better hands."

Bethany Jay: Yeah. One of the things with listening patiently, and this was an aha moment for me when I read the book. If you're so focused on what you have to say that your hand's up in the middle before somebody else has finished their thought, you're not really listening to that person. And the idea of, look, hands shouldn't be raised until the previous person has finished talking, to me feels like a game changer in the classroom.

Matthew Kay: The funny thing about that is every single year I get emails and text messages from former students and mentees who are frustrated that in college people are raising their hand before they're finished speaking. It makes them furious, because it's one of the things that in my classroom was a rule, and it's kind of spread throughout our schools, so they're kind of used to this idea of when I'm speaking, everyone else is making a concerted effort to show me that they're listening to me. They go off to college, and all of a sudden people have their hands up when they're speaking. They're like, "What is this?" And they get very frustrated. You know, they get used to respect, and they get used to demanding it. And some of them will demand it in class. "Excuse me, I'm not finished speaking. Can you put your hand down?" I think that anything that makes the kids used to demanding respect, I'm going to be here for all the time anyway.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And you talk a lot about your own modeling of listening patiently and listening actively for students, and how they pick up on that doing things like referring to, "Well, I'm going to pick up on what Matt said about X with my thought about Y," creating those conversational threads consciously, and honoring what's been said before, even if you're disagreeing with it. "I hear what so-and-so said. Here's what I think about that." All of that, I think, are not only essential classroom skills but, like, essential human skills, right? You know, we've all been in those conversations with people across a dinner table or across a conference table at a meeting where you know that nobody's listening to you, they're just planning the next thing to say. And by you modeling that in the front of the classroom, and all of us as teachers modeling that in the front of the classroom, I think that can have a real impact.

Matthew Kay: Sure. And the beautiful thing about me modeling it is how far from perfect I am. I'm going to interrupt students out of excitement. And I know it because it's a weakness of mine. Like, I'm going to interrupt folks out of excitement, and this encourages their agency to say, "Hold on, Mr. Kay, I wasn't finished," which to me is so important, you know, with me as an authority figure. Like, I'm not going to pretend like I'm not an authority figure in the classroom. It's my classroom. I'm the boss. I give the grades. They don't give me grades. So as student-centered as I am, it's silly to not acknowledge that you're the lead personality in the classroom for better or for worse. And to give them ammunition to use to advocate for themselves I think is a side benefit because, you know, I'm going to be far from perfect with my listening with them. And it gives me a chance to go, "Oh, my bad, I'm sorry." And just model that that's not weakness to say, "My bad, I'm sorry." Which I want them to be doing when they mess up. I want them saying, "My bad. I'm sorry."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, You can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional development." That's PodcastPD, all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: "conversation"—all lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Bethany Jay: What do we do if that safe space breaks down? What if a student says X? What if a student comes from a really entrenched political position and is combative in the classroom? What have you done when the safe space has broken down?

Matthew Kay: The first thing is trying to determine what has happened. Is what you're seeing bullying? Is what you're seeing trollish behavior? If it's bullying or trollish behavior, and you're certain of that, then you reach into your bag of tools for whenever kids are misbehaving in class. That's a discipline issue. I think for students who are speaking to wound deliberately, and to troll, I think that's the moment in my classroom where you will see a different me. And I try to make that as stark as possible. I try to deliberately from the very beginning be very brusque and very like, "We don't do that here ever." And then I'll slap a smile right back on and go right back. I change everything about my demeanor for those 10 seconds, and then I go right back. I try to make sure it's like, this isn't my persona. I'm not one of those don't smile until December types who acts like they don't like kids. But the first level of that defense is making sure they see a clear change in my entire demeanor when those things happen. If you keep doing it then you have to leave the room. You have to go to the office, you have to go to your advisor, you have to get out of my sight because you're mean. And this is not a place where we're mean. With trolling and mean behavior, make the lines as clear to students as possible. Like, there's a difference between values conflicts and trollish behavior and bullying. We can disagree and have different values on things, and that's okay.

Bethany Jay: Can you give us an example of a values conflict?

Matthew Kay: Yeah, immigration. There are some folks who believe that we need a super secure hard border where people cannot get in, and some people believe that we do not need that. And that's a political difference that they hear in the adult world that could be filtered down into your classroom if you happen to be discussing an issue that engages immigration. Hopefully, there's something about the way your class has engaged immigration where the things they're going back and forth about are fact based.

Matthew Kay: They aren't dealing in fake news. They're dealing in fact-based issues, and then they're kicking ideas around. And those ideas might be rooted in different values about quote-unquote, "secure borders." Now once they start getting into the space of calling people aliens and saying people are thugs with, like, calves the size of watermelons or whatever that dude said, like, once they get into that kind of stuff, then we're in trolling behavior.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: And it's not just the language, it's the intent. You could be just as racist as that guy and not say that and still get checked by me. I'm like, "You said it very sweetly, but you're trying to instigate. That's an instigation." But I think the kids can have disagreements, and they can be deeply felt, like the kind of stuff that's learned at their grandfather's knee, like deeply felt. Those conflicts can emerge. But there's a difference between that and speaking to wound, speaking to instigate, speaking to inflame.

Matthew Kay: And we haven't made things easier, by the way, for kids, because we see adults and politicians name calling and doing all those things and calling it discourse.

Bethany Jay: We're not modeling proper behavior ourselves.

Matthew Kay: Yeah, we're not modeling—exactly. So thank you adult world for making our job a little harder. You know, I believe that there's a very clear difference between a values conflict and trollish behavior, and they don't have to lead to each other. But if the issue is a student says something that reflects a political view that's unpopular, and it's within the scope of the conversation, then that's where the emphasis on listening matters the most, because the other kids do have to listen to that. It's a conversation, so it's not an echo chamber. And so they have to listen to that. But also, that kid has to listen to everybody else. If you set up your structures like I do in my class, it falls under the category of listen actively. All the students, they have to take notes during all of our class conversations, you know, pull out some things that their classmates say that they find intriguing or they disagree with or stuff like that.

Matthew Kay: And then in our analytical essays for the quarter, they have to cite their classmates' contributions to our conversation in their essays. So they get to write about it and engage it. And so if you set up the listening actively structures and the kids are following them, that means that you've taken a little bit of the teeth out of some of those exchanges, because that kid can't just get up on his soapbox and just like, "Well, this is what I think. This is what I think. Da da da da da." And then not be accountable for what else happens in the room.

Matthew Kay: They still have to listen to everyone else if they want to get a good grade at least. And also in order to get praise from me. I don't put the value on you being a loudmouth. I put the value on how well are you listening to your colleagues. The other thing is, as far as debates are concerned, a lot of times those kind of moments happen that you describe, and it's a little bit not their fault. It's not the kid's fault. It's our fault. It was poor planning. Like, that's not on them.

Bethany Jay: One of the things I often see newer teachers do is I'll see in a lesson plan, "Students will have a discussion." How is this discussion happening? You know, what are the questions you're asking them to consider? What are the sources? What information are you providing them with? What sources are they looking at in order to sort of gather information? Like, discussion doesn’t just happen magically. Discussion takes planning. And a lot of that planning has to do with providing students with the necessary context that they need to enter into that discussion.

Matthew Kay: I use an example, and you can find this video on YouTube. This teacher, he had his students having the Colin Kaepernick debate. In his introduction, he says, "For those who don't know, Colin Kaepernick is a football player who has recently started blah, blah, blah." And then he gives the prompt: "Is he right?" And I'm listening to it as a teacher, and I'm like, if you have to tell them who Colin Kaepernick is…

Bethany Jay: You haven't done the work.

Matthew Kay:…the same day you're doing the debate.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Matthew Kay: Then all that you're going to get from the young people in front of you is what they hear at the dining room table. You haven't taught anything. They haven't discussed the history of protest. They haven't done any of the pre-work. So of course, later in the video, a kid says, "If he doesn't like it here, then he can just leave." And I'm like, "Well, what do you expect?" Like, that error was made way before that moment when you had decided to have a debate without teaching them anything about Colin Kaepernick, or contextualizing it in whatever subject. I'm watching the thing and I'm like, "I don't even know what subject this is."

Bethany Jay: Right. Where is this? Yeah. What class is this?

Matthew Kay: Is this history class? Is this English class? And I should be able to know right off the bat. And I see so much of that. We have a lot of debates where we're like, "Stand on this side if you think this. Stand on this side if you think this. Now go." Right? And essentially, all you're getting is, "This is what I think." And people are like, "Well, this is what I think." And there's no learning happening. It's just like tennis. They're just, like, hitting the ball back and forth. And then if it's spirited, the teacher says, "Good job, that was good." And if it's a little bit over-spirited, they say, "Oh, these kids are too immature. They don't know how to—" and I'm like, "Well, you didn't ask them to engage in anything, you just said, "Are they right?" How are you contextualizing the thing you're discussing in prior learning that the kids have done?

Matthew Kay: Or are you saying, "Colin Kaepernick is a football player. By the way, do you agree with his protest?" Like, that's going to end poorly.

Bethany Jay: Right. He's a football player who hates the police.

Matthew Kay: Yes.

Bethany Jay: Discuss. Yes.

Matthew Kay: Discuss. You know, all you've done is replicate the comment section under a YouTube video.

Bethany Jay: Right, right. These difficult conversations, like you brought up with the Kaepernick example, is not possible unless we are also making good curricular decisions. And you brought up what not to do, and I'm going to steal that conversation from you and show that video in my own class when I'm back in my methods classroom this year. Can you give us an example of how you've kind of approached researching and planning for a particularly difficult lesson in your classrooms?

Matthew Kay: An example would be how I approach Jim Crow when I'm teaching Richard Wright's Native Son. So the character is from the Jim Crow South, and I want my students to be able to fully contextualize this character's upbringing as the upbringing that a lot of folks had, and maybe even their parents or grandparents. I have a slide show that I work with, and I isolate specific Jim Crow laws, about six or seven of them, and I put them up on the board. Like, "You're not allowed to share books," or "Your dead can't be buried in the same graveyard." You know, those kinds of things. And what we try to do is I ask the kids,"Why do you think this law existed?" Outside of racism. Let's assume they're all racist. Like, they're all racist. What specific racist reason causes this? And they said, "You can't share books." And the kids are like, "Well, maybe they want to keep the books out of the hands of Black schools because they are underfunding the Black schools. So therefore…" And the kids kick those ideas around just as a way to get us started. And some of those are uncomfortable because they might even see direct ties to, like, the bad funding in these Jim Crow schools to the bad funding in the schools in Philadelphia where I teach.

Matthew Kay: Or they have a rule about Black men can't cut white women's hair. And the kids always jump immediately to, like, "Well, you know, they're afraid of Black men being rapists," and stuff like that. And that hits home for some of the kids on the way they've been treated or kids from interracial families or those kind of things. But through the lens of just looking at the laws, what could they be thinking, I found to be a way to get them attached to this character and connect their own lives and the history, and so they can better analyze the book. The other similar conversation is we look at the term "ghetto," and I do who, what, where, when, why? Like, what are the assumptions about this word? What are some of the connotations and denotations of the word? And it's like, who? Who lives there? What? What do you find there? What don't you find there? And they're like, "Grocery stores!"

Bethany Jay: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Matthew Kay: We go through all of those things for the perception. And then when we get to "when," we talk about redlining and all those kinds of things. But that simple structure of who, what, where, when with a word, it helps kids, again, connect their own experiences and the things that they've heard about a phrase that shows up in the book that we're reading. And that's my goal. I want them to be able to meaningfully connect their experiences to what we're learning, and even more so to own what they don't know.

Matthew Kay: Like, "I don't know where this word came from." Because some of them know how that word was used in World War II with Jewish people in Europe. Some people don't. So it gives the kids a chance to get that sharing in a very low-stakes environment. It's like, "Well, I've heard it this way." And like, "Oh, okay." And it gets a time for me to do that without a lecture. They get to share their knowledge, so I'm not framing the conversation in a "Is Kaepernick right or wrong" kind of way.

Bethany Jay: Right, right.

Matthew Kay: We're going to gather information, we're going to do some inquiry, we're going to try to figure out why do I think they wrote that law? Why do I think they do that? Okay, we can actually research that now. And then if we want to have a debate, we can have a debate, but we can have a debate when we've already teased out the things that are worth teasing, and where the kids aren't just going to eventually graduate to throwing barbs at each other.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, and a lot of what I'm hearing is really being conscious as a teacher of the different contexts that your students need. You know, the most shocking things that we're going to talk to students about are the things that need context the most, before you just throw them at them in front of the classroom. The other thing that I find newer teachers do, I call it a "shock and awe" kind of teaching. You know, I'm going to grab students' attention with something that is very shocking, and then we're going to sort of unpack from there. I'm thinking of beginning a unit on Jim Crow with a graphic lynching image that you haven't prepared students for. And that's not really creating the safe space in your classroom, or that's not really going to lead to the great conversations that you want.

Matthew Kay: Absolutely. And I think sometimes we associate crying or shouting or any of those displays of emotion as engagement, or even worse as learning. And sometimes, you know, we'll say, "That was a good day. It got deep." Like, all you did is make them upset.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, you made them nervous to come to class the next day.

Matthew Kay: Now they're nervous to come to class. Like, you haven't—and so I respect the intention, but we need to make sure we know what learning looks like. And teachers of goodwill make those kind of mistakes. I know that I have made those kind of mistakes, because we want to grab kids' attention because that's the whole ballgame. So I respect the instinct, and I'm a little easier on teachers than some folks in the social media world might be when they go a little far trying to grab attention.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And it goes to the intent, right? You know, like, what's the intent with that? Is it to foster a good conversation or, you know, is it to…

Matthew Kay: Yeah. It can be bad practice.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: Like, it could be something that shouldn't be repeated. It could be something that they need to apologize for the next day. All of those things I have done, and I am always apologizing to my kids. I'm like, "Too far? Oh, sorry. Oh, I—"like, that's—you know? But, you know, there is a little bit of energy that I just want to acknowledge out there that is just, like, really hard on teachers right now.

Bethany Jay: Oh, yeah.

Matthew Kay: It's like, you're simultaneously supposed to be brave enough to have conversations, and then also perfect at having them.

Bethany Jay: Right, right.

Matthew Kay: That is tough.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, and I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries. We prepare detailed show notes for each episode of this podcast, so that you can use what you learn here in the classroom. You'll find relevant resources like "How to Check your Lessons for Unconscious Bias," as well as a full transcript, complete with links to materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Once again, here's my co-host Bethany Jay and her conversation with educator Matthew Kay.

Bethany Jay: One of the things that is very similar between teaching English as you do and teaching history, and there's a lot of similarities and there's a lot of potential, I think, for interdisciplinary work between history teachers and English teachers in high schools, but one of the many similarities is the fact that students are going to encounter outdated, sensitive or downright offensive language, images or ideas in the different source material that we deal with. You've tackled that kind of material in your classroom, you know, particularly the N-word as it appears in different source material that you use. I know many of my students are very worried, like you say, about people are hard on teachers, and they're worried about showing students different sources, and the language that might be in sources or even the ideas that might be in sources, and they're worried about ending up on Facebook or, you know, on the local news the next day. So can you talk with us a little bit about how you've kind of handled that kind of material in your classroom?

Matthew Kay: Well, unfortunately, I can't promise that folks aren't going to end up on Facebook or the news. I want them to be on the news because they're doing something right. If you're on the news because you're, you know, disturbing a dangerous or racist status quo, then unfortunately, that's the nature of the business right now. I just don't want folks on the news for bad pedagogy or something careless, something that with more reflection they would have done differently. As far as when I talk about the N-word, what's very important about that conversation is how necessary it is to really understand Kindred, which is the text that they're reading.

Matthew Kay: So Octavia Butler's Kindred, the story takes place in the mid '70s. The protagonist, Dana, she's transported back in time to the antebellum South and to the bedroom of this little white boy. And he uses the N-word in a super casual, not very mindful way, because that's just how he addresses Black people. That word is the first thing that Octavia Butler has this character wrestle with before she wrestles with all of the other horrible things that enslaved people have to deal with. The first injustice that she faces is language.

Bethany Jay: Which prompts then your conversation about it in your classroom.

Matthew Kay: Exactly. Octavia Butler is doing something very specific in that scene with her use of the word. And you're not really getting Kindred, like, getting it, getting it, unless you have that conversation. And, it's important that we don't skip how important it is because sometimes it's not as important. If you're reading a book and it has the N-word in it because it's a historical document and that's what they called Black people then, it might be enough to say, "Hey, look. Reminder, you're going to see this word. Here's why we're looking at this text." Boom. And keep moving. Because that isn't why you're reading it.

Matthew Kay: On the English end, I've seen teachers mistakenly do that with Huck Finn. And they'll make two days out of, like, "Hey, Mark Twain uses the N-word 219 times in the book." And they'll read all these articles about versions of it that don't have the N-word, and all those kinds of things. And they'll focus on it as if that's the thing they're teaching with the book. They won't talk about anything else.

Matthew Kay: And they'll even ask disingenuous questions like, "Should we even be reading the book?" And they're like, "Yo, I just put my name in this book. Of course we're going to read it. Like, you just handed it out."

Bethany Jay: Isn't that your decision? Yeah.

Matthew Kay: "That's your decision. Why are you putting that on me? I'm just a 16-year-old kid. Like, what are you putting it on me for? You're the one who said we have to read it." And I feel like if you're going to teach Huck Finn, then it's not because of the N-word. And if it is, then you shouldn't be teaching it. But I'm assuming you're teaching it for other reasons, other themes. So then it might be enough to not just dwell and be like, "Hey look, here's why we're reading this book. Here's our general rule-making around this word." And so that would follow for all instances that you mention, like, with tough imagery or outdated ideas or stuff like that. First, you have to decide, is it absolutely necessary for you to highlight that thing in a way that takes up a lot of energy and air? Or are you making the problem worse by highlighting it that way? It's a subtle but it's an important instinct for us to develop. Like, does this need to be highlighted, or does it need to be mentioned and just pushed forward?

Bethany Jay: Right.

Matthew Kay: And here's an example. I do a Supreme Court case law unit with my 10th graders, and I made a mistake of not fully checking my student teacher's example that he was going to use because he's a brilliant student teacher, and I'm like, "He's got it." And like, the one time I didn't check, one of the justices used the R-word to refer to someone who has a mental difference. And he was just reading it aloud. He was reading, and he came across the word and internally I'm like, "Oh, crap."

Matthew Kay: Like, oops! And it's one of those things. And it was a perfect source for what he was trying to teach. It was perfectly aligned with the skills we were doing. It was perfectly aligned with what we were discussing. Like, there was nothing wrong with the example, but he said the word. And then soon enough—and we're on Zoom obviously, also—and so the kids immediately in the chat, it's like, "Excuse me. I just want to say something, Mr. So-and-so. You really shouldn't say that word da da da da da." And to his credit, that's why I'm putting him on blast in a good way. To his credit, he immediately was like, "Oh, my bad." Like, "Oops, you are right. Thank you for bringing that up. My bad." And then he pushed on with the rest of his lesson. But it was like an earnest 10 seconds of no justification. No, like, "Oh, this unit's perfect. Oh, stop being so sensitive. Oh, this." None of that. It was just "My bad." And "I'm sorry. You're right. I shouldn't say it."

Bethany Jay: That's awesome.

Matthew Kay: And he just moved on and just taught the rest of his awesome lesson. And I'm like, that's how you handle it. But, you know, the source itself, I would be sad if he felt like we couldn't use this source, even though it's perfect for what we're discussing because it has this word in it. It's a historical document. That's what they used to say. But just when you're reading aloud, you don't say it, or if you get a chance to blank something out or whatever, you manage. But, you know, it's subtle decisions that we make.

Bethany Jay: You were talking about your class on Kindred. What you actually did with the N-word was write the word out on the board in big, all capital letters to sort of frame in some ways the discussion that you were having with your students. How did your questioning proceed from that kind of, "All right, here we are. This is what we're doing now." Then how do you sort of pull your students into that conversation?

Matthew Kay: Yeah. Well, what I did is try to replicate what the character is feeling in engaging the word for the first time. Like, she's not used to hearing it in, like, hard "ER", like, in all of it's viciousness. She's not used to hearing it, and she's especially not used to hearing it from a little white boy. And so I put on the board to just try to replicate, "What is your relationship with this word? What are you feeling right now in this moment?" And, you know, that's the first prompt. What's your relationship to the word? And I encourage them to be honest. And the kids, you know, to their credit normally are. They're in a space where some kids are like, "I use it all the time. I used it this morning. You know, this is part of my language." And some kids are like, "I was told never under any circumstances to ever, ever, ever use this word." And, you know, the kids in a former camp they're all Black. You know, the kids in the latter camp are mixed. And there's a lot of complexity there.

Matthew Kay: And basically, it's sharing first. Like, a lot of the roots for the conversation, for it to be super student-centered is me re-prompting off of what kids say, which is one of those skills that I find most useful, but it's one of the things that's my biggest goal for student teachers is to get them good at re-prompting off of what kids say, because I think a good portion of the whole ballgame is that.

Matthew Kay: You know, if an African-American kid says, "Well, my mom said we should never use this word because it's the last thing that someone heard when they were lynched," and I'm like, "Ah, interesting. Thank you for sharing that. You know, does everyone understand that? She said…" and then I repeat back what was said. And then, you know, if a kid earlier had said something about reclaiming the word, I'll say, "One group says that you can reclaim it, and one group says that you can't. What do you think about that?" And it's not like who's right? It's more like you set up the idea. That's how it turns into, "Is Kaepernick right or wrong?" It's more like, "What do you think about this?" And then they go back and forth. "Well, you can reclaim. No, you can't." And then we kick that around, and then we table that and say thank you. And then I take two other kid experiences or three other kid experiences. Bring it up, then table it. Bring it up and table it. And you go in that routine. And with something like that N-word conversation, I did that for about a decade. You know, after the first couple of years, I had heard so many of the kids' responses that it was rare that a kid was saying something I was completely unprepared for.

Bethany Jay: Right, right.

Matthew Kay: And so I knew like, well, when someone says this, then these are the kind of follow-ups to ask. Which is why we should allow teachers, obviously, to teach the same thing a few times so we can get good at it, you know? For any administrators who are listening, that makes things easier.

Bethany Jay: I mean, one of the things that I like about how you discuss leading these conversations is that not every conversation needs to come to a resolution, you know? Not every conversation needs to come to a consensus and a decision among the classroom. Often the conversation itself is the point, and when we have the conversation, we can, like you say, just all right, table it, and let's move on to the next series of issues that we're going to deal with. And I think often as teachers, you know, the instinct is to try to get everybody to the same place all the time, right? Because we're so used to assessment, and we're so used to sort of thinking in that framework when you're having these conversations. Like, no, it's okay to just say, "All right, here's where we are," right? And now we're going to move on. Particularly when you're talking about students sort of sharing out their own experiences, where there's not necessarily—there's not a right or wrong here, right? That we can have the conversation, and the conversation is the point.

Bethany Jay: The other thing you brought up is administrators, and your administrator—your principal, I believe it was—walked into the room with the word in giant letters on the board. You know, in your case, your principal knew what you were doing and was supportive of it. And if you could talk a little bit about that kind of relationship. But then also, I don't think you would necessarily advise that all teachers take that strategy when leading discussions of this kind. So two different points if you want to sort of take them on.

Matthew Kay: So he'd seen my unit plans. He'd seen how I had built to this moment, why I was having this moment, what was coming after this moment, and that this was above board. And so as a leader, he stepped in and encouraged me. So that's good. And so the things that lead to that are what I just described. Like, there's got to be a clear transparency. Like, this is what I'm planning. Here's why. That transparency has to go both ways. He's got to be able to go, "Yeah, I don't want you to do that." And I have to be like, "Okay." You know, it's a two-way street there. I wanted to make sure it's super clear that that particular angle was something that I could take because of my unique privileges in that situation. My brown skin is such that I can do that. If I was white, I would not. That doesn't mean I can't have the conversation. And you can even use my chapter as a prompt, Not Light chapter five, which is where the story is held. You can say, "So there's this Black guy, and he does this, and I can't do this. Let's talk about it."

Bethany Jay: "I'm not doing that." Yeah.

Matthew Kay: "I'm not doing that. Let's talk about that. What rules am I honoring by not doing that?" There are societal rules about who can say it and who can't. And those rules make sense. And we can discuss them, we can unpack them, we can try to see where they come from, but we don't give each other permission to break them. If you say it, there will be consequences. Like, if you as a white person says this word and then you justify it with like, "Well, it says it in the book," the people of color around you might be in a space where they're like, "I don't like this person anymore." And that's well within their rights. Given their histories with the word, they're not being hypersensitive that they're saying, "I don't want to mess with you anymore. I don't want to work with you." Like, that's well within, and we need to understand that. And you're full of hubris if you think that those rules don't apply to you just because you're a scholar or just because you're a teacher or just because you voted a certain way or whatever. Your skin's still white. Those are those rules. Now can you discuss those rules? Absolutely. They're worth discussing, you know, if they make sense in the unit that you're teaching.

Bethany Jay: As we end our conversation, and we've thought about a couple of particular moments in your own classroom, and a lot of general ideas about how we might lead these sorts of conversations, what would you like to leave teachers with as they're considering going back into the classroom in September, maybe not having seen their kids in person for over a year or so? What would you like to leave our teachers with as they think about building relationships, and trying to have these sorts of conversations in their classrooms?

Matthew Kay: I would like teachers, colleagues to be proud of themselves. Like, you made it. There's a whole lot out there that's hard on us, and puts pressure on our shoulders. Like, we need to make sure that we do this. Like, in some spaces, it's like, we need to make sure that we catch the kids up. In other spaces it's like, we need to make sure that we solve racism this year. [laughs] And everything in between. And I was nervous about that discourse throughout the entire pandemic where it's like, "Let's reimagine schools. Let's do this." I'm like, "Sure? Yes, that would be good. Let's survive first." Like, let's make sure that when kids come back they feel loved and cared for and taken care of. You know, let's not put pressure on ourselves to do everything, because that pressure is probably going to be pretty violent when school starts. There's this idea that just teaching good lessons is somehow not enough.

Bethany Jay: Right, right.

Matthew Kay: Like, teaching good units is not enough. Crafting good projects is not enough. You've got to also blank. And I'm more than a little wary about that, because a lot of us are so close to our emotional capacity already, and school hasn't even started.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Matthew Kay: And the kids? Forget about it. I can't imagine being 15 years old living through these past two years. I can't imagine it. And so to reject some of the pressure that's being put on us in this moment, I think, is important. As far as race and equity is concerned, and justice? My advice would be to try to avoid home run thinking. Try to avoid, "I'm going to teach this unit that's going to solve this. I'm going to teach this unit that's going to make them all understand all of their privileges." Instead, trying to find ways to layer in one or two good race conversations every unit. And that's not small. That's massive. I'm still trying to get to one to two every unit where it makes sense, right? And I'm still not there, and I wrote a book about it. Like, I think find one or two good race conversations, one or two good gender conversations, one or two good—like, where you apply that lens—especially for history folks—where you just apply that lens in whatever history moment you're working yourself through, just try to add one more perspective. But if you do that for every unit, that's massive.

Matthew Kay: That's a massive undertaking that we're capable of. It's so big, but also it takes the pressure off of us at the same time. We're not trying to teach that one unit that solves everything. We're trying to feather it into our conversation about whatever moment in history we're talking about. I think if you do that, then you're going to have enough stamina for the long haul. And as a bonus, you'll be able to fly a little bit under the radar of the bad actors out there. The more you go into trying to have all of these pop up conversations that are not related to your unit and you're just like, "Let's talk about white privilege. Let's talk about this election," you know, the more you do that, the more you're going to put target signs on you if you're surrounded by bad actors, which unfortunately a lot of us are discovering that we are. But if you're just bringing in a discussion prompt that thoughtfully applies a race lens to the thing you're talking about, it's just good teaching and learning. Your admin will have an easier time having your back, your students are less likely to go home and say, "Our lesson was blah, blah," you know, in some completely twisted way. It's just easy because they're just learning. They're just learning. They're like, "Well, and while discussing this, we also mentioned this." And so it feels like less of a thing. It's not cowardice to fly under the radar a little bit right now. It really isn't. It still requires bravery to mention it at all.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Matthew Kay: But there's no reason for putting unnecessary bullseyes on us by doing so many things that are outside of our curriculum involving race. Let's just infuse your curriculum with race. Make it the meaningful lens that it is for analysis, and we'll be able to have successes.

Bethany Jay: Thanks so much for having this conversation with us that both, I think, inspires and provides guidance for teachers who want to do this work, for all of us who want to do this work, but also gives us all grace to make mistakes, and to work within what we know is doable in our particular school, particular district, while still making an impact by infusing these conversations, as you say, throughout our curriculum. So thanks so much for being here. Your perspective as a teacher is so important, and I really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you, Matthew.

Matthew Kay: Thanks so much for having me. That was fun.

Bethany Jay: It was.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Matthew R. Kay is an English teacher at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. A proud product of the city's public schools, he is a columnist for Education Leadership, and the author of Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations. Mr. Kay is also the founder and executive director of the Philly Slam League.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow Era and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we put Jim Crow under the spotlight, examining its history and lasting impact.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries—associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Who Was Ella Baker?
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Kingian Nonviolence Training
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, The Story of SNCC
• Matthew Kay, Not Light (website)
• Matthew Kay, Not Light, But Fire: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Classroom
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies
• Matthew Kay, Demystifying the “Safe Space”
• Edutopia, Making Sure Your Praise is Effective
• Islam Faith, What is Eid? Why Do Muslims Celebrate This Holiday?
• Learning for Justice, The Language of the Immigration Debate
• Shawnee Mission East High School, Debate: Colin Kaepernick (video)
• The New Yorker, Richard Wright’s "Native Son"
• Learning for Justice, The Color of Law: Creating Racially Segregated Communities
• Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
• Octavia E. Butler, About the Author
• The New York Times, Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You
   

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Resources

• Learning for Justice: Article, Students Say Teach the Truth
• Learning for Justice: Article, How Culturally Responsive Lessons Teach Critical Thinking
• Learning for Justice: Lesson, Jim Crow as a Form of Racialized Social Control (grades 9-12)
• Learning for Justice: Student text, Jim Crow is Watching (grades 9-12)

Transcript

[NEWS CLIP: Critical race theory. The mere phrase sparks debate, even outrage across the country.]

[NEWS CLIP: A controversial bill could change the way your child learns about race relations in the classroom.]

[NEWS CLIP: Although it's known as the "Critical Race Theory Bill," that term isn't in the legislation itself.]

[NEWS CLIP: Debate over its potential role in school curricula has set off a firestorm that has roiled school districts and state legislatures nationwide.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This board allowed an age-inappropriate social agenda-driven curriculum into our elementary classrooms.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Parents, beware of terms like "social justice," "diversity," "equity," "inclusion." Those inherently good things are being used to disguise a biased political agenda.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It is not your job to force these ideas onto my child. Your job is to teach my child math, language arts, science and history, including American history.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [taps microphone] Let's just keep it civil.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: In the third grade, in the CMS Elementary School, my child went on a field trip to Latta Plantation. When she got home and I asked what she learned on the plantation, she told me about farm animals and farming. I asked if she'd learned about slavery and she looked at me puzzled and said, "No." When I followed up with her teacher, she said that slavery was not covered in third grade standards for history, North Carolina agriculture was. Taking any child, regardless of their race to a plantation in North Carolina and not talking about slavery is exactly what those against historical accuracy want to happen.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: This is American history. All of it should be taught in a certain context, and also age-appropriate.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Critical race theory is not in our schools and it never was, and the people here to complain about it did not know what it was six months ago and had never heard of it. That's why they're going after "diversity," "equity" and "inclusion" instead, and trying to pretend they're the same thing. They aren't.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Fear has no place in education!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Currently, there are five states who now have already banned and another almost a dozen states that are considering banning the teaching of critical race theory.]

[NEWS CLIP: It would dramatically limit how teachers next year could draw links between America's past and present.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... this legislation is aimed at teaching racial harmony, but critics across our area say it will whitewash history in the classroom.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It will limit what public school students can be taught about things such as white privilege or racial equity.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: As of July 1, teachers won't be able to teach that the United States or the state of Iowa is fundamentally or systemically racist. They're also barred from race scapegoating and race stereotyping, and from creating discomfort or guilt because of one's race.]

Bethany Jay: [sighs] These times are tough—especially for educators.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When are they not?

Bethany Jay: Right? Not only is this global pandemic still raging, now legislators, parents and educators are debating whether or not to teach about race and racism.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: To say nothing about the attempted coup on January 6.

Bethany Jay: It feels like things haven’t changed much in the wake of last year's "racial reckoning."

[NEWS CLIP: We keep hearing the drumbeat of, "Where is the evidence?" Right here, Sean. 234 pages of sworn affidavits. These are…]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We looked at cases of mail ballot fraud, assistance fraud and illegal voting prosecuted by the state of Texas over the last 17 years. Voter fraud offenses that were prosecuted represent a small fraction of the votes cast since 2004.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's not to say that election fraud doesn't exist—it does. But it's on a scale that is so small in comparison to what is being reported.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: If you include cases that are still pending, it's still less than one percent.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It just doesn't make any sense.]

[NEWS CLIP: Meanwhile, President Trump continues to pound the table on alleged voter fraud, but just moments ago Trump's attorney general ...]

[NEWS CLIP: Attorney General William Barr says the Justice Department has not found evidence to support allegations of widespread fraud that could change the results of the presidential election.]

[NEWS CLIP: Republican lawmakers have continued to push the message on social media, again without any evidence to support it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: For more than a decade, a growing number of Americans have become less confident that their votes were accurately cast and counted.]

[NEWS CLIP: The state of Georgia has just overnight passed a new law that really attacks a key tenet of American democracy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: By March 24, lawmakers had introduced 361 restrictive election bills in 47 statehouses.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: A lot of the components of this law that have been focused on are those that would restrict ballot access in some ways, specifically for a disproportionate number of voters of color and low-income voters here in the state of Georgia.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... in the Texas state legislature are rapidly advancing some of the most restrictive voting laws that we have seen in our Republic since the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s.]

Bethany Jay: Hasan, if our students are going to understand the current moment, we have to examine the history of post-emancipation America. To understand the wave of voter suppression laws sweeping across the country, we have to study the history of voter suppression during the Jim Crow Era.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And as you know Bethany, it's even more than that. We also have to understand that segregation is still inscribed in our landscape, and is rooted in this history of post-emancipation America. We have to look at how where we live and how we interact evolved over time.

Bethany Jay: Exactly. Housing inequality in the United States didn’t just happen naturally. And it wasn’t born during slavery. The laws and structures we see today come after emancipation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mass incarceration, police violence, these mechanisms to control and disenfranchise African Americans all date back to the Jim Crow era.

[NEWS CLIP: The breach on federal grounds has many people comparing what happened yesterday to the protests and marches that we've seen over the summer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law and so I wasn't concerned.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I told them to just leave the Capitol and in response, they yelled, "No, man. This is our house!"]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Many, many known organizations with ties to white supremacy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Would this attack have happened? Would it have been allowed to happen if those who stormed the Capitol were there to stand up—stand up for Black lives rather than fight for white supremacy?]

Bethany Jay: So many people were shocked by the insurrection on January 6, but the use of political violence to shore up white supremacy is also a part of this history. We have to give our students a basis for understanding that history, and even the history of how we understand race in the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Despite the obstacles we've been talking about, we also see the Black community rise during this period. They establish scores of HBCUs, which still play a major role in higher education. They develop thriving black business districts in Chicago, Durham, Atlanta and Tulsa. And they create amazing new music and literary traditions. Which is why we need to talk about the oppression—and the resilience.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

Bethany Jay: I'm Bethany Jay. And this is Teaching Hard History. We're a production of Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This season, we're offering a detailed look at how to teach the history of Jim Crow America. In each episode, we'll explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Bethany Jay: In the coming episodes, we're going to shine a spotlight on the era of Jim Crow, starting with the period directly following the Civil War—Reconstruction, and it's eventual failure. Did I say "failure?" That's the old story! What we're talking about is the intentional undoing of Reconstruction.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Precisely. So let's begin.

Bethany Jay: Well, it's been a year, Hasan, and a lot of this year has probably felt very heavy and hard for both of us and those who are listening to us. But there is good news—recent good news, in fact. And one of the sort of recent pieces of good news is the fact that Juneteenth is now a national holiday. Did you celebrate Juneteenth, Hasan? And what are your thoughts on it being an official holiday now?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I did indeed celebrate Juneteenth. And I know there were Black folk who were like, "Look, we didn't ask for a holiday. We asked for reparations." And they didn't get it. But it is still important. It is a modest measure in the move towards full equality, but it is an important one. It is meaningful because it creates these opportunities for conversation about emancipation, about slavery, which we just have not done at an official national level. So Juneteenth? Certainly worth celebrating, modest but meaningful. And that also wasn't the only good news that we saw most recently. We've seen some Confederate monuments come down in some really important places.

Bethany Jay: Right? On July 10, after a years-long legal battle and, of course, that deadly Unite the Right Rally in 2017, finally, the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues came down in Charlottesville. Those statues, as you know, were part of a whole cultural offensive to propagate a lost cause, myth of the civil war and create a sort of cultural foundation for white supremacy and segregation. And the fact that they're no longer standing is certainly a move in the right direction. So that is indeed good news.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But this wouldn't be America if we did not balance the good news with some sobering news. You know, we've been dealing with, in 2020, a wave of voter suppression laws. And this wave of voter suppression laws, I mean, we're talking about in the hundreds that are emanating from various state legislatures around the country, you know, also come out of a context: the resurgence of white supremacy in the last four years under the Donald Trump administration, the reaction and response to the Big Lie.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That somehow his loss in the November 2020 election was a result of African Americans and people of color in particular casting fraudulent and illegal ballots, and therefore, it is necessary to pass more stringent laws to protect the access to the ballot. I mean, these are clearly undemocratic measures designed to suppress the vote. And that comes out of a long tradition rooted in the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement coming out of Reconstruction. And, you know, to a certain extent, that wasn't a surprise, knowing a little history that this would be the response. But I'll tell you what, Bethany, what did come as a surprise to me was the vehemence with which we have seen this anti-Critical Race Theory hysteria.

Bethany Jay: [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it's tied to the voter suppression stuff. I mean, it's emanating from elected officials and politicians. But boy, you talk about people losing their mind?

Bethany Jay: Right. And of course, the Republican-led state legislatures, some of whom were put there because of voter suppression laws, are what makes these anti-critical race theory laws possible. And others have said this, but we can say it again, that what's actually being taught in American middle and high school and elementary schools is not actually critical race theory. But more than 25 Republican-led states have passed these kinds of laws, which really limit the kind of content that can be taught in the classrooms, or even the kind of trainings that teachers and other state employees can go through, sorts of anti-bias trainings.

Bethany Jay: And the language in those laws is really vague. They just say you can't teach content that's divisive, you know? So when we're talking about divisive concepts, you know, what we're really talking about is a narrative that doesn't focus almost exclusively on white actors and a celebration of American history. You know, the narrative of perpetual progress or the narrative of perpetual racial progress, as I've heard you refer to it before, and the focus on sort of great white men, right? With maybe Frederick Douglass and Pocahontas and Susan B. Anthony thrown in for good measure. And of course, I'm being a bit facetious there, but that also gets us to this idea that we'll be diving into later in the season, that whiteness, that the white experience of history in this case is the norm against which all else deviates.

Bethany Jay: But the idea is that the old way of doing things is somehow not divisive. That the African American, Latinx, LGBTQ and female students in our classroom don't feel excluded by a narrative of American history that divides them, their struggles and their achievements out of the story. There's decades of studies that tell us sort of what kind of harm that does to students when they don't see themselves represented in their classrooms and the stories that are being told. You know, so the idea that, well, this is the happy history, well, it's really not for everybody, right? It's the happy history if we're really just taking one perspective.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it ain't true, right? I mean, the version of the past that people expect us to teach if we adhere to the rules and regulations of these "anti-divisive," quote-unquote, anti-critical race theory that's included in this legislation is a version of the past that just isn't true. And that goes against everything that we are supposed to be doing as teachers. And you're asking teachers to do the one thing that they are sworn or committed not to doing, right? And that's not lying to their students either by omitting or by outright, outright lying.

Bethany Jay: Right. And we need to understand all of that history if we're going to engage in the work that needs to happen still today. And that work is all around us. We can see it, right? Just opening a newspaper. I guess nobody opens a newspaper. Clicking on a ...

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: [laughs] Clicking on a link.

Bethany Jay: Clicking on an article. Yeah. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think that speaks to the political purpose of these efforts, because if you don't teach students about how we got here, if we're not honest with our students about the past, if we don't confront hard history directly, then what you wind up doing is just reinforcing and supporting the status quo. And so those who want to maintain the status quo—which perpetuates inequality—are totally fine and are fully on board and are pushing forward this effort to make sure that we don't look critically at our history, at our present, so that we do not change anything. But, you know, I think, Bethany, that brings us to why we are doing season four of Teaching Hard History on the Jim Crow era.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When you think about the Jim Crow era and why it's important to have teachers thinking about how to teach, and learning some new content, why do you think that it’s important to disrupting these efforts to create silences around the American past and the problems that we face today?

Bethany Jay: So much of the season is about denaturalizing—if that makes sense—the moment that we're in. Really asking ourselves why is the wealth gap between white and Black families so large? You know, why have Black Americans been some of the hardest hit by COVID? Why are Black maternal death rates so much higher than white? Why are prisons disproportionately populated by people of color? Why does the government so often represent the will of the minority? When we ask those questions instead of just saying, "Well, it is what it is," instead of just, "Oh, politicians are corrupt," or whatever the sort of dismissive answers might be, we see that so much of the moment that we are in was consciously created or upheld or cultivated during the period that we're going to talk about this season. And that, for me, is part of what makes this season so particularly exciting. How about you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's the same, right? You know, we tend to, in the classroom particularly, when it centers around the Black experience, but even when it centers around just the expansion of democracy in America, we'll go American Revolution, Civil War, civil rights, present. Right? It's like, "All right. Now how did that happen?" You can't just jump from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King. And so there's a century of critical history that we have to teach in order for all of the other pieces to make sense. I agree fully with you that when we're thinking about the problems that you enumerated, the inequalities that still persist, you cannot make sense of them unless you know and understand the history between emancipation and the height of the civil rights era, the long history of racial terror, disenfranchisement. In the absence of learning about that, when students begin to think about how inequality persists—or why it persists—then their default explanation will be this thing called race.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Not because of redlining, right? That Black folk are concentrated in these communities that are under-resourced, but because Black people don't know how to save and can't get out of these communities that are under-resourced. And so it's critically important that students understand how these problems came about in the post-Emancipation era—the legacy of slavery and this new thing called Jim Crow—so that they can accurately make sense of what they're seeing today. And so that they don't default back to these stereotypes about race, because it still has this really strong explanatory pull, a default for those who are unable to see the way systems and structures in American society continue to work.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We should be clear probably about what we mean by Jim Crow. It has a very specific origin coming out of the minstrel tradition of white people in blackface and even Black actors in blackface because it was the only work they could do, engaged in the caricaturing of Black people, enslaved folk. But Jim Crow was much more than segregated water fountains or minstrel shows.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, in curriculum, or in even the way that we sort of represent this period in popular culture and other things, you know, what we see are the white and Black water fountains. You know, that stands for this entire, as you say, sort of 100-year period. And the idea that Jim Crow is just separation, that somehow it's just segregation is so incomplete.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So let me ask you, Bethany, when you think of Jim Crow, what sort of comes to mind in terms of definition?

Bethany Jay: You know, the first word that comes to mind when I think about Jim Crow is the word "systems." It is a variety of systems: political, legal, economic, social, that, in the absence of slavery was able to reinforce white supremacy when whiteness didn't immediately evoke freedom and power, and blackness wasn't immediately slavery and the lack of power. These systems governed everything from who can vote to how you might walk on the sidewalk, even geographically positioning people, you know, and limiting the options available to the African-American community in as many ways as possible. We have to understand that because we're still operating in the world that that created in so many ways. I often say to my students who are going to be teachers, "Look around your districts. Look around your classrooms. The makeup of your classrooms is not an accident. It's the product of all sorts of policies and legislation that determined where people could be and couldn't be—or what opportunities were available to different groups of people – for the past 100 years-plus."

Bethany Jay: To help you take advantage of what you learn here, we prepare detailed show notes for each episode, including a list of relevant resources—like how to teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre. There's also a complete transcript, with links to the materials mentioned by our guests. You can find them at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I think it's important to see Jim Crow as a legacy of the institution of slavery, which I think we stop talking about too soon, right? We hit the Civil War, and then we're like, "Okay, slavery is over. Now let's fast forward to something else," without thinking about its legacy, right? I mean, the principal legacy, in my opinion, of the institution of slavery is white supremacy, and that does not disappear. And so when I think of Jim Crow, I think of exactly those systems that you talked about, that immediately there's this effort to put in place new systems that could recreate the basic labor and social relationships between Black people and white people that undergirded the institution of slavery. Yes, it's legally abolished, but what drove it in the first place does not suddenly dissipate from the minds of white Southerners, and is still in the minds of white Northerners. What we're doing this season is not narrowly confining Jim Crow to one particular region—we're talking about Jim Crow America!

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm. When we were thinking about Jim Crow America—as opposed to just the Jim Crow South—it is in some ways a reaction to another of our myths that we perpetuate, that the North is the good guys, right? That we are anti-slavery, that slavery either never happened or was not important to the North, that the North fought the Civil War specifically as abolitionists to end slavery, that the North is an egalitarian mecca. You know, laws in Northern states are prohibiting the immigration of free Black people from other states, right? Warning out laws, you know, laws that prohibit Black people from holding certain jobs in Northern cities. And so as we think about what Jim Crow is, we have to think about it nationally or we're just reinforcing another one of those myths, that Jim Crow doesn't happen everywhere, that it's Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, right? It's the sort of usual suspects.

Bethany Jay: And that's as incomplete and as damaging as any other kind of version of history that we might tell ourselves. So if we think about the chronology and sort of the broad outline of how we're thinking about Jim Crow, we're really beginning in this immediate post-Emancipation period during and right at the end of the Civil War, 1870s or so, where we're going to look both at those Reconstruction Amendments: 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and their sort of purpose and how they impacted that Reconstruction period. But then also looking at how, as we get into the 1870s, we really see this undoing, this conscious undoing of a lot of the promise of Emancipation, and the limiting of opportunities for the newly-freed population through things like racial violence, through restrictive laws. And then as we move into the later part of the 1870s to the post-World War I period, really thinking about the hardening of those sort of lines between Black and white. The heyday of lynching, for example, and the constant threat of violence that is held over the Black community. The crafting and expanding of legal segregation in state legislatures all throughout the American South and beyond. And, of course, the sort of restrictive labor practices, trying to still sort of enforce the conditions of slavery, the economic sort of conditions and the labor of slavery absent the system of slavery. And it's at this point—we can't forget our monuments—that we are also looking at the Daughters of the Confederacy building the foundation for a continued loyalty to the lost cause and the racial relationships that it will engender as we move through the period. Hasan, can I throw it over to you for the post-World War I period and beyond?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yes, certainly. I think when we think about the post-World War I period in 1918, 1919, the returning of African-American soldiers, the Red Summer, I mean, this is really sort of Jim Crow maturing, as you have these efforts to reinforce inequality and segregation and white supremacy. And so we see it being represented and strengthened and enforced not only in the streets of America as Black blood begins to flow, but then also in media, in Hollywood as it matures. But at the same time, this is a period where the African-American response to Jim Crow is also maturing, the cultural flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. This is the period when Marcus Garvey's UNIA has over a million members. The NAACP is really finding its footing in the 1920s and into the early 1930s. So there's this period where Jim Crow really begins to mature. But then you have the major disruption of the Great Depression and The New Deal.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Now often we think about the New Deal as this ultimate progressive form of legislative agenda. But in many ways, we see the New Deal and the responses to the Depression strengthening Jim Crow. And so this period from the 1930s through World War II, on the one hand can be looked at as a period of Jim Crow's entrenchment, the way it gets embedded in what would become modern systems and structures, modern political and economic systems and structures. But this is also the beginning in this period, coming out of the New Deal into World War II, of Jim Crow's demise. The crumbling. We see the crumbling of Jim Crow during this period. But it's also the movement to bring Jim Crow to its knees. So the crumbling isn't just because, you know, it rained too hard one day. It's because there's an earthquake.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that earthquake is Black folk organizing to end Jim Crow. And certainly we also have to think about the legacy of Jim Crow in its various configurations, from the rise of the carceral state, for example, to the voter suppression legislation that has been sweeping the nation.

Bethany Jay: My hope as we go through this season is that we'll give teachers both a sort of chronological framework to understand this Jim Crow America, but also a thematic framework to understand it. And we've sort of been talking about our themes kind of organically, but it probably makes sense to kind of list just exactly what they are. I mean, in addition to sort of moving through very specific chronology of Jim Crow, very specific sort of periodization, we're also going to be talking about themes like: law and politics, violence and control, the structures of white supremacy, protest and resistance and building Black institutions.

Bethany Jay: So as we think about law and politics, we'll give teachers ways to understand what we're calling Reconstruction 101. Those sort of government and legal aspects of Reconstruction. But then we're also going to return to those ideas of law and politics, as we think about the New Deal, as we think about mass incarceration. Same thing with violence and control, right? We will think about lynching and the heyday of lynching in the early part of the 20th century. But that theme of the threat of violence will continue through our discussions of a variety of different topics, including Black participation in the world wars, and the response to Black veterans when they return home.

Bethany Jay: Probably one of the hardest themes that we're going to talk about for teachers to bring into their classroom is that idea of the structures of white supremacy. And for that theme, we both have a lot of content about that, content about the lost cause, content about medical racism and the ways that Black women in particular are treated during this era. We also have two episodes about teaching these topics. Both teaching approaches to race in general, and then also sort of how to create a classroom environment and how to plan your lessons to allow for students to really engage in these difficult discussions of the creation and perpetuation of white supremacy throughout this period. And of course, white supremacy doesn't happen without protest. It doesn't happen without resistance from the Black community. And that's our next theme that we're going to deal with. And this is probably one of my favorite themes that we're going to talk about, really thinking about building Black America, right? HBCUs and Black banking, for example. The Harlem Renaissance, and also sort of Black nationalism and Black political thought.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So one of the themes that we're going to explore is politics. You want to say a little bit about what we're going to focus on in terms of that as a theme within this season?

Bethany Jay: Sure. I mean, really, there's such a perfect parallel between then and now. If we look at disenfranchisement tactics during the immediate post-Reconstruction, the end of Reconstruction period and now, what we're seeing is laws that are seemingly written in a colorblind way, but are going to have a disproportionate impact or be disproportionately enforced on certain populations. And whether it is a grandfather clause or a poll tax or a literacy test in the 19th century, or restricted mail-in voting, voter ID laws, restricted polling places in the 21st century. And add on top of that the gerrymandering of districts across the South that splits African-American votes, the impact is to make it harder, if not impossible, for African-American people to vote. You know, when we ask that question of "Why in so many places are state legislatures or even our federal government seeming to represent the will of the minority?" It's because the system is rigged. And the same way the system was rigged when the quote-unquote "Redeemers" came in in 1876, the system is rigged for today. I'm sure you have stuff to add to that analysis. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, I mean, it's spot on. It's one of the things that we have to talk about, that we cannot understand the efforts to suppress the vote today without putting it in the broader context and the longer history of efforts to disenfranchise—to literally take the vote away from—African Americans. And then once it's impossible to take the vote away from the whole group, then to make it harder for smaller numbers within the group to vote. As you were saying, these things, in the absence of explicit mentions of race, are not racially neutral. Colorblind in their language, but not colorblind in their effect.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And, you know, the same thing with another one of the themes that we're going to be talking about throughout: criminalization, and the ways in which African Americans coming out of the institution of slavery as a race become criminalized. And so drawing that throughline from convict leasing to mass incarceration in the present. One does not necessarily lead to the other, but you cannot understand one without understanding the other. And I think that the connective tissue in there is the conscious efforts to criminalize African Americans. And this isn't just a Southern thing. And we're going to have a whole episode when we look at the ways in which African Americans are criminalized around the turn of the century, aided and abetted and led in many ways by the great academic thinkers out of the North. And so, again, Jim Crow America.

Bethany Jay: Well, and I'm thinking as you're talking about criminalization, that part of what makes criminalization possible are representations of Black men in particular in popular culture, media. The African-American community is painted as violent aggressors as a way to justify mass incarceration. And that makes me think of another theme that we're going to be dealing with is this theme of violence. Violence is one of the ways, of course, that that voter suppression happens in the Reconstruction era, and violence is used as a control for the African-American community with lynching. And between 1880 and 1930, there's over 3,000 African Americans who are lynched in the South. And we'll be talking about Red Summer and 1919, and part of what happens in those white riots where African-American people are defending themselves, is that the media paints the African-American community as aggressors, as violent, as criminals. So this intense threat of violence hangs over the the Black community, but then also when provoked and made to defend itself, the Black community being painted as the violent aggressors.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you mentioned those horrendous lynching stats: between 1880 and 1930, 3,000 African Americans who are publicly murdered. You know, between 2010 and 2020, 3,000 African Americans die at the hands of the police.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm. And they are again being painted as the violent aggressors, right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Exactly.

Bethany Jay: The men who are the victims of that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. And the flip side of that, we'll explore, too. Because we're going to talk about white supremacy. We're going to talk about whiteness, and how that plays out in our general perceptions of society. So when we think about criminality foisted on Black folk, a lot of it has to do with threat perception. The perception that is created, intentionally and purposefully created, that Black people are dangerous. And the flip side of that coin is that white people are not. And so you can have the January 6 insurrection, where you have armed white folk marching on the nation's capital. And, you know, police are like, "Oh, I guess it'll be okay." Like, are you serious? Now you know you can't imagine Black folk or folk marching—not even Black folk, you could have white folk coming in support of a Black issue. And the issue itself is considered threatening and dangerous.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you had the state senator out of Wisconsin and, you know, he said the quiet part out loud. He was like, "Well, they weren't Black Lives Matter, so I had nothing to worry about." Right? He was like, "If they were, then maybe I'd be concerned." And what was he saying? He was like, you know, "We don't have that same threat perception from white folk." So the question then becomes: why are Black folk perceived as being so dangerous, and why are white folk not? Even in situations and circumstances where they clearly intend to be dangerous?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that speaks to one of the themes that we're going to be exploring, and that is the making of whiteness. And what does it mean? Because it's flexible during the era of Jim Crow. So we can't understand these current notions of whiteness, and how they speak to an issue like threat perception, without looking closely at it during the Jim Crow era.

Bethany Jay: The other piece to me that has been so important—and I'd like to get your thoughts on this—is really thinking about Jim Crow not only as oppression, but as a period that despite all of these systems saw art and culture and institutions, and these incredible sort of communities of African-American people that flourished within it. And that was the other piece that, you know, when we were thinking about this season and that we were really intent on. And I think that's important too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, you have to balance—when talking about the African-American experience, the Black experience, you have to balance the pain and the suffering with the survival, with the joy and with the love. Because it's all there, sort of wrapped up in one combustible mix. If you take African Americans seriously as political actors, if you take them seriously as human beings, then we have to recognize their agency. That even in the midst of degradation and attempts to rob Black folk of their humanity, they find ways to cling to it, they find ways to create family and build bonds and build community. And they find ways to make the most out of these terrible and terribly difficult situations. And focusing on that doesn't mean that we ignore the difficulties and the challenges that Black folk face, because then you've fallen into that happy history that doesn't do anybody any good, right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's actually saying, "Look, man. These are the circumstances. This is what Black folk were dealing with. But look here, as a result of the determination of Black folk to build, to survive, to thrive, look at what they're able to create." And the same thing can be said of any era of the Black experience. You know, in slavery it's the same thing. You can go back to the Middle Passage, right? Yeah, that's a story of horror, but then when you think about the ways in which African folk shackled together, stolen from their homes, are able to survive and create community on the other side of the Atlantic, I mean, that's also a story of triumph in a way. And this is a continuation of that story.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And then also looking at the organizing, right? We just did a season on civil rights, but that doesn't begin in 1954 with the Brown decision. It has these deep roots. So exploring some of these deep roots in this earlier period, talking about Black nationalism and of Marcus Garvey, and then how that will inform the politics of not just of Malcolm X, but also what Dr. King and so many others is going to be one of the things that I'm really looking forward to exploring.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Learning for Justice has a special opportunity just for educators. After listening to this episode, you can earn a certificate for one hour of professional development. All you have to do is go to LearningForJustice.org/PodcastPD—PD for "Professional development." That's podcastPD—all one word. Then enter the unique code word for this episode: reconstruction—all lowercase. You'll also find a link in the show notes. It's a great way to get even more out of Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Just as we plan on exploring the making and the unmaking and the expansion and sometimes the contraction of this thing called whiteness, we’re going to spend some time talking about Blackness and the African-American community. You know, one of the things you had talked about that I talk about a lot is disrupting the myth of perpetual racial progress, because there are moments during this century, during this Jim Crow era, where real gains are made, because people are putting in the work and the efforts. But there are also times—and probably far more—where they're working just as hard, they're struggling just as hard, and they are losing ground.

Bethany Jay: Tulsa encapsulates that, right? Where you have Black Wall Street, and then the massacre. And this narrative of great progress and great success, and how that is undone in just a night or two.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And then as a result of that, you know, Black folk have to try to build again. And as they're building again in the Greenwood district, fast forward to the post-New Deal era and you hit the 1950s, and the next thing you know, that community that was clinging by a thread was able to rebuild at least some of its infrastructure, gets an interstate planned and plotted right through it.

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And so how does this sort of history of purposeful destruction of Black communities play out? And how are Black folk able to respond? Because Greenwood is still there. These other communities are still there—not necessarily in the best shape, but still hanging on. And that's critically important to understand coming out of the era of Jim Crow.

Bethany Jay: As you talk about Tulsa, it makes me think of there are so many people who said to me after President Biden's speech and the larger media attention to the anniversary who said, "I had no idea that happened." As I've worked with teachers, as I've looked at a bunch of different state curriculum over the years of my work as a history educator, much of this story isn't in the vast majority of curriculum. And so part of what we hope to do this season is give teachers those cues about how we can talk about this within what we need to teach? If we're going to talk about World War I and the home front and the impact of World War I, then to me, it makes sense. Let's talk about 1919 in that context, and returning World War I African-American soldiers. And how they are treated when they try to expand the democratic institutions at home. You know, just giving teachers those cues. Here's the stuff that's there, and here's how you can include this story in it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, and I think that is going to be one of the important takeaways for those who are teachers who are listening. That you don't have to create an entirely new curriculum. You don't have to teach two different curriculums, right? That which is required by states and schools and districts, and then this other thing over here. It's like, no, you can take what's already there, just as you were saying, whether it was World War I and then infusing Red Summer, or you're dealing with the New Deal, and talking about the ways in which it reinforced inequality when we think about the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the like, and creating redlining and all this other stuff. So one of our challenges to ourselves is to say, "Okay, we're going to talk about this history, but we're going to talk about it with an eye for points of entry, where this history can be incorporated into that which we are already being asked to teach in the classroom." Whether that is in APUSH, or whether that is in a local state history. Or even whether we are just introducing these new concepts to our youngest learners in early elementary, or even in kindergarten and the like.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm. Yeah, thinking about how do we reframe what we are already doing to be inclusive of this story as well. As I think about the legislation that's meant to limit what we talk about in the classroom, ultimately that is so naive, because it's assuming that our students don't experience this history, don't see it anywhere except in the classroom. And the idea that our students are going to be entirely ignorant of this if we're not talking about it in the classroom, and just have the Pollyanna kind of view is just incorrect, because this is all around us in all of the ways that you and I have talked about today. And what's more dangerous than actually talking about it in the classroom and making sense of things is having the pieces and no way to put it together into a logical whole.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And then that's when you get the frustration on the part of students, and they just shut down, right?

Bethany Jay: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Because it's like, "This doesn't make any sense." And when the subject doesn't make any sense to the student, then the student will shut down. And then we've lost them as educators. And that's not what we want at all.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And as citizens, right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And as citizens. Right, right. Next thing you know, they're storming the damn Capitol.

Bethany Jay: That's right. [laughs]

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So Dr. Bethany Jay, I am excited about this season. We have a lot to cover, but we've mapped out something that I think is really going to be phenomenal. We're going to be hitting it from all angles. And I cannot wait to dive right in.

Bethany Jay: Me, too. I'm very excited about getting started with all of these conversations.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: All right. We'll be back soon. And like you said, we'll get it started.

Bethany Jay: Sounds good!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice—the education arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and more. You can find award-winning films and classroom-ready texts at LearningForJustice.org.

Bethany Jay: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the Jim Crow era, or its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. In our fourth season, we're examining what happened after Emancipation—and tracing it’s legacy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This podcast was produced by Mary Quintas and senior producer Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. "Music Reconstructed" is produced by Barrett Golding. And Cory Collins provides content guidance. Amelia Gragg is our intern. Kate Shuster is the series creator. And our managing producer is Miranda LaFond.

Bethany Jay: If you like what you've heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Bethany Jay: I'm Dr. Bethany Jay, professor of history at Salem State University.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Bethany Jay: And we're your hosts for Teaching Hard History.

References

• ``
• Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Learning for Justice
• Bethany Jay (co-editor), Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
• Learning for Justice, An Intersectional Lesson From Reconstruction
• Learning for Justice, Jim Crow Is Watching
• The White House, A Proclamation on Juneteenth Day of Observance, 2021 
• NPR, Charlottesville Removes Robert E. Lee Statue That Sparked A Deadly Rally
• CNNPolitics, Donald Trump's Big Lie explained
• Chalkbeat, Efforts to restrict teaching about racism and bias have multiplied across the U.S. 
• BlackPast, Redlining (1937-)
• American Heritage, Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows
• PBS, Race-based legislation
• United States Senate, Landmark Legislation: Thirteenth, Fourteenth, & Fifteenth Amendments
• Encyclopedia Virginia, United Daughters of the Confederacy
• PBS American Experience, Red Summer: When Racist Mobs Ruled
• PBS American Experience, Universal Negro Improvement Association
• NAACP, Know the Issues
• National Museum of African American History and Culture, Traveling Through Jim Crow America
• New Georgia Encyclopedia, Redemption
• ​​Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
• American Sociological Association, The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930
• Washington Post, Police Shootings Database
• Learning for Justice, Teach the Truth of the Tulsa Race Massacre
• The White House, Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre
• National Community Reinvestment Coalition, HOLC “Redlining” Maps: The Persistent Structure Of Segregation And Economic Inequality
• Wikipedia, AP United States History (APUSH)
   

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Teaching Hard History, A Framework for Teaching American Slavery
• Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, Classroom Videos (key concepts)
• Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly (editors), Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
• SPLC, Teaching the Hard History of American Slavery

Transcript

Christy Clark-Pujara: It was the business of slavery that allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a single staple or cash crop.

Paul Finkelman: The irony of American history is that we’re one of the few countries in the world that begin with the stated purpose: we hold these truths to be self-evident that we’re all created equal.

Bethany Jay: I begin my American History courses saying there were Africans in Virginia before there were Pilgrims in Massachusetts.

Tamara Spears: I feel like primary sources are what the kids can really build their facts on. What were they doing back in West Africa or Central Africa or wherever they came from?

Price Thomas: I think that understanding history, and understanding why two Black dudes can’t sit in Starbucks, but a white girl can carry an AR-15 on a college campus—why is that the way it is?

Christy Clark-Pujara: You don’t know who you are as an American unless you know the history of slavery.

Jordan Lanfair: We aren’t making students, we’re making citizens. Because at the end of the day, that’s what our kids are going to be.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: To fully understand the historic times that we are living in, it is important to comprehend the central role of slavery in our nation’s past. I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries. And this is Teaching Hard History – a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This episode is a special look back at important ideas from our first season, and how they correspond to the Ten Key Concepts in Teaching Tolerance’s framework for helping educators talk about and teach the history of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Chronologically, these concepts begin before there was a United States. The first is that Europeans practiced slavery long before they invaded the Americas and established the thirteen colonies. The second: Slavery and the slave trade were central to the growth of those colonial economies.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Here are excerpts from our interviews with Christy Clark-Pujara of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin; Paul Finkelman, editor of the Encyclopedia of African American History; and Bethany Jay, co-editor of the book Understanding and Teaching American Slavery.

Christy Clark-Pujara: It was the business of slavery that allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a single staple or cash crop.

Paul Finkelman: At the founding of the American nation in 1775-76, slavery is legal everywhere in what becomes the United States. In fact, slavery is legal everywhere in the New World, from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Magellan. Every colony all across both South America and North America has slaves and slavery is legal.

Christy Clark-Pujara: Farmers in southern 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.

Bethany Jay: I begin my American History courses saying there were Africans in Virginia before there were Pilgrims in Massachusetts.

Christy Clark-Pujara: 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.

Paul Finkelman: During the revolution, this begins to change. Americans who were fighting for their liberty are faced with the dilemma of “how can we fight for our liberty when we deny liberty to other people?” And so starting in 1780, some Americans will begin to dismantle slavery.

Christy Clark-Pujara: 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, of what’s been happening since 1607.

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

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The third Key Concept in the framework for Teaching Hard History is that the founding documents of our nation protected slavery. Enslavers dominated the new federal government, controlling the Supreme Court, and the Senate.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Here, again, are Paul Finkelman and Bethany Jay, along with John Bickford of Eastern Illinois University and Christian Cotz, formerly of The Montpelier Foundation.

Paul Finkelman: And so there is this inherent tension from day one between the rights of slave-owners to be free and to have liberty, including the liberty to own other people, to buy and sell other people, to whip other people, to treat other people like property and other Americans who find this to be immoral and appalling and horrible.

John Bickford: Take a look at Thomas Jefferson. Nearly all of his trade books focus on this idea that he was a good master who loved liberty and wanted to give it to everyone. But he just couldn’t free his slaves because of the debt that he had or how the American high society was a difficult social structure for him to negotiate. Get serious! He was a slave master. He spoke of liberty, but he only freed the slaves he most likely fathered.

Christian Cotz: Madison will abhor slavery his entire life, he writes about it all the time, from the time he’s a young man in college, until the time he dies—and yet he’ll be a slave owner his entire life and will never free a single individual. And he’ll own well over 100.

Paul Finkelman: So how do we balance slavery and freedom in a nation that on one hand begins with assertions of freedom and rights of liberty and on the other hand these assertions are actually being written by slave-owners?

Bethany Jay: From the ratification of the Constitution onwards, one of the biggest issues that separated Northern and Southern states was the enforcement of federal laws relating to slavery, particularly whether federal laws could compel people in the North to return escaped slaves to slave owners in the South.

Paul Finkelman: At least 60,000 slaves are brought into the United States between 1803 and 1808. This is the largest importation of slaves into what became the United States in the entire history of the country.

Bethany Jay: The Fugitive Slave Clause was written into the Constitution. It’s in Article 4, Section 2, and it guaranteed that slaves who fled to free states would still have to be returned to slavery if Southern slave owners claim them.

Paul Finkelman: If a slave runs away from Virginia to Pennsylvania, he cannot become free under Pennsylvania law. If a slave runs from Kentucky into Ohio, she does not become free under Ohio law.

Bethany Jay: Anthony Burns had been a slave in Virginia and he escaped to Boston. When the former slaveholder learned where Burns was, he traveled to Boston to reclaim what he saw as his property, namely Anthony Burns. In May of 1854, Burns was eventually arrested. Boston abolitionists mobilized in response to Burns’ arrest. Federal authorities declared him to be a fugitive slave and they sent soldiers to come and collect Burns from Boston and bring him back to slavery in Virginia. 50,000 Bostonians lined the streets to watch as he was marched in shackles right to a waiting vessel. One Massachusetts native wrote, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad abolitionists.”

Paul Finkelman: The Supreme Court holds that no state can interfere in the return of a fugitive slave. That a master had a right to seize a slave anywhere the slave was found without any judicial process. A slave captor could simply grab someone and say, “This is my slave. I’m taking him or her back to my state.” And the free state had no right to interfere. Northern states immediately passed laws prohibiting their state officials from helping in the return of fugitive slaves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Slavery was an economic institution designed to generate profits for enslavers. Its methods were promoting racism and trying to break the will of the enslaved. That’s the fourth Key Concept in our Teaching Hard History educational framework. The fifth emphasizes how enslaved people resisted those injustices, in both ordinary and extraordinary ways.

Christy Clark-Pujara: 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 massive lines of credit to plantation owners so they could buy seed, farming equipment and people.

Paul Finkelman: It’s wrong to think of slavery as geographically bound to warm climates. Slavery is profitable wherever free labor can turn a profit.

Christy Clark-Pujara: 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.

Paul Finkelman: Historically, slaves had always been used for mining. They had been used for raising cattle. They had been used for growing wheat. The Roman Empire grew wheat with slaves. The Roman Empire mined with slaves.

Kenneth Greenberg: Well, Brazil is full of these gigantic rebellions of hundreds of thousands of people, or Caribbean rebellions and so forth. Haiti, which is inspired by the French Revolution, where the entire country undergoes a revolution. Thousands and thousands of whites are slaughtered in this revolution, and Haiti becomes the first country ruled by Africans in the New World. In the United States, the United states had a much larger white population than many of these other areas. And it was hard to have a rebellion in and area where there were so many whites who could organize and repress the rebellion right away. So, to take one example, one of the most famous slave rebellions, is the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831. And that involves maybe 60 rebels who kill 55 white people.

Paul Finkelman: And when is the militia called out? When is the army called out? After Nat Turner’s rebellion, the U.S. Navy hunts for slaves who had been part of Nat Turner’s rebellion.

Kenneth Greenberg: So Thomas Gray met Nat Turner in his jail cell and basically interviewed him. Listen to what he says here. This is called The Confessions of Nat Turner. Listen to what he says here. Turner purportedly speaking. “As I was praying one day at my plow…

Nat Turner: As I was praying one day at my plow, the Spirit spoke to me saying, “Seek ye the kingdom of heaven, and all things shall be added unto you.”

Thomas Gray: What do you mean by the Spirit?

Nat Turner: The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days, and I was greatly astonished, and for two years prayed continually when my duty would permit. Then I had the same revelation again, which fully confirmed in me the impression that I was ordained for som great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.

Kenneth Greenberg: There’s another moment too in The Confessions […] when Gray says…

Thomas Gray: Do you not find yourself mistaken now?

Nat Turner: Was not Christ crucified?

Kenneth Greenberg: “Was not Christ crucified?” It just sends chills up and down your spine. Here’s a guy who knows he’s going to be killed, who’s surrounded by his enemies, who has no chance of survival, and he has the tremendous confidence to speak back to Gray in that jail cell.

Paul Finkelman: When John Brown organizes a raid into Virginia, now West Virginia, to help free slaves, the local Virginia authorities don’t have the power to suppress John Brown. They have to wait for the US Marines to arrive, led by an Army Colonel named Robert E. Lee, and so John Brown is suppressed by the US Army. So, again, while Southerners talk about states’ rights, they are in fact delighted to have the federal government send troops to Virginia, to what is now West Virginia, to anywhere where there might be a slave rebellion.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was Paul Finkelman, author of Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s. Before him, we heard Brock Peters reading from The Confessions of Nat Turner, along with Kenneth Greenberg, author of Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory; and Christy Clark-Pujara, who wrote Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History, a podcast from Teaching Tolerance. We’re on the web at Tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our sixth Key Concept is conveying the wide variety of slavery experiences. Life for an enslaved person depended on when and where they lived, as well as the kind of work they were forced to do.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: John Bickford of Eastern Illinois University, Steven Oliver of Salem State, and middle school teacher Tamara Spears let us know that the best way to discover the experiences of the enslaved is to use primary sources, so we can hear from the enslaved themselves.

Steven Oliver: I love to use the actual audio recordings, and now there’s such a rich body of interviews that were done in the ’30s and ’40s with individuals who were still living at that time who had actually been slaves.

John Henry Faulk: (Library of Congress audio) Can you remember slavery days very well?

Harriet Smith: Of course. I can remember all our white folks. And my ma was the cook, My ma was the cook, and I remember when she used to plow oxen. I plowed oxen myself. I can plow and lay off a corn row as good as any man. Chop, and chop, pick cotton, pick my five hundred pounds of cotton. Then walk across the field and, and hunt watermelons, pomegranates [laughs].

John Bickford: But now teachers can locate the original Library of Congress document or in the National Archives. Say, a runaway advertisement, if it says, and I’m quoting here, “Ran away. A negro girl called Mary. Has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing. The letter “A” is branded on her cheek.”

Laura Smalley: (Library of Congress audio) Took a woman to the peach orchard and whipped her. You know, just tied her hands around the peach orchard tree. Well, she couldn’t do nothing, just kick her feet. But they just had her clothes on down to her waist, you know. And every now and then they’d whip her. Then thy snuffed the pipe out on her.

Interviewer: Good Lord, have mercy.

John Bickford: Here’s a direct quote from one book: “One day you’ll be free, perhaps in the master’s will. I believe my husband will set you free.” This is a slave mistress talking to a slave about how “Yeah, you can hope for freedom.” That’s ridiculous.

Charlie Smith: (Library of Congress audio) I was born in Africa. Liberia, Africa. And come to the United States. That was in slavery time. They sold the colored people. And they brought me from Africa. I was a child, a boy.

Tamara Spears: Primary sources are what the kids can really build their facts on. What were they doing back in West Africa or Central Africa or wherever they came from?

Elmer Sparks: (Library of Congress audio) Did they trick you to get you on the boat?

Charlie Smith: They fool you on the boat. They fool the colored people on the boat. They say, “Over in that country, you don’t have to work. If you get hungry, all you got to do go to the fritter tree.” Same thing now, people call them pancakes, they call them flitters. “Come on down here!” And the hole on the lower deck on the boat, they called the hatch hole. “Come on down here in the hatch hole.” Got down in the hatch hole, we should have felt the boat moving. And they are leaving. And when it landed, it landed in New Orleans.

Charlie Smith: The man, they put you up on a block. They sell you; they bid you off. The highest bidder gets you. He’ll carry you to his plantation. And they went to mistreating the—the colored. Getting children by the colored women.

Charlie Smith: And they come down, the North and the South fought a war to free the colored. North and South fought a war to free the colored people from slavery time.

John Bickford: A slave named Jourdan Anderson, he escaped from his master, I think from one of the Carolinas, and he made it to Canada. And sometime after the Civil War, his master wrote a letter asking, “Would you come back and work for me on my plantation? You can be free.” Jordan’s response to his former master: “Even though you shot at me twice when I was running, I’m glad to hear the Union soldiers didn’t get you.” You know, he’s wonderfully audacious.

Fountain Hughes: (Library of Congress audio) My name is Fountain Hughes. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My grandfather belong to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was a hundred and fifteen years old when he died. And now I am one hundred and one year old.

Steven Oliver: A gentleman by the name of Fountain Hughes very matter-of-factly is telling his story of having been a slave, and says, “We were sold. Bought and sold the way you might sell cows or horses,”

Fountain Hughes: To tell you the truth, when I think of it today, I don’t know how I made it. You wasn’t treated as good as they treat dogs now. But I don’t like to talk about it, because it makes people feel bad.

Steven Oliver: He also talks about what happened when slavery ended and the ways in which people really had nowhere to go, were just sort of put out like wild cattle, he says.

Hermond Norwood: (Library of Congress audio) Do you remember much about the Civil War?

Fountain Hughes: I remember when the Yankees come along and took all the good horses and took throwed all the meat and flour and sugar and stuff out in the river and let it go down the river. And they knowed the people wouldn’t have nothing to live on, but they done that. And that’s the reason that I don’t like to talk about it. Colored people is free, and they ought to be awful thankful. And some of them is sorry they are free now. Some of them now would rather be slaves.

Hermond Norwood: Which would you like to be, Uncle Fountain?

Fountain Hughes: Me? You know if I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away. Because you’re nothing but a dog.

Steven Oliver: “Because you’re nothing but a dog,” In his narration, he says, “We didn’t know anything because we were never allowed to look at a book.” The impact of withholding an education from individuals.

Kenneth Greenberg: Throughout much of slavery it’s a crime to teach someone how to read who was an enslaved person, because reading is seen as the way in which people can learn about the rest of the world, and get ideas, which might undermine slavery.

John Henry Faulk: (Library of Congress audio) Well, well, while you all were slaves did they teach you to read and write?

Harriet Smith: Nuh huh.

John Henry Faulk: Did you all go to school any?

Harriet Smith: Nuh huh. They didn’t know nothing about reading and writing. All that I knowed they teach you is mind your master and your mistress.

John Henry Faulk: They sure didn’t teach you any reading and writing?

Harriet Smith: No, they didn’t. No. I remember then picking cotton. Yeah, I remember all about those slavery times.

Wallace Quarterman: (Sings.)

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You’re listening to Wallace Quarterman, a formerly enslaved person, recorded in 1935 by noted cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston for the Library of Congress.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ever since the Civil War, people have invented all manner of reasons for why the South seceded. But if you examine what the proponents of secession said and wrote at the time, the primary reason is abundantly clear. That’s our seventh Key Concept: Slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Here, again, are Bethany Jay of Salem State University and Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College.

Bethany Jay: This was a slaveholding republic from the start. There’s all sorts of protection for slavery and slaveholders in the constitution.

Paul Finkelman: Our constitutional law is heavily tied to the needs of protecting and preserving slavery. And many of our important constitutional doctrines, that we still live with today, come out of slavery.

Bethany Jay: So what changed? What changed from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to 1860? Well, what changes is Lincoln’s election and Southerners feeling that the power of the slaveholders in the federal government is no longer going to be a sort of bulwark to protect slavery no matter what.

Paul Finkelman: And the final thing to understand about the Constitution is that the Secession in 1860–1861 is about slavery. It is not about state’s rights. Because as we’ve seen: The southerners hate state’s rights because state’s rights are what northerners are using to fight slavery. The Texas Secession Convention says that “Slavery will exist forever in the state of Texas.” Mississippi says, “Slavery is the most important institution in the world.”

Bethany Jay: First and foremost, students should recognize that Southern politicians were not always in favor of states’ rights. In fact, for the majority of the 19th century prior to the Civil War, they supported the use of federal authority over states’ rights to protect slavery.

Paul Finkelman: The Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, gives a speech on the eve of the Civil War, after secession. He says that in the North, people believe in racial equality. And then he says, “Our government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” And so the South becomes the first country in the history of the world to be created on the basis of racial inequality and racial subordination.

Bethany Jay: From the onset of the war, free blacks in the North clamored for a chance to serve as soldiers in the Union Army. Frederick Douglass said, “Once let the black man get upon his person, the brass letter US. Let him get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”

Paul Finkelman: At the Battles of Lexington and Concord, there were black soldiers fighting along white soldiers in the Massachusetts militia. And at the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the heroes was a black soldier.

Bethany Jay: Even Confederate politicians recognize the implications of black military service. Joseph E. Brown, who was the governor of Georgia, famously stated, “Whenever we establish that they are a military race, we destroy our whole theory that they are unfit to be free.” By the end of the war, nearly 180,000 black soldiers had fought in the Union Army. Of those, 98,500 had been slaves who fled the Confederacy. We really want to correct the notion that slaves were given their freedom. Free and enslaved African Americans worked tirelessly to make emancipation the outcome of war.

Paul Finkelman: When Lee’s army marched into Pennsylvania, it captured free black people and dragged them to the South and enslaved them. This was a violation of every known rule of war in the Western world. It violated the Confederate military codes. When free black soldiers surrendered at Fort Pillow, they were massacred. They were shot. Some of them were buried alive. General Lee and President Jefferson Davis did nothing to reprimand the Southern commanders who did this. So when Southerners insist on flying the Confederate flag over their state capital or insist on having monuments to the leaders of the Confederacy, they are, in fact, supporting a regime, they are, in fact, remembering a regime that was created to support and preserve white supremacy and slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness. That’s our eighth Key Concept, that white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this next segment, you’ll hear professors Deirdre Cooper Owens of University of Nebraska. Kenneth Greenberg of Suffolk University, Brooklyn social studies teacher Tamara Spears, and Price Thomas, formerly of The Montpelier Foundation. All were our guests in Season One. And all talked about deeply held beliefs about race that intentionally dehumanized enslaved people, particularly enslaved women.

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Harriet Jacobs, who was a former slave, wrote a memoir, Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, that spoke about her experiences and escape from slavery in North Carolina.

Harriet Jacobs: (Audiobook excerpt) Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depth of degradation involved in that word, slavery; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The excerpts from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, read by Audio Élan, come to us courtesy of Cherry Hill Publishing.

Kenneth Greenberg: This Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the few books written by a woman.

Harriet Jacobs: He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of.

Kenneth Greenberg: She’s describing being vulnerable, sexually vulnerable to her master.

Harriet Jacobs: I turned from him with disgust and hatred, but he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him, where I saw a man 40 years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property, that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny, but where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony, or as fair as her mistress, in either case there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death. All these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.

Kenneth Greenberg: There’s no crime of rape in slavery. If you’re a woman and you’re enslaved and a white man sexually assaults you, you can’t go to the police; you can’t go to courts of any sort. That’s not a crime. The only legal recourse would be if your master thought there was a violation, and your master could bring the person who raped you to court on a charge of trespass. It’s his property, and someone else has trespassed on his property. But, if a master rapes you, and this happens all the time, it’s built into the institution, that’s not a crime. It’s not a crime if blacks rape you as well, so women are extremely vulnerable in slavery.

Tamara Spears: There’s another article about Sukie who resists her master’s advances. She’s making soap and, you know, he tries to come in. And, you know, he pulls down her dress and gets her to the floor. It doesn’t get much more graphic than that. But she punches him, throws him into the soap, and the kids are cheering while they’re reading.

Price Thomas: How do we use history to have modern conversations? Do we understand how slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow influences a lot of the issues we see today when we talk about the achievement gap or wage discrimination or mass incarceration? All these things matter, and all these things are connected.

Kenneth Greenberg: Then in 1954, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, the decision was made by the Supreme Court that if you separate the races, you can never give them an equal education, and therefore segregation was unconstitutional. That was just one of many, many decisions. But the great movement which extended into the 1960s and beyond, which attack segregation, that changed the world.

Price Thomas: I think that understanding history, and understanding why two Black dudes can’t sit in Starbucks, but a white girl can carry an AR-15 on a college campus—why is that the way it is? Right? Why do those things matter? What’s the historical context for a lot of the modern issues that we’re dealing with today that are popping up in the news.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There’s a saying: “If only America loved Black people as much as it loves Black culture.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our ninth Key Concept explores how African-American culture, going back to the days of slavery, has impacted the cultural traditions of America and the world. But it’s also popular culture that often promoted the destructive myths and racial stereotypes that continue to plague our nation. Here’s film historian Ron Briley.

Ron Briley: Popular culture has always presented Reconstruction as the “Tragic Era,” in which the South was taken advantage of after the war by free Blacks, northern carpetbaggers, the freedmen former slaves, and poor southern whites, as a travesty in which white Southerners were treated terribly, till they rose up and redeemed the South and took control.

Ron Briley: That is the myth of Reconstruction, and it has certainly been perpetuated by Hollywood, in films such as Birth of a Nation made in 1915.

Ron Briley: Out in the countryside, freed Blacks are taking over and attacking a cabin. The emphasis here is that what the blacks want to do is break in, attack, and rape the white women. So, who’s going to ride to the rescue? In this film version, the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue and saves the day. The South and southern virtue is symbolized by the women who are rescued from the clutches of the blacks, and the Klan is viewed as the hero. Incredibly racist material because what actually happened in America in 1915 is Americans went to the theater. Many whites saw this. Racial violence in the country increased. Lynchings increased.

Ron Briley: Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, and it continued with the very famous Gone With the Wind in 1939.

Rhett Butler: (film excerpt) Take a good look, my dear. It’s a storied moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the Old South disappear one night.

Ron Briley: Scarlett O’Hara takes a shortcut while driving in her buggy, a shortcut through a shantytown. Living in the shantytown are a lot of poor whites and freed blacks. What happens is they attack Scarlett O’Hara, okay? And it looks as if she is about to be raped. She passes out.

Gone with the Wind: (Film excerpt: Sam rescues Scarlet and says he’s “sick of these carpetbaggers.”)

Ron Briley: Then, her husband says, “I’ll take care of this.” He says he’s going to a political meeting.

Gone with the Wind: (Film excerpt: ”I’ve got to go to a political meeting.”)

Ron Briley: The film emphasizes that he takes out his pistol, puts it in his holster. Clearly, he and his friends are going to go take revenge against the shantytown, and the political meeting he’s referring to really is the Klan, although the word Klan is not used in the film.

Gone with the Wind: (Film excerpt: Melanie and Scarlett discuss the men and their “protection”.)

Bethany Jay: Our understanding of the Civil War, both as historians and as Americans as it’s been represented in popular culture throughout the better part of the 20th century, our understanding of the Civil War has been one that was built to reinforce white supremacy as well, right? The Gone with the Wind narrative of the Old South, The Littlest Rebel and Shirley Temple, those are all white supremacist narratives of the Civil War as well.

Jordan Lanfair: When I ground it in literature is I always start with, like, To Kill a Mockingbird, because that leads me to Jim Crow laws, which leads me to lynching, which leads me to talking about Emmett Till, which leads me to talking about “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, which opens up all these doors.

Kenneth Greenberg: When you look around you, and you see the wonderful things that African Americans do in our society today, where does that all come from exactly? The culture that forges those wonderful institutions—the music, the religion, for example—all those things happen in the institution of slavery. Somehow in the midst of this exploitation, there is tremendous achievement that goes on.

Jordan Lanfair: I play the first about five or six minutes of the Black-ish episode based around Columbus Day because they have a skit about what Columbus did on the island of Hispaniola, which was begin genocide.

Black-ish: (TV show excerpt: skit about Columbus as slaver.)

Jordan Lanfair: There’s a pretty funny moment where Dre and his father confront one of the teachers by, like, “Well, why don’t we celebrate these other holidays, you know, like Magic Johnson Is Still Alive Day, Tupac’s birthday and then Juneteenth.”

Black-ish: (TV show excerpt: Dre and dad about alt-holidays and Juneteenth.)

Bethany Jay: Because when we talk about removing Confederate monuments or the appropriateness of displaying the Confederate battle flag on public buildings, at the heart of that question is what the Confederacy was about. Was the Confederacy about a sort of abstract Southern way of life that is removed from the question of slavery and the rights of African American people, or was the Confederacy intrinsically tied to the issue of slavery? Was it in fact a movement whose main focus was to perpetuate the enslavement of three and a half million people?

John Henry Faulk: (Library of Congress audio) Well, can you remember what happened when they set you free? Do you remember how the old master acted?

Mrs. Laura Smalley: No, sir. I can’t remember that, you know. But I—I remember, you know, the time they give them a big dinner, you know on the nineteenth.

John Henry Faulk: Is that right?

Mrs. Laura Smalley: On—on the nineteenth, you know. They give them a big dinner. We didn’t know. They just thought, you know, were just feeding us, you know. Just had a long table. And just had, ah, just a little of everything you want to eat, you know. And drink, you know. And they say that was on the nineteenth. Well you see I didn’t know what that was for. Now a child 6-7 years old can tell you.

John Henry Faulk: That’s right.

Mrs. Laura Smalley: You know, and old master didn’t tell, you know, they was free.

John Henry Faulk: He didn’t tell you that?

Mrs. Laura Smalley: No he didn’t tell. They worked there, I think now they say they worked them, six months after that. Six months. And turn them loose on the nineteenth of June. That’s why, you know, we celebrate that day. Colored folks celebrate that day.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Knowing how to read and interpret historical sources gives us insight into the lives of African Americans during slavery — their aspirations, creations, thoughts, and desires. This is our tenth and final concept in teaching the hard history of American slavery.

Steven Oliver: We’ve inherited this mess that we find ourselves in: racism, sexism, homophobia, right? We’ve all been born in this sort of catastrophe. But what follows that, very quickly, is this notion that all of us, although we didn’t create these dynamics, we now have a responsibility and an opportunity to consider the ways in which we might be upholding some of these systems of oppression, how we might be benefiting from some of these dynamics, and most importantly, how we can be part of undoing these systems of oppression.

Bethany Jay: And that just hit home with me as far as tying a lot of this together. Our responsibility as teachers to reflect the world that our students are living in, to make sure that our students are reflected in the history that we’re talking about.

John Bickford: Our students deserve more than a textbook to be memorized. And the way to do that is to position students to evaluate like historians, to place them to analyze and then creatively show what they know in new and novel ways.

Bethany Jay: Overwhelmingly, the only emotion I get from my students about this is anger that they haven’t heard it before. Anger that, “Why am I just hearing this now in my college classroom?”

Paul Finkelman: For so many generations, Americans viewed Black people as inherently dangerous, as an inherent threat to the legal and political and social order and, at least where slavery was preserved and working, as fundamentally inferior. We have written into our constitutional law, Chief Justice Taney’s decision that “blacks have no rights that whites need to respect.”

Christy Clark-Pujara: So history at its best is not about the past. It’s about the present and how we function in the present.

Paul Finkelman: We can’t obliterate the past. I wouldn’t ban the teaching of the Civil War, but I wouldn’t memorialize traitors, either, and I wouldn’t memorialize people who fought against their nation to preserve slavery.

Christy Clark-Pujara: You don’t know who you are as an American unless you know the story of slavery.

Jordan Lanfair: We aren’t making students, we’re making citizens. Because at the end of the day, that’s what our kids are going to be. And so you have to go into these lessons, this capacity-building, understanding that your curriculum better make better citizens and better people. Through having them check their privilege, through having them look at their history, through having them engage with primary and secondary sources. Because if our only goal is to have some great activities, we’re not doing our ancestors any bit of good. We’re not doing our country any bit of good. Sorry. That was my soapbox. I sit down on it now. But like, that’s kind of why we need to do what we do.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jordan Lanfair teaches seventh- and eighth-grade in Chicago, Illinois.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the civil rights movement and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. We began by talking about slavery—for two seasons. And now we’re tracing that legacy of oppression and resistance into the present day.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to all of the educators and experts we heard from in this episode. Our theme song for season one is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is from Wendel Patrick’s album JDWP Tribute.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials about slavery and the civil rights movement that include award-winning films and classroom-ready texts on our website. You can find these—along with the Framework for Teaching American Slavery, at tolerance.org/hardhistory, all one word. And we hope you will go back and listen to even more amazing content from Season One.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This podcast was produced by Barrett Golding. Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our senior producer is Shea Shackelford, Russell Gragg is our associate producer, and our technical producer is Mary Quintas. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. And our interns are Miranda LaFond and Amelia Gragg. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

Thanks to Cherry Hill Publishing for permission to use excepts from their Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl audiobook.

• Christy Clark-Pujara, Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin
• Bethany Jay, History, Salem State University
• Paul Finkelman (editor), Encyclopedia of African American History
• Paul Finkelman, President, Gratz College
• Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly (editors), Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
• United States of America, Declaration of Independence
• France, The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)
• John Bickford, Social Studies Education, Eastern Illinois University
• James Madison, Montpelier
• U.S. Congress, Fugitive Slave Act of 1793
• Teaching American History, U.S. Constitution: Article IV, Section 2: Fugitive Slave Clause
• BlackPast, Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)
• Learning for Justice, Nat Turner, Freedom Fighter
• Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Learning for Justice, John Brown's Speech to the Court at His Trial
• Paul Finkelman, Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s
• Brock Peters (reading), The Confessions of Nat Turner (audio)
• Kenneth Greenberg, History, Suffolk University
• Kenneth Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory
• Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island
• Steven Oliver, Secondary and Higher Education, Salem State University
• Library of Congress, Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories
• Washington Post, Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and ‘the master class’
• American Anti-Slavery Society: Thomas Weld, American Slavery As It Is (1839)
• Jourdan Anderson, To My Old Master (1865)
• Museum of the African Diaspora, Fountain Hughes
• Library of Congress: Audio Recordings, Wallace Quarterman
• Library of Congress: Collections: Zora Neale Hurston
• The Avalon Project (Yale Law School), Confederate States of America : Documents
• Learning for Justice, Meet Frederick Douglass
• Deirdre Cooper Owens, History, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Learning for Justice (Tamara Spears), “We Are Our Ancestors' Wildest Dreams”
• Price Thomas, LinkedIn
• Learning for Justice, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (excerpt)
• Cherry Hill Publishing (audiobook), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Learning for Justice, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
• Ron Briley, All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History
• D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (film)
• Victor Fleming, Gone with the Wind (film)
• David Butler, The Littlest Rebel (film)
• BBC, Strange Fruit: The most shocking song of all time?
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., What Is Juneteenth?
• Bill of Rights Institute, Roger Taney and Injustice
• Jordan Lanfair, Edutopia

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice, The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors (film)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, The Other Slavery (Andrés Reséndez)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Slave Codes, Liberty Suits and the Charter Generation (Margaret Newell)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History. We’re a production of Learning for Justice—a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is a special, short episode about Learning for Justice’s new film, The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors. It was created by a unique team of filmmakers based in Alaska, and I’m happy to have the assistant producer, Alice Glenn here with me to talk about this amazing film which you can watch at LearningForJustice.org/forgottenslavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Alice, how are you doing? It's great to be in conversation with you.

Alice Qannik Glenn: Hello, good afternoon. So nice to meet you. Uvaŋa Qannik. My name is Alice Qannik Glenn. Qannik is my Iñupiaq name. The tribe that I am from, the north slope of Alaska, Iñupiaq.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, the film opens with Paula Peters, who talks about learning the history of native peoples as a young girl from white teachers.

Paula Peters: I can remember very vividly going into, I believe it was my second-grade classroom. We were being taught about Thanksgiving and the story of the friendly Indian. And at that time, back in the 1960s, they didn't mention the Wampanoag tribe by name. They didn't mention Squanto by name. The teacher was talking more in generalities about these wonderful Indians who came and they taught how to plant corn, and then at the end of the season they harvested all this wonderful food which helped them to survive and they had a great feast. Then she offered up the information about what had happened to these Indian people. She says, "Yep. They're all dead." And I remember waving my hand wildly like a little kid will do. And I said, "No! They're not all dead. I'm here. I'm a Wampanoag and I'm still here."

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Paula Peters is talking about the Wampanoag being "disappeared," if you will. Erased from the history books. But that isn't an educational experience that is just unique to her, is it?

Alice Qannik Glenn: You know, we're home-schooling our six year old here this year, and just last week we're going over his work and there's a page there on Thanksgiving, and it's basically that same story. It's just like, "Wow! It's 2020, come on!" We're still telling this tired story that's just not true.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The central core of the film is the history of native peoples that is too often overlooked, and that is the history of Indigenous enslavement. You interviewed a friend and colleague of mine here at Ohio State, Dr. Margaret Newell.

Margaret Newell: Indigenous people were enslaved here first. They were enslaved here in large numbers in various localities under different imperial powers.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You interviewed UC-Davis professor Andrés Reséndez, who talks about the new estimates of Indigenous enslavement.

Andrés Reséndez: It's impossible, really, to count them accurately. However, we've been involved in trying to make an initial estimate at least to have a baseline. It's 2.5 to 5 million since the time of Columbus to 1900.

Alice Qannik Glenn: One person that we interviewed for our film was Dr. Sven Haakanson, who is Sugpiat from Kodiak here in Alaska.

Sven Haakanson: As I was reading this, like, 500-page book of Russian history, and there's a couple of references of what they would do.

Alice Qannik Glenn: We interviewed him about the slavery of the Sugpiat and the Russian colonization and the American colonization of Kodiak.

Sven Haakanson: On Kodiak alone, there's 90 percent of the people died. They were using the people as slaves to hunt sea otters. And if the people didn't listen, they killed the children and mother. And of course, everybody's going to line up. Nobody wants to lose their family.

Alice Qannik Glenn: I had no idea that that happened to people who look like me, who are from this state like me. It was kind of a reckoning.

Sven Haakanson: I started to piece together and then you hear about them taking hostages in every group they ran into. When I read this stuff I get angry. It ate me up. Why am I angry? I can't change the past. I started to think about how do we educate our communities so that we are not repeating ourselves?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So one of the things that Dr. Newell points out in the film is that in New England, for nearly a century, it wasn't African people who were the enslaved labor force. That's not who Europeans were enslaving. It was actually Indigenous folk. It was the folk who were here, whose land that they were on. And we almost never talk about that.

Margaret Newell: So for nearly a century, Indians were the main source of enslaved labor. They were the enslaved population.

Andrés Reséndez: Europeans, all Europeans, French, Spanish, English did it. Dutch did it. The Americans did it. The Mexicans did it. Various native groups did it to each other.

Alice Qannik Glenn: You know, that's such a huge proponent of this film is to teach this story, teach these histories. And we were kind of, you know, a little bit ashamed about what we learned in school, because it is that same story, that same tired old whitewashed story.

Andrés Reséndez: Indian slavery really was quite active and thriving in the American West throughout the 19th century.

Alice Qannik Glenn: It's not a one-off thing. It didn't just happen in Alaska. It didn't just happen in the Northeast. It happened everywhere. And it was systemic, you know? That was what our country was founded on, on this stolen labor.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, Alice, we have some really powerful closing thoughts from the folk that you interviewed. Paula Peters is one and Sven Haakanson is another.

Paula Peters: I think as history is being taught to be more inclusive of the Indigenous story, it is legitimizing the Indigenous people that are still here. It is giving them, it is giving me the power of my own story. If you don't know the whole story, you're gonna walk away, you know, with a fairy tale.

Andrés Reséndez: Throughout the history, there have been people opposed to the system, who recognize the immorality of this system.

Sven Haakanson: If one is a multiracial citizen of this republic, shouldn't they learn a multiracial past?

Paula Peters: These are sisters, brothers, cousins. They're grandmamas, they're little babies in arms. They're families.

Sven Haakanson: But we need to know this so that we can move forward too, both as Indigenous communities but as a nation.

Alice Qannik Glenn: You know, we do have a strong, rich culture still. We know where we're from, we know the lands where we come from, our people have lived there for thousands and thousands of years.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials about slavery and the civil rights movement that include award-winning films and classroom-ready texts. You can find these online at LearningForJustice.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Most students leave high school without an understanding of the civil rights movement and its continuing relevance. This podcast is part of an effort to change that. We began by talking about slavery for two seasons. And now we’re tracing the legacies of that era into the present day.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks to Alice Glenn from Coffee and Quaq for talking to us about her documentary The Forgotten Slavery, produced in conjunction with Learning for Justice.

Alice Qannik Glenn: Savaktuŋa kuuppiaġlu quaġlumi. I now work full time on my podcast, which is titled Coffee and Quaq. Quaq is the Iñupiaq word for frozen or raw meat or fish, a delicacy we have in Northern Alaska. My podcast is available on my website, www.coffeeandquaq.com.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer. Mary Quintas is our technical producer. And "Movement Music" is produced by Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. Our interns are Miranda LaFond and Amelia Gragg. And Kate Shuster is our executive producer.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Our theme song is “The Colors That You Bring” by Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is from their album Where Future Unfolds. And from Wendel Patrick's JDWP Tribute.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: If you like what you’ve heard, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate your feedback.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, and your host for Teaching Hard History.

References

• Learning for Justice, The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors (film)
• Alice Qannik Glenn, Coffee & Quaq (podcast)
• Wikipedia, Paula Peters
• Margaret Newell, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
• Sven D. Haakanson, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington

 

Return to Episode Listing

Resources and Readings

• Teaching Hard History, Grades 6–12 Framework
• Teaching Hard History, Grades K–5 Framework
• Historians Against Slavery

Bethany Jay

• History, Salem State University
• Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly (editors), Understanding and Teaching American Slavery
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Slavery & the Civil War, Part 1

References:

• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Indigenous Enslavement: Part 1 (Christina Snyder)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Slave Codes, Liberty Suits and the Charter Generation (Margaret Newell)
• National Park Service, Bacon's Rebellion
• Wikipedia, Yamasee War
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Dealing With Things As They Are: Creating a Classroom Environment (Steven Oliver)
• Learning for Justice, James Baldwin: Art, Sexuality and Civil Rights
• Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Reverend angel Kyoto Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation
• Reverend angel Kyoto Williams, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Teaching Slavery through Children's Literature, Part 1 (Ebony Thomas)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Teaching Slavery through Children's Literature, Part 2 (Debbie Reese)
• Society of American Archivists, Protocols for Native American Archival Materials
• National Congress of American Indians, Are Native Youth Being Pushed into Prison? (PDF)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, Using the WPA Slave Narratives (Lynn Lyerly)
• Teaching Hard History: Podcast, The Other Slavery (Andrés Reséndez)

Transcript

Meredith McCoy: I'm Meredith McCoy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Hasan Kwame Jefferies. And this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Meredith McCoy: A special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Meredith McCoy, we've reached the end of the second season.

Meredith McCoy: That is so hard to believe. I am just thinking about all of the different material we've covered, all the strategies we've discussed, all the cool people we've gotten a chance to talk to and learn from. It's been a lot of fun.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's been a lot of fun, and I have really learned so much. Not only about how to teach American slavery, how to teach the history of Indigenous enslavement, but really how to think about the past as well as the present.

Meredith McCoy: The fact that we're having these hard conversations and thinking really carefully about how to teach this hard history, if all of us as educators in higher ed and K-12 are thinking together about how to do this work, that gives me a lot of hope for the future. And in this, our final episode of this season, we're excited to bring together the many strategies we've discussed across both seasons for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And to help us make sense of the history of the enslavement of African people as well as the history of enslavement of Indigenous people, we've actually done something really special. We've reached out to Dr. Bethany Jay, who is the co-editor, along with Cynthia Lynn Lyerly of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Bethany was also the first scholar in the very first episode of season one, and she's going to join us in this episode to help us really make sense of the connections, the parallels, the similarities, and those things that are different between the history of Indigenous enslavement and the history of enslavement of African people.

Meredith McCoy: I love that we're bringing it full circle here as we wrap things up. And I'm excited too, because today we're also going to be joined, both through some live calls and through some voicemails, by other educators who are also thinking about these questions, including a special educator from my alma mater who's gonna help us think about the role of librarians and archivists in these questions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, let's dive right in.

Meredith McCoy: Let's do it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany, it is really great to have you back. Thank you so much for joining us for this last episode. I can think of no better person to close out this second season. So welcome back.

Bethany Jay: Thanks for having me.

Meredith McCoy: We're so glad you're here.

Bethany Jay: Yes, I am, too.

Meredith McCoy: So as we wrap up and reflect on where we've been and how we've grown in our thinking about this issue of teaching the hard history of enslavement, I'm wondering if you could help us start by thinking about trends and resonances that have come up across season one and season two. What have you noticed in thinking about these two seasons?

Bethany Jay: So for me, there are two big things that jumped out at me after listening. And the first is the artificiality of the way that we think about American history, the way that we talk about American history in our public culture and the way that we even deal with American history in our classrooms. The notion that American history begins with the Pilgrims is really complicated by these stories, but even more broadly, we have this narrative of the United States as sort of becoming multicultural, that somehow diversity is a product of modernity.

Bethany Jay: But here we see that this land was vibrant, diverse, a multicultural space even before Columbus. And as we look at this land, even after European colonization, we continue to see it as a multicultural space occupied by many diverse groups of Indigenous peoples, European colonists, Africans and all of these groups' descendants. So this notion that multiculturalism or diversity is a buzzword of the 20th century and the 21st century is really wrong. And if we want to understand the lived experience of people in the past, we need to acknowledge and understand this diversity and the varieties of experiences that all of these different groups had with one another. The lived experience of people of the past is that they're living with people of African descent, they're living with Indigenous people. I love Margaret Newell's discussion of colonists and Indigenous people in and out of each other's houses in early New England. I think our students and my students who are going to become teachers often think of these as sort of siloed groups that don't interact with one another. We have to pull apart those silos, and that means inserting, allowing Indigenous people, allowing people of color into the curriculum throughout the continuum, and also changing that chronology too, so that we're beginning this story in a different space.

Meredith McCoy: For your students who are then going themselves go out into their own classrooms and teach social studies, how do you think about helping them reframe their curricular materials, their resources that might have just that sort of very traditional narrative that you're talking about working against when you are helping them to think about histories of enslavement?

Bethany Jay: One of the challenges that I was considering as I was listening to this season is the way in which state frameworks are imagined. And I know for Massachusetts, for example, in the high school frameworks, within the context of US history, no course goes before, like, 1763. American history begins with the sort of French and Indian War in the Massachusetts frameworks. And so part of what I think we need to do to sort of reframe this history is choose a different beginning. And that beginning can't be this moment before the United States is about to become an independent nation, which is how it's framed here, and I think in a lot of other curriculum frameworks. That beginning needs to really be where we have multiple nations, including sovereign Indigenous people, who are all existing in this space and all playing different roles, and all who have power to wield within this space. So I think we really need to sort of think about American history. And I encourage my students to think about American history as a history that always includes diverse peoples right from the start, and not just in moments where it's easy to talk about those histories.

Meredith McCoy: I've been thinking a lot about this issue of how, when I was teaching US history, and for many of my students coming into my classroom now at the college level, they only have learned about enslavement in the context of the Atlantic seaboard. And so I think part of what we've been doing about thinking about the Midwest and the West Coast, thinking about enslavement under the Spanish Empire as well as under the British Empire, we've really tried, I think, in this season to sort of blow up our understandings of where does slavery happened and when to slavery happen. Particularly in the Christina Snyder episode and in the Andrés Reséndez episodes, that there are some really provocative opportunities for us to think about expanding our understanding of who has experienced enslavement.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. Listening to this season has really been sort of surreal, because when I listen to those episodes on Indigenous slavery, so many of the stories are stories that I know, but not in the context in which we're talking about them in season two. When we think about it within the larger narrative of slavery, it's happening in a different chronology, it's happening in different spaces. We have the Spanish in Central and South America, for example. The second season underscores that the history of Europeans enslaving people in the Americas begins in the 15th century and not in the 17th. In some places, native slavery was outlawed well before the 13th Amendment, and in some places it persisted well after the 13th Amendment. But there were also throughlines that are the same: the exploitation of people to extract labor for profit, the use of violence as a mechanism of control. But even more importantly, the persistence of slavery. I think it was Christina Snyder in one of the first episodes started talking about slavery, the way that it mutates and transforms as almost viral. The fact that, despite legal, political or even moral barriers to enslavement, the institution persists.

Bethany Jay: It persists for Indigenous people with things like debt peonage and apprenticeships long after the institution was supposedly outlawed. It persists in ways that mirror what we know as, quote unquote, "slavery by another name" in African-American history. And it mirrors the way slavery persists today. I often, when I start my US history classes, I begin them taking a sort of much wider view of saying, look, it's not predestined that the United States is going to occupy this landscape. So let's think about what North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, looked like in this space and in this moment. And when we take that view, we really do start to see the very different ways and the different chronology of slavery emerge. I love teaching with the requirement, Christina Snyder talks about the requirement. And the requirement becomes one of the first ways that my students are like, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense, this sort of legal mechanism to enslave people, that they have no idea what you're saying. It lays so bare some of the nonsensical legal ways in which people are enslaved.

Meredith McCoy: That's so right. And in that way, you know, sort of unsettling for students, that perceived inevitability and permanence of settler colonialism is a really important, I think, classroom tool for helping students to imagine alternative ways that history could have gone, and therefore also alternative futures for where we might go from here.

Bethany Jay: And I think that concept of settler colonialism is so powerful because I know my students, and I'm in New England, we often think about English settlers as being refugees from empire, and not really agents of empire. And I think it's really interesting to shift the lens and think about those sort of early English colonists, not just as fleeing from the British, but as agents of them, in the way that we might think of 19th century British imperialism. It's a whole different sort of lens to flip on. And I think it makes it easier for our students then to see the different power players, you know, on the continent and to see the multiple motives that English settlers had.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I tell you one of the things, Bethany, that really stuck out to me as well, was this notion of the persistence of slavery. That there are times throughout the history of this new world slavery, if you will, that governments, that individuals and of course, those who are being enslaved themselves are actually trying to end the system. And yet it persists for centuries, and not by accident, but rather because of the purposeful actions of certain individuals, as well as the purposeful actions of companies, corporations, businesses and governments. And that ought not be lost. The persistence of slavery isn't an accident of history, it's the result of people wanting to maintain this institution of exploitation for personal profit and gain. And you really see that over the centuries, and the ties, the mirror reflections and interactions between the enslavement of Indigenous people and the enslavement of African people.

Bethany Jay: One of the more powerful, you know, little—not little, but one of the more powerful realizations that came through in season two was this idea that maybe slavery as we've always imagined it, thinking about the African-American experience of enslavement is the exception to the rule, right? The legal, out in the open version of slavery that we are so used to, that really the sort of more under the radar, legally ambiguous sort of forms of slavery is actually more the rule for how slavery has existed and still does exist today. And then that African-American experience is in some ways exceptional in how out in the open and legal and protected it was.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, that's an interesting notion, because in some ways that makes for considering the enslaving of African people here, you know, an extension of more common traditions, more common forms. But then it also, I think, helps explain why, with abolition and emancipation in 1865, you still have these versions of unfreedom and unforced labor, because you almost have a reversion back to the ways in which people were being enslaved beyond and outside of what we consider to be the enslavement, the system of transatlantic world slavery as it related to African-Americans. Which would help explain too, why it's been so hard to get rid of and eliminate and completely abolish the institution of slavery as it has existed in sort of New World terms, if you will, post-1500, and continues to exist in various facets across the world today.

Bethany Jay: I keep coming back to that saying, you know, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. And that saying was sort of going through my head as I listened to the entire second season. And thinking in some places, we really do see history repeating here more than just rhyming, as we look at these tactics that are being used.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And applied to different groups at different times.

Bethany Jay: Yep.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right? In part because they have been tried and they have been tested. You mentioned Andrés Reséndez in episode seven and eight, talking about debt peonage and the forms of involuntary servitude that we see African Americans trapped in the late 1800s, certainly have been practiced and tried and tested and worked with regard to the enslavement of Indigenous people earlier on.

Bethany Jay: That, to me, was one of the most powerful discussions of the second season, and really I think that conversation with Andrés brought together these two seasons so well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany, you had mentioned this idea that students approach the study of this subject thinking about African Americans, Native Americans, Indigenous people, colonists, as sort of existing in these siloed groups. And well, clearly they were not, right? They're interacting. They're engaging. They're almost never apart. And because of that, you know, maintaining the institution of slavery or the institutions of slavery actually takes work. I mean, one of the things that we don't do a very good job of is talking about and teaching the ways in which the institution of slavery is maintained. It's not a natural law that there will be enslaved people and there will be free people. It actually takes a lot of work. It strikes me that the systems used to maintain, the many varied systems used to maintain slavery are one of these areas of continuity, or at least there are some real parallels between the systems used to maintain the enslavement of Indigenous people and the systems used to maintain the enslavement of African people. Is that something that you saw as well?

Bethany Jay: I think we see that so much across both seasons as really probably the predominant way that slavery is maintained. The persistence of violence as a mechanism to maintain slavery, violence or the threat of violence, but then also looking at the ways in which governments and legal codes adapt to the changing nature of slavery. And we see this in the African experience as we watch the sort of Virginia laws slowly mutate until they become a real slave society. And we see it with Indigenous slavery as well. The way that the laws adapt and change and find ways to keep people enslaved. So the legal system, the system of violence, and then systems that pull apart and separate people from their culture. And that's, of course, key to the transatlantic slave trade: separate people from whomever might speak their language, right? Whoever might provide an opportunity to resist.

Bethany Jay: And we also see that with Indigenous slavery, where we see social separation is a key tactic of how do you enslave people? Well, you separate them from groups that can provide aid or help to organize resistance. Key to both of those, though, both the legal mechanisms that allow for slavery, these sort of tactics of violence and social separation, is we see that they have their limits as well. And I think that gets us to the other sort of continuity, is that for all of these mechanisms used to perpetuate slavery, there are enslaved people across the board who resist every single one of those mechanisms. And as much as we want to talk about those cultures being in contact and that being necessary to maintain a system of slavery, that's not the only relationship that was happening here, right? That we also have Native American people and we have African-American people who are resisting those systems as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I just want to underscore something that you had pointed out, and that is the importance and the omnipresence of violence. I mean, we certainly see that in the African-American experience. The cornerstone of slavery was violence. But we also see, when we explore the enslavement of Indigenous people, that the cornerstone of that enslavement was also violence. And part of the reason for that, seems to me, is because those who were being enslaved are constantly resisting. You have to use violence and the threat of violence and make it real, whether that's the physical violence of beating and the like, or that sort of social violence of separating person from community and family, that that is really undergirding this whole thing because people who are being enslaved, Indigenous folk, African Americans, are constantly resisting. There's never a moment where we don't see people resisting at either sort of an individual level or rising to the level of mass rebellion. That strikes me as one of these important resonances across the two seasons and these subjects as well.

Bethany Jay: I keep going back to Christina Snyder. You know, everybody talks about the demographic decline of Indigenous people after settlement, and we often frame that as a result of disease and other issues. But, you know, Christina Snyder's estimate that for every one Indigenous person taken alive and enslaved, three people died resisting, that to me, that's a data point that we can talk about as teachers that allow us to sort of think about this moment in a different way with our students, right? It's just a sentence, but it really reframes this moment for our students, that it's not just that native people are dying, native people are being sold into slavery, and native people are resisting those actions and dying in the process.

Meredith McCoy: And for Indigenous people, another way that this violence manifests is the separation from your land. There is a particular form of violence that is inherent to that displacement, that deals with the severing of botanical relationships to medicines, and the disconnection of places where your people have their stories of how they understand themselves since time immemorial. So when we think about the kind of interpersonal violence of slavery, we cannot lose sight of the broader social and territorial violence that was also a component of the separation of people from their homelands.

Bethany Jay: And I think the other place that was a sort of a-ha moment for me is I spent a lot of time in my American history courses talking about Bacon's Rebellion. And I can remember as a student in college learning about Bacon's Rebellion and being like, whoa, this is a big deal that I've never heard about before, right? And I always take the time to talk about that. And Hasan, I think even in the episodes you say this is one of the main ways that we really talk about the kind of shift to African slavery, this sort of wholesale commitment to African slavery. And as I was listening to the episodes this season, you know, the Yamasee War really popped out at me as I need to teach these two things sort of side by side because whereas, you know, Bacon's whole plan in Bacon's Rebellion is to exterminate the native people, here in the Yamasee War, we see the native people sort of acting as agents, resisting this colonial enterprise. They both end up having sort of the same effect, to sort of reaffirm a commitment to African slavery at the end of the day in South Carolina and Virginia, but we see Native American people playing very different roles in those two narratives. Again, it's a place where I can see right in my existing curriculum that I can take this example and I can provide my students with a different way to think about the colonial moment, and I know this will make sense to my students as well.

Meredith McCoy: And I think for teachers and pre-service students who are looking for strategies, some of those strategies that you've just mentioned are very closely linked to the strategies that we heard from teachers in our call-in episode this season, about things like emphasizing resistance and using data points as ways to help students understand histories of enslavement across the continent.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So Bethany, I really like that you brought up the Yamasee War because that was one of the things that really leapt out for me as well. And I really appreciate you putting it into conversation with Bacon's Rebellion, because it seems to me that one of the important things that needs to be done in the classroom is to get our students to think in different ways about what it meant to be an Indigenous person living during this time, what it meant to be an African enslaved person living during this time, and in and next to these systems. So the importance of teaching resistance for me is just so critical. And it was reaffirmed by this season as well, because I see that as the way of conveying the humanity of these groups of people who were not only dehumanized then, but are also dehumanized now in the way that we teach them. But by putting them in the context of folk who resisted and who are fighting for their individual lives and the lives of their communities, we see their humanity. I wonder if you could say a little bit about, not only the importance of teaching resistance, but how do you go about teaching resistance, both from the perspective of incorporating the African-American experience, but then also the Indigenous experience as it relates to fighting slavery?

Bethany Jay: The other thing that I think is so incredibly important about the Yamasee War is that we see another mechanism of resistance, which is making calculated political decisions to try to better one's life. Before the Yamasee enter this military campaign against South Carolina and the traders in South Carolina, they're trying to fit themselves within that system. I think that's an interesting way and an important way to think about resistance, and not just as happening within a very particular context and as framed by limited sets of options. And that's really how I often think about resistance when I talk about the African-American experience. Like many others, my students come to the classroom and they think of resistance as Nat Turner, and that's the end of it. And when we start to talk about other forms of resistance, I think sometimes my students feel like this is maybe disappointing. That breaking tools or working slowly, it's not the dramatic narrative that they want.

Bethany Jay: But then we talk about the systems, right, in which that resistance operated, and what that resistance actually allowed people to do. So, you know, resistance can be running away for just a night or two to go see your wife or children. This allows you to maintain your humanity. It allows you to maintain a sense of community and self. So it matters. These big acts and these small acts of resistance, they all are a way in which people maintained a sense of individuality, community, worship and practicing your own forms of religion, also a mechanism of resistance, that provide continuity in a system that's meant to destroy it. And so thinking about the array of different ways in which people resisted, and the contexts in which that resistance happened, I think is so important for our students. And I think with both Indigenous communities and with African-American communities we can see this, and we can see it in the cultural continuity and the impacts that those communities have had on larger culture even today. We can see the sort of power of those movements of resistance.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I would add as well that I think incorporating native resistance to slavery, what it actually does is expand the spectrum of resistance options and how resistance manifests itself, because every one, every group, everybody in all times make choices. Everyone has choices, but not everybody has the same set of choices. And this is why I think what you are pointing out is context matters so much, because often in the classroom you have students just like you said, well, hell, if everybody is not Nat Turner then what are they doing, right? And it's like, okay, everybody has choices, but not the same set of choices. And everybody's trying to live. These aren't suicide missions. So trying to negotiate within the context of what's existing, I think shifts the dynamic and offers a kind of agency that we often overlook, that people are trying to survive individually and collectively. And sometimes that rises to the level of we don't have a choice but to pick up arms, and in other ways it's like, how can I just make my life more meaningful, ameliorate these conditions, so that I can survive with a greater degree of humanity in this hell that I find myself in?

Meredith McCoy: And so much of this is always focused on your children. How can I make this moment better for me? But then if you have kids, how am I looking forward to the next generation and the generation after that? And how do I navigate my own forms of resistance that preserve my dignity as a human being, and that also tries to create a little bit more space within the constrained circumstances in which I find myself for them?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah. I think that's a great point, because people certainly are resisting and thinking about obviously the individual lives, but they're always thinking ahead. I mean, they're always thinking for their children, for their children's children. How do I make this situation, just like you said, not only better for me individually, but for those who I love, those who I'm concerned about, my community, whether it's a small, defined plantation community or a broader Indigenous nation, how can I help perpetuate that into the future? That's part of that calculation. That's an important variable going into the equation that people are evaluating when they're making the decisions of how to resist—not should we resist, but rather how do we resist?

Meredith McCoy: So, Bethany, as we've been thinking about these resonances across the two seasons, one of the others has been this question of pedagogical strategy.

Bethany Jay: Sure. I mean, in both seasons, I think we see some strategies that are really grounded in the choices that teachers make about content. So when we are talking about African-American slavery or we're talking about Indigenous slavery, thinking about how people are represented, right, is a throughline in our curriculum. And resistance is a big piece of that. But then the other piece of thinking about how we do this in our classrooms is really thinking about that classroom experience. How are we setting up a classroom that is conducive to difficult conversations? How are we getting to know our students so that we can guide them through this kind of content and these kinds of discussions? How are we making our classrooms safe spaces? Those processes aren't easy, and one of the best people that I know to sort of lead us through those discussions is Steven Oliver, my colleague at Salem State University, who wrote a chapter on this in Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, and is back with us today to think about it in the context of both native peoples and African-American peoples and enslavement.

Meredith McCoy: Hi, Steven. Welcome.

Steven Oliver: Hello, hello. Thank you for the invitation.

Meredith McCoy: We're thrilled to have you.

Bethany Jay: Steven, I know you've done a lot of thinking about African-American slavery in the context of the book and in the context of your teaching. I was wondering if you could let us know your reactions to thinking about Indigenous slavery more carefully in season two.

Steven Oliver: Yeah, I thought it was an amazing season and filled in a lot of the blanks for me. This was something that I knew about on a surface level, I'd heard about it throughout the years, but to now have access to more in-depth knowledge of how these different systems worked, the numbers of people that were actually enslaved. I didn't know the whole piece about Indigenous people being brought back to Europe and enslaved in Europe. So there are so many nuances that season two really brought to the light. And for all of these things, I'm always thinking about how all of these things connect back to larger issues of power and access to resources, and how whether we're talking about African slavery or Indigenous slavery or other struggles that have happened other places in the world. that we come back to this sort of core central dynamic. So for me, that was a powerful throughline that existed through season one and season two.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Steve, what are some of the ways that you are thinking about suggesting to teachers that they incorporate this new knowledge into the classroom?

Steven Oliver: For me, it's always important that we provide students with a context and a reason for having the conversation, right? This idea that introducing this new knowledge is going to interrupt people's worldviews and understandings of the past. So there's places in season two where teachers are telling the story of students saying, "Well, wait a minute. You mean all the stories that I've heard and all those worksheets that I worked on, all those things were not true?" I mean, that's a powerful moment to take students through with a range of emotions that come up. And there has to be a reason for that. And the reason is so that we can understand how these systems have worked in the past, how they're related to things that we're observing in our world today, and how education and their role as teachers can hopefully be part of interrupting, disrupting, dismantling some of these systems so that the society becomes better for everyone. We're having this conversation to enlist them in the service of addressing these issues so they don't continue in any form in the years to come. And I think that framing it that way is so important. You know, it's the truth of what happened, and we need to make sure that our students have access to the truth, and that we give them time and space to have those kind of a-ha moments.

Bethany Jay: Steven, what you're talking about, you know, learning about this difficult past to enlist students in making a sort of better future is so important, but it's also not easy. And I know with the pre-service teachers that I work with—and I'm sure you see it in your students as well—there is a real concern that they're going to say or do something wrong that will get them in trouble. What do you see as some of the sort of struggles that teachers might have as they try to incorporate this sort of history? And how can we sort of help to allay some of those fears of, you know, going viral as it were, so that they're willing to engage in these conversations?

Steven Oliver: You know, it's an interesting and an important question. When you first were posing it, part of what was coming up in my mind was the question of, well, what is the other option here, right? The only other option is to not deal with the truth. And I know that we frame so many of these discussions as difficult. And they are. But one of the things that I always find myself talking about is the importance of meeting fear head on. And the fact that when we confront our own fear and then deal with things as they are, that that fear tends to dissipate. So I want to challenge people to be willing to face the fear head on, to trust that our students are more resilient often than we give them credit for, and the importance of building the kind of relationships that are strong enough to hold these kinds of challenging discussions. It's not easy to do. But again, to say well, what are the options? What's the alternative? So I want to acknowledge the fear as a real thing, but I also don't want to allow it to be the driver of our reality as educators.

Steven Oliver: I think also, you know, I'm coming at it from the perspective of a person of color, as an African-American man, Right? Not dealing with it, not having the conversations and allowing people to walk into their careers with serious gaps in their knowledge, that's a far more terrifying prospect to me. And I'm trying to model for them through my own stories, the fact that I make mistakes all the time, they will make mistakes all the time, and that if we're going to make mistakes, then this classroom space is the place to do it. Let's do it. Let's do it here. Because I'd rather have it happen in the context of our classroom than for students to go out into their careers as teachers and be making those mistakes in their own classrooms, or trying to engage with individuals or communities where there could be much more likelihood that they can cause indelible harm.

Bethany Jay: What you're saying reminds me so much of one of the guests this season, Alice Mitchell, who talks about teachers need to give themselves grace, right? To be able to be messy and to make mistakes in the classroom. That we allow that of our students, but we don't allow that for ourselves. And often if we just talk to our students about the fact that we might make a mistake, but this is why we're doing it, we can get over those hurdles.

Steven Oliver: Yeah.

Bethany Jay: A little bit easier.

Steven Oliver: I think that's definitely true. I'm often saying to students, when we know better, we do better, right? And I have a couple of stories that I offer them of times where I've made mistakes, and where my own students have called me on things. And I'm thankful that they did, because if they didn't, I would continue to make that same mistake in perpetuity. I think it's important in the kinds of assignments that I give, and I'm steeped in this idea of contemplative pedagogy, where I want people to write for what's arising for them in the present moment, and being clear to them that I don't want you to write for what you think I want to hear, right? And a lot of our students have learned how to write these reflections in a way that sometimes has little resemblance to what they actually think and feel about something. And I really don't want them to do that, because I want them to feel free to write whatever is emerging for them. And then if there's any, you know, thing that I need to do to sort of enhance their understanding of something, then that's on me to teach more to a particular aspect. But I want them to feel very free to get all those thoughts and ideas out there so we can see things for what they are.

Meredith McCoy: You know, when you're talking about giving students a place to put those uncomfortable feelings that might be coming up for them, something that I've found effective with my students is just giving them that vocabulary of settler colonialism and white supremacy as a way to frame their understanding of these things that maybe they've never really had to sit with deeply before. How do you think about those kinds of conversations about vocabulary, and where did those frameworks fit for you in your own approach to your students?

Steven Oliver: By knowing about these things, we can do something about it. We can have a part in dismantling some of these systems. But in order to do that, and I remember mentioning in my episode this notion that comes from James Baldwin, this idea that, you know, the only way to get through life is to first understand all the worst things about it, right? It's also a notion that comes from Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed, the idea that in order for people who are oppressed to transform their own situation, they first have to understand all the mechanics by which they have come to be oppressed in order for them to be able to act upon it. So I see the discussion of white supremacy and settler colonialism and all the ways in which this language continues to evolve to be part of that kind of process. But as an African-American man working with mostly white students, I have to be really clear with them about why we're having the conversation. Otherwise, students will become defensive and they will shut down.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, Steven, on that note, what are some of your classroom approaches to getting students—especially white students—to receive this history and its contemporary implications as something other than a personal indictment against them that would then lead to them pushing back, resisting and then shutting down in the classroom?

Steven Oliver: In the course of one semester, we might deal with several different topics. Race might be one topic, but we're also talking about gender, and we're also talking about sexual orientation and we're also talking about class. So this throughline of power and access to resources and how these things have manifested throughout time, allow them to understand that. And I often talk about the fact that I don't prioritize whiteness in the work that I do, where there's lots of talk now about decentralizing whiteness. So whiteness is part of the story, but it's not going to be the whole story. And I think in doing that, it gives students sort of different points of connections, because they're able to see me coming at lots of different things from lots of different perspectives.

Steven Oliver: To the degree that I can, I bring a lot of my own narrative, and the various identities that I hold come into play as an African-American man. I am also a gay-identified man. So I'm able to talk about issues related to gender and sexual orientation in ways that they can see that I am applying similar thought processes and strategies when dealing with issues of power wherever it manifests. And I think the other important part is trying to communicate to students that there have always been people of different backgrounds across all points in history that have been working in the struggle against, whether it's white supremacy or settler colonialism, and wherever possible, providing them of examples. You know, in this case of white people who are writing and thinking about how they can do this, how they can be part of this struggle. Because I find if I don't do that, if students don't have any way of seeing themselves as part of the struggle, then again, they're more likely to shut down.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, from the perspective of a teacher, part of that struggle is to get students to understand that exploring the past is important so that we can disrupt its continuities. In other words, white supremacy isn't just a thing of the past, a system of the past. It's something that we are still struggling with now, and so they have a responsibility to explore the past so that we don't continue the practices that have led to the kinds of inequality that we see in the past and that we are experiencing in the present. It's an important challenge, it's a difficult challenge to get students ready to face. So I really appreciate what you're saying.

Steven Oliver: It definitely is difficult. You know, I was listening to a talk recently by a Reverend Kyodo Williams, who is a Black lesbian Buddhist teacher. They were talking about this issue of white supremacy, and upholding white supremacy, and who benefits from white supremacy. And there was this really nuanced discussion that I found challenging. They were putting forth the idea that, in order to uphold white supremacy, you don't even necessarily have to be white, right? And, you know, back to your earlier question, you know, when I'm talking about sort of not prioritizing whiteness or centering whiteness, or having it be something that would cause white students to shut down, if you add that nuance to it and look at the ways in which, you know, all of us, regardless of the identities we hold, can be part of upholding this construct, that becomes a really powerful thing to consider.

Meredith McCoy: And that is true for settler colonialism as well. There's a lot of thinking in settler colonial studies about who is a settler? Recognizing that anyone who is not actively working against settler colonialism is at least complicit, and benefiting in some way from the ongoing possession and occupation of Indigenous lands and the ongoing theft and exploitation of Indigenous resources. So I think the way that you're framing that does open up this question of what is the role of all of us, regardless of where we come to these issues in helping to dismantle them and envision different futures.

Steven Oliver: Absolutely. Well, what's at stake if we don't do this work? And if we don't do this work of making sure that our students are aware of this history, then who is going to do it, right? And, you know, as I listen to season two, just being blown away by the level and depth of things that I just simply was not aware of pertaining to the places that I live and move and have my being now. And so I'm so thankful to everybody that participated in season two for not only sharing their knowledge, but also pointing me in the direction of where and how I can learn more so that these become things that I can incorporate into the work that I'm doing with students and continue to grapple with. And model for students this idea that we never arrive, and there's always more to learn. And this is what we hope their journey as educators is going to be about, and that they see these things as opportunities more so than they see them as challenges. If we have this conversation, what then becomes possible? If more students understand this history, if more people in this society understand this history, then what becomes possible? That's far more powerful and compelling to me than to sit with the question of how do we move people past their fear?

Meredith McCoy: That was great. In the spirit of lifelong learning, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn with you, both from your episode in the first season and today on this episode. Thank you so much for joining us.

Steven Oliver: Thank you. I've enjoyed the conversation, and I so appreciate the work that all of you do.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you.

Bethany Jay: Thanks, Steven.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, thanks Steven.

Steven Oliver: Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So Bethany, one of the key revisions that was made in the updated framework was to focus specifically on how to teach the history of enslavement in America at the earlier grade levels. Could you say a little word about some of the key takeaways for teachers in K-5 and in middle school?

Bethany Jay: You know, I approach this sort of question from both my experience in training future teachers who are products of an educational system that dealt with slavery in a certain way, and as a parent who's watching my twin nine year olds and my 12-year-old son move through elementary school. And what I've noticed is that one of the challenges that comes with teaching my students how to approach this kind of history in their future classrooms is that they're products of this kind of siloed narrative, where they're thinking about native people, they're thinking about enslaved people only in very certain places and contexts: Thanksgiving, right? 1830's South, the Civil War, right? That it is hard for them as students, and as students who are imagining themselves as teachers, to envision a curriculum that is more inclusive. So in college now, we're starting sort of from the ground up. The frameworks help us to do that because they operate very well with curriculum frameworks. They are an overlay to what my students have to use in the classroom that allow them to see these sort of points of intersection. So I think as we see these sort of frameworks implemented it's going to have a kind of snowball effect. When you have students who are the products of a more inclusive history, then they imagine history as being more inclusive from the start.

Bethany Jay: And that's where I think this sort of elementary work that we're doing is so important. That's where the incorporation of Indigenous and African-American slavery into the middle and high school context is so important. The other piece of the elementary education, the conversation that really sort of stuck with me was thinking about the representation of slavery in children's literature. Ebony Thomas's as well as Debbie Reese's episode about how African-American slavery and how Indigenous peoples in general are sort of represented in children's literature. As a parent, I see that most of the ways that my children are learning history is through children's books. And not all of those books that they've come home with, whether they were assigned or whether they just found them in the library and brought them home, have been books that have done a good job of representing enslaved people or representing Indigenous people in the ways that, you know, Thomas and Reese are talking about kind of vetting books. And so that intersection, because elementary schools have so little time for actual social studies work or actual history work, it ends up getting sort of subsumed with ELA. And so that children's literature piece I think is so incredibly important.

Meredith McCoy: That's super. Bethany, I'm glad that you brought up the Debbie Reese and Ebony Thomas episodes. You know, both of those really helped me to think through the process of understanding whether or not a children's book is accurately and appropriately representing the experiences of enslaved people and Indigenous people. And I think this is something, you know, we've heard this season from teachers, and we also have gotten an opportunity to hear from librarians who are similarly thinking about what might their responsibilities and opportunities be within this process of teaching hard history. And in particular, we heard from Elaine Westbrooks, who is the vice provost of university libraries and the university librarian at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So let's take a second and hear what Elaine shared with us when she called in.

[Elaine Westbrooks: Hi. I just want to tell you I've been listening to this podcast as I do my walking, and it's just amazing. I am not a teacher, although I used to be a teacher. Now I'm a librarian. I just want to mention that a big user of the documents you talk about are librarians. And not only are we users, we're the ones that are digitizing this material, we're the ones that collect it, and we're the ones that try to make it accessible to teachers all over the world. And I want to know any way that librarians or archivists can support this work, teaching this hard history and making sure that the truth comes to light I'm supportive of. Thank you.]

Bethany Jay: That's great.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, Meredith, I'm so glad Dr. Westbrooks called in and made the point that those who are not just listening to the podcast but who are using this material aren't just teachers in the classroom, but are librarians. Because librarians truly are the gatekeepers of knowledge in our society, which means that they are pivotal to maintaining democracy. They have the keys to this access of knowledge, right? What has actually happened in the past that we need to know about? And it's through librarians, through media resource people, that we're able to disseminate information. And in so many ways, because they have librarians, because they have this access to what is out there and what has been archived and what has been stored, you know, they can really make teaching hard history possible by making accessible these primary source documents and resources, by making accessible the kinds of books and reading material and literature that kids would gain and benefit the most from. I think, you know, they have to be a part of this conversation. And that's not just, you know, school librarians, per se. You know, Dr. Westbrooks, is the university librarian for UNC Chapel Hill, for your alma mater. You know, this is where knowledge is being kept and stored. And so they have to be really a part of the conversation when we begin to discuss and think about how to disseminate information that allows for a thorough and honest teaching of these difficult subjects from the past.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. You know, at the K-12 level, school librarians are some of our biggest resources as classroom teachers. They are the ones who help us to know what books are at appropriate levels for our growing readers, and for those librarians who are keyed into the diverse books movement, they're doing that critical work of making sure that school libraries reflect the experiences of their students by identifying books that are created by, written by, illustrated by people who deeply understand and share the experiences of our students. And then in higher education, I think about, for example, what universities can do. There is a long colonial history of archives having exploitative relationships to native communities. And so librarians and archivists in higher education could think about adopting the protocols for Native American archival materials that was adopted by the Society of American Archivists in 2018, and recognizing the kind of opportunities and responsibilities to undo some of those histories of harm, and to engage in ongoing relationships with native people and native nations.

Bethany Jay: One of the things that Dr. Westbrooks talked about was the work of librarians and archivists to digitize resources, and that makes me think of Lynn Lyerly's WPA episode from this season about the WPA slave narratives, picking up on her chapter from Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, I think is so key to use those complicated resources. And then we also had an episode that talked about the WPA narratives that dealt with Native Americans from the same era, and their importance and their utility in the classroom. So I'm so glad Lynn Lyerly could be part of season two. As you folks know, she is the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, and she has played a very pivotal role in the way that the book developed, and I'm so happy that we could get her on the podcast. She was one of my teachers, one of the professors that taught me about American slavery, and I'm glad she can share that knowledge more broadly because she's fantastic. Being able to do this work so much relies on having the resources that we need, and we all know that for enslaved people and for native people, those resources are harder to come by. And so the work of librarians and archivists becomes especially important in these fields.

Meredith McCoy: I'm so excited to give us an opportunity to hear from Elaine Westbrooks, who is the vice provost of university libraries and the university librarian at my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Vice Provost Westbrooks, thank you for calling in and for sharing your thoughts with us, and for helping us to think about the critical role that librarians and archivists play in implementing frameworks like Teaching Hard History.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So Bethany and Meredith, we received another call from James Stewart, who was actually a contributor to Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, and one of the co-founders of Historians Against Slavery, really a fantastic organization whose motto is, "Using history to make slavery history." Really focusing on the contemporary manifestations of slavery, how slavery exists in today's society. So let's listen to James Stewart's question.

[James B. Stewart: Hello. Knowing a lot about African-American slavery in the past can allow us to be able to see much more deeply and much more critically, and develop much better action plans when it comes to the problem of confronting human bondage in the United States and around the world today. So the question that I really would like to try and ask is a hard one. And it's based on a book that was written a long time ago by a historian named Ira Berlin. And Ira Berlin's book was about un-enslaved African-American people living in the South. In other words, free Blacks living in the slave society. But the title of his book is very disturbing. The title of his book—even though the people are technically free, the title of his book was Slaves Without Masters. Which seems like a really strange thing to think about. But the point he was trying to make in titling his book this way was to say that the really deep power of enslavement goes way, way, way beyond what we're customarily thinking about as the slavery that we've seen in the South.]

[James B. Stewart: Now I started thinking about this much more as I listened to the Nakia Parker talk about the relationship between the spread of Southern slavery and the removal of the Southern five Indian tribes. And I thought about it some more as I was listening to Andrés Reséndez talking about Indian slavery. That's slavery that's very, very different from the slavery in the South, just as this enslavement that we have today is very, very different than the enslavement that we had in the South. And one of our problems today is where does the boundaries of slavery end? Can we possibly have masterless slaves?]

[James B. Stewart: It's a really old, difficult concept because alongside of it is a big claim that came out of very oppressed workers in England and the early United States during the time of the first industrial revolution, who called themselves wages slaves. In other words, here were people who claimed that they were enslaved even though they took home a paycheck. And their point was that the paycheck was way too small to do anything but to allow them minimally to survive, and they did not have the option to walk away because there was no other job for them to go to. In other words, they were trapped into an exploitative system where they didn't have a personal master, but their argument was that they had an institutional master: a big corporation, a steel mill, an assembly plant, a garment factory. All of these different sectors of industries in the United States and in other parts of the world who had their workers who take home pay claim—and get serious attention for the claim—that nevertheless they are slaves without masters. They are slaves with employment, but slaves nevertheless, because they have no freedom to choose.]

[James B. Stewart: Now that becomes a very fascinating question right now, it seems to me. It's a hard question, all involved with what we can think about today when we think about modern American prisons. Modern American prisons, many of them are prisons that use imprisoned labor to create products for major corporations of all kinds. And for a great deal of the work that is done to produce material for the Defense Department, where the people inside doing the work are really not getting paid for it at all. Think about that, and think then about the proportion of dark-skinned and light-skinned people who find themselves in prisons now. Another way to think about this, which is very disturbing, has to do something with the COVID virus that we're going through now. If there are people who have no choice but to work where they are, even at the risk of death, danger and starvation, is that slavery with another name? Is it a slave without a master? Can undocumented people working in poultry factories disassembling chickens in the middle of the COVID virus, who will be fired and have no place to go unless they continue to come to work at low pay and at risk of their lives, how close does that approximate the condition of being enslaved?]

[James B: Stewart: So the broader question is, what's the idea behind, if there is a good idea behind the concept of slaves without masters in the past or today? Part of this question came to me once I began to understand how different American Indian enslavement was, and maybe still is, because plantations have nothing to do with this. Everything has to do with conquest, with force, and with disposable people. Which sounds very much to me, much more like contemporary slavery today than the plantation seems to. My only point is to get people thinking about this, and I'm glad you've given me the chance to take a second crack at this. Take care. Bye.]

Bethany Jay: I feel like I'm back in my comp exams. I've got a whole list of notes here. It seems like at the heart of Jim's question, which is a very good question, is thinking about how do we define slavery? And thinking about slavery, not just perhaps as being a person who is owned by another individual—movable property—but thinking about slavery in a very kind of structural sense. You know, what are the factors that allow people's labor to be exploited, right? What are the factors that can narrow or even eliminate choice for workers? And as Jim's question highlights, there are a variety of different ways in which we can see this operating within the United States today and the sort of larger world.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think you highlighted one characteristic that's critically important, and that's this notion of chattel slavery and property. So when we're talking about specifically and explicitly the African-American context, which extends in various iterations dependent upon where and when you're looking and talking about with regard to Indigenous enslavement, and that is the reduction of the laborer to property, property that could be bought and sold. We try to apply that to the contemporary context for the worker who's in the early-20th century textile mill or the factory shop or the poultry plant today. Certainly there are questions of poor wages, questions of being forced to work. Even in prison. When you move into prisons, I think the lines begin to blur, right? Because certainly these are gradations. But, you know, there's a difference between someone who's being literally forced to work for starvation wages or they lose their job, and somebody who could be sold and considered property, and all the other rights that are denied them outside of the workplace. Because whereas slavery certainly was across the board—and Historians Against Slavery, their sort of definition of slavery connects to this, when people are forced to work against their will for the profit of others, slavery absolutely is an economic system in all of its iterations that has these social components as well to help justify it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But it is more than just that sort of putting people to work. That may be the purpose. I think those other social components: the denying people their right to mobility, to move, and the stripping away of all these other basic human rights, is a critical component of that broader definition. And I think Jim was getting at this. It's not so much is this the same thing as what existed before, but rather, how do these forms of forced labor, unfair labor or exploitative labor that exist today, that we see today, how do they connect to this universe of unfree labor? And I think that's important to keep in the conversation, because at the heart of slavery—and I think we learned this through your work, we learned this through the first season and the second season—is this exploitation of people, the extraction of their labor. And that's the heart of it. And that doesn't suddenly end when the explicit systems of enslavement end. The goal is to extract labor at minimum cost. That's capitalism. And we're still in that system, and when you look at the margins of that system, we see these practices that are unfair, that really connect back, or should be. We should think of them as extensions of connections to these earlier systems of unfreedom.

Bethany Jay: Yeah. And I guess sort of Jim's challenging us really to think about expanding that definition of slavery. That just because a person is not physically owned by another person doesn't mean that an exploitive system is not in place.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There is like two elements to that that we need to think about when we're talking about these systems of unfreedom in a contemporary context and what amounts to slavery, is that you want to be able to explain and use language and descriptions that capture the essence of what this is. And at the same time, you don't want to deny the differences that existed between what came before and what we have now. I think the challenge is to put the contemporary and the historical both in proper context so that you can better understand both. As opposed to saying, "Oh, well, that's just not that," because that's not very helpful.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, see both the throughlines and the ways in which these two systems are different than one another. And that context has been so much of what we've been talking about today, and so much of what the various historians and educators on the podcast have been talking about, right? Really, the importance of thinking about all of these things in their proper time and place.

Meredith McCoy: There are a lot of different ways to think about what it means to be held against your will. And we thought about this when we were looking at what definition of slavery to use in the Teaching Tolerance framework for Teaching Hard History. So the definition and the framework is: "Slavery is the holding of people through force, fraud or coercion, for purposes of sexual exploitation or forced labor, so that the enslaver can extract profit." If you're looking for it, that's in summary objective one in the framework for grades 6 through 12, and it's adapted from Free the Slaves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, we want to thank James for his questions. Very thoughtful and provocative. And, you know, Jim's point about contemporary manifestations of slavery and unfreedom really got me thinking as well about what are the legacies of Indigenous enslavement and the enslavement of African Americans, Africans here in the United States, and how do some of the things that we see, exploitative labor practices that exist today in a contemporary moment, what are the throughlines, as you had just said, between that and what became earlier? So Bethany, let me just ask you, what do you see as some of the principal legacies of American slavery that carry through the last century and a half into the present?

Bethany Jay: One of the biggest ones—and Jim's questions referred to this—is really white supremacy. When I use that term with my students, I think they often just think of white supremacy as Ku Klux Klan rallies, or people with swastikas tattooed on their bodies. They don't think of it as a whole system, right? And so I think really the biggest throughline that we see is white supremacy and legal, economic, political and cultural structures that help to support it. The prison-industrial complex and the racial disparities within it, right? Access to voting rights. I mean, all of these different ways that white supremacy manifests itself in our society today.

Meredith McCoy: You know, the thing that always comes up for me when I think about the kind of intergenerational echoes or permutations of enslavement in a contemporary context for Indigenous people is missing and murdered Indigenous women. We know that there is an epidemic of Indigenous women and two-spirit people and girls who are being held against their will for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. And so I want to make sure that we continue to keep an eye on that problem, and the many efforts of Indigenous people to locate their missing relatives and to end this epidemic in Indian Country. And something else I think we should consider is the relationship of Indigenous youth to the judicial system. We know that the school-to-prison pipeline is very active in Indian country, and research coming out of the National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center details that, you know, native students are only one percent of the student population, but they're two percent of all school arrests and they're three percent of referrals to law enforcement. And so, as we think about mass incarceration, we have to also remember that native youth are also disproportionately impacted by the school-to-prison pipeline.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany, I'm glad you keyed in on white supremacy, because I'm often asked, you know, what's the legacy of slavery? And I think the principal legacy of slavery is, in fact, white supremacy. You know, sometimes we don't want to talk about it, we get a little nervous, but you have to talk about white supremacy, otherwise, none of what we're actually seeing makes sense. And that is what we see. I mean, the versions of white supremacy, in other words the racism that we see—but it's not just racism, I don't think that's specific enough, but the term, the terminology "white supremacy," which inherent in that definition is the idea that people of European descent are somehow socially, culturally superior to people of African descent, people of color, that is so critically important to the institution of slavery, for justifying it. Why Jefferson can say all men are created equal and still be enslaving people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it is so critically important to what we see after slavery is abolished. Why, after the enslavement of African Americans ends, you can see peonage and sharecropping emerge. Why, after you can have the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, you can still see the enslavement of Indigenous people across North America. White supremacy provides the justification for the exploitation of people of color in American society. It provided the justification for slavery. It provided the justification for Jim Crow. And it has provided the justification for mass incarceration, both explicitly and implicitly. And you have to have a socially acceptable justification for society to accept the conditions and the treatment of people.

Bethany Jay: If you don't talk about white supremacy as a structure that is determining a lot of the way that our culture and society works, then you're almost taking its tenets for granted, right? For example, if you don't think about white supremacy in who can get a mortgage or de facto kind of school desegregation that exists in wealthy towns and neighborhoods, then you take it for granted that well, Black people just must not be able to live here. Black people can't get a mortgage because of some inherent flaw in that person and not a problem in the system. So we have to talk about white supremacy in order to name it, identify it, and then start to undo it. Otherwise, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And then the inequality that it helps create, that is certainly justifies, then becomes, as you rightly point out, considered natural. It's just the natural order of things.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When we know, in fact, that inequality is the product of purposeful decision-making, policies and practices over the course of generations.

Bethany Jay: Centuries.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Over centuries, absolutely. And so we have to name it in order to be able to explain it.

Bethany Jay: Right. And that's where the American problem of talking about race, and not just race is something that belongs to African-American people, but also thinking about whiteness and white supremacy, and our problem with having those big conversations sort of dooms us into this cycle. That's what I'm hoping that Teaching Hard History can help us to remedy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. We're not just interested in exploring oppression. We're not just interested in sort of dissecting and trying to make sense of that, although you absolutely have to. That's the context, those are the systems that we're dealing with. But also recognizing the agency of the people who are being exploited by these various systems, who are being oppressed. So studying the marginalized people and giving them voice. And one way to do that, of course, is to focus on resistance, the way they fight back, and the change that they have made over the centuries. Whether that's folk engaged in rebellion in what has become New Mexico or people who are taking to the streets in Watts or calling for Black power in Mississippi. And we are going to be continuing that exploration in our third season. Season one and two really focused on American slavery, drawing on the work that you and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly did with Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. And for our third season, we are going to be focusing on the African-American freedom struggle in the 20th century, centered on the civil rights movement, taking a deep dive into the ways in which African Americans have continued this struggle for freedom.

Bethany Jay: It's going to be good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We're sort of placed in this sequence in part because you can't understand the obstacles that Black folk were facing and what they were fighting against, as well as what they were fighting for—these basic civil rights and human rights that continue to be denied them after the moment of emancipation, unless you understand this centuries-long history of enslavement, and then what came after.

Bethany Jay: I love that your book on Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement has come out, and I love that this is the next season for Teaching Hard History, because this is one of the principal things that I hear from my friends who are teachers in elementary, middle and high school classrooms, that the way the frameworks are written in so many states, you have kind of Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, and then you've got Martin Luther King. And those are some of the only people and moments that curriculum encourages us to think about an African-American experience. Ebony Thomas, I think, also talked about this in her podcast episode, and what my friends in the classroom have said and what I've talked with my students who are going to be teachers about is, how can you understand the civil rights movement if you don't understand slavery, if you don't understand segregation, if you don't understand everything that came before? So having spent these two seasons really thinking carefully about what does slavery look like, I love that we get to pivot in season three and think about the leaders, the everyday people who worked together to make a change during the civil rights movement.

Meredith McCoy: And I would just echo that, as teachers have thought about the intersections of Black and Indigenous experiences and the kinds of solidarities between Black and Indigenous people, that they carry that interest with them into the next season, and continue to think about the intersections between the American Indian Movement and the civil rights movement and other struggles for Indigenous freedom.

Bethany Jay: I think we can see how carrying all these threads, all of these threads, that we have to continue to bring through the curriculum.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, and I think what you're describing in terms of understanding the civil rights movement because you understand this history of enslavement, is also true for understanding contemporary movements for Indigenous freedom. So when we think about, for example, the current standoff between native nations in South Dakota and the South Dakota governor, or just a couple of years ago, when we think about the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in order to understand these efforts to protect and promote tribal sovereignty, we have to see them within this legacy of 500 years of fighting against settler colonial encroachment, including fighting against these longer legacies of the various permutations of enslavement.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Meredith, before we go, I understand that we received another voicemail that we need to listen to and get some reactions from.

Meredith McCoy: Okay.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So let's cue that up and play it now.

Meredith McCoy: Let's go for it.

[Monita Bell: Hey, Meredith. This is Monita Bell, interim co-director for Teaching Tolerance. I just want to give you a special thank you for stepping in to lend your voice and your perspective to this season of the podcast. We will miss you so much. And thank you for continuing to serve on the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board. Your contribution is just invaluable. So thank you and kudos for all your excellent work. We just wish you all the best for the endeavors that you have ahead of you. And we will be in touch.]

Meredith McCoy: That is so kind!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I totally didn't know that was gonna happen.

Meredith McCoy: Oh, that is so lovely. Thank you. I have really appreciated and enjoyed this opportunity to learn by doing the podcast with you, Hasan, this season, and learning from our guests and learning from engaging with the teachers who have been listening to us. And it's just been a wonderful experience for me, and I hope that I have shared as much with y'all as you have shared with me. So thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. It's been a great joy. And, you know, we also have our executive producer, Kate Shuster, on the line. Kate, would you like to say a few words?

Kate Shuster: Yeah, I definitely would. This 18 months or so that I have worked with Meredith has changed my life. It hasn't just changed my life, it's changed my practice and the practice of tens of thousands of teachers, and by proxy, hundreds of thousands of students. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. And I do want to say to you, Meredith, that you have been incredibly patient in answering the questions that I've asked and a lot of people have asked as we took on the ambitious task of rewriting the frameworks and putting together this podcast. I feel like you're incredibly erudite, a living bibliography. That there has never been a time in our acquaintance where I didn't say, "Hi, do you know where I can find this information?" and you would know where to find it. And I feel like you've just been this incredible collaborator, that you've taken up new projects, often with a ragtag bunch of strangers, and you've really shown all of us on your team how essential teamwork really is to generate genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship. And so I just cannot say enough that, well, I think you have a face for TV, you definitely have a voice for radio.

Meredith McCoy: [laughs]

Kate Shuster: And we literally could not have made, not just this season, but the K-12 framework without you, so I'm just deeply grateful, not just for myself and not just for Teaching Tolerance, but for the ways your contribution for the work are going to help us continue to try to dismantle as much as we can the poisonous legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy. So you are a superstar, and I am excited not just to say I know you now, but I'm going to have known you when. And I don't know if I'm saying this right, but is the way to say it "miigwetch?"

Meredith McCoy: Aw! Yeah, miigwetch. Miigwetch. Thank you for that. You know, I think one of the things that I love so much about this podcast is that it is a way to facilitate the necessary conversations between teachers who are doing the work in the classroom everyday, and those of us who are trying to brainstorm the best ways that we can support and contribute to that important work. And so I, as a former middle school teacher who has a lot of longing to be back with my 12 year olds, have been really grateful for this opportunity to think about classroom practice in this kind of communication with Hasan and with all of our guests and all of our listeners. And I just also want to note that the insights that I have been able to share here on the podcast, that I have tried to bring into this conversation, are the result of conversations happening far beyond me, conversations happening with the many Indigenous scholars who have been doing this work in history and in American studies and in Indigenous studies and in education for decades. And so I can't take any of the praise here for this. This is the thinking that has shaped me that has come from Indigenous scholars who have walked me through this process and who will be here to pick up the work when I'm done with it. So a big shout out to them as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, from everyone on the Teaching Hard History podcast team, Meredith, we really thank you for all that you have brought to the table. And I personally thank you for being a co-host. You've just made this such an enjoyable experience. And I've often found myself just sitting back and listening probably too much. I was, like, taking notes and I was like, "Oh, wait. No, Meredith got that. I don't need to add anything. No, this is good." Made life so easy.

Meredith McCoy: I feel the same way about you. Thank you, Hasan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's been a real joy, and I have listened and learned so much in the season. It just wouldn't have been a season without you. And I know how much work it takes, so I'm so glad that you made the time to be a part of this special podcast, this special team. And we know we got to let you go. We know you have other things, career things, personal things that you got to handle, that you've got to make work. You're gonna do wonderful things. But we will find a way to bring you in next season. So don't go too far. There's still some work to be done, and I'm sure the audience members for next year would gain tremendously from hearing your insights on the contemporary struggles for freedom in the United States.

Meredith McCoy: Well, thank you. I would love to come back and join whenever there might be an opportunity for that. But in the meantime, I am looking forward to kicking back and listening to you and the direction that you take next season in.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There we go. Bethany, we want to thank you so much for taking time out to join us for this final episode of the second season. And to thank you, of course, for really laying the groundwork, you and Cynthia, for laying the groundwork for this entire podcast, for the framework. We certainly wouldn't be doing what we have been able to do without your hard work.

Bethany Jay: Well, I always have fun hanging out with you, Hasan, and it was great to meet Meredith.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Before we head out of here, do you have any last words that you would like to share?

Bethany Jay: You know, really in season two, I've gone through this journey with our listeners, and I've been inspired and encouraged to do even more with Indigenous slavery than I have been doing in the past with my classes. I've been inspired to talk with my students about elementary education and slavery. And I'm really looking forward to digging even more into some of these great resources on Teaching Hard History, to go forth and do this work. And I hope others are, too.

Meredith McCoy: Thank you, Bethany. Thank you so much for being here and for doing this work.

Bethany Jay: Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany Jay is an associate professor of history at Salem State University, where she teaches courses on 19th-century American history, African-American history and history education. She is also co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery from the University of Wisconsin Press.

Meredith McCoy: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online ...

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And resources mentioned during this episode ...

Meredith McCoy: ... at Tolerance.org

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: /podcasts. Teaching Hard History is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance, and Kate Schuster is our executive producer.

Meredith McCoy: Our theme song is "Different Heroes" by A Tribe Called Red, featuring Northern Voice, who graciously let us use it for this series.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we'll be back in a couple of months with season three. And the focus, of course, will be on the civil rights movement. And I'm gonna tell you right now, it's about to be fire. We have new ways of focusing on teaching the African-American freedom struggle. We're going to have civil rights playlists, Spotify lists. We're going to be talking about nonviolence and self-defense, complicating King, complicating Malcolm X. How do you teach them? So stay tight. Come back and be ready for some more.

Meredith McCoy: Man, I cannot wait to listen to those episodes. In the meantime, that's a wrap for season two. Stay healthy, stay safe, y'all.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy: I'm Dr. Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American studies and history at Carleton College.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Meredith McCoy: And we're your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Resources from Fairfax County Public Schools

• Changes in Population (PDF 800 KB)
• Dos and Don’ts of Teaching About Race, Culture, and Identity (PDF 130 KB)
• The Role of Virginians During the Civil War (PDF 1.4 MB)
• The Role of Virginians in the Founding of the New Nation (PDF 970 KB)

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Teaching is a creative profession. And as one of our guests for today noted, sometimes we have to “MacGyver” our classrooms. Even in the best of times, when we’re not trying to learn how to teach remotely on the fly, every day in the classroom is an adventure. Education is, at its core, improvisational; teachers are constantly dealing with different situations, a range of student personalities, and unfolding current events.

Meredith McCoy: That is so true. And as part of our work on the Hard History advisory board, we get to see the many ways teachers use our materials out in the world as they adapt to their classrooms. And we know there are so many more ways that teachers are using these resources that we don’t even know about. It’s encouraging and exciting to see all the ways teachers are taking this material and running with it, especially while we’re teaching long distance.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And today, we’re going to get to share some of those stories with you.

Meredith McCoy: I'm Meredith McCoy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries. And this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

Meredith McCoy: A special series from Teaching Tolerance—a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: During our second season, we expanded our focus to better support elementary school educators and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in what is currently the United States.

Meredith McCoy: And as this season draws to a close, we’re excited to turn our attention to you—the educators in our audience—to talk about how we're navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We want to thank everyone who participated. We received a lot of calls, and in the end, we tried to pick some questions and stories that would resonate the most with you. We’ll see you on the other side.

Meredith McCoy: Hey Hasan, we’re just gonna go straight into it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ah, my bad. My bad. What is it that you say? We’re so glad you can join us!

Meredith McCoy: Yes we are. Our first call today is with Erin Green, a fifth grade teacher in Texas who just started a unit on enslavement with her students distance learning. Erin, welcome. Could you start by telling us a bit about your classroom and your question?

Erin Green: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I teach 18 kids and I have those same kids all day and teach all the subject areas. But I work on a team of four teachers, and my job is to create the lesson plans for social studies and English language arts. And so I have a unit on slavery and abolition that I've taught for the last few years and kind of worked with and tweaked. And I feel pretty good about it. And then with this whole work from home distance learning situation, I just couldn't wrap my mind around how to teach such a hard part of our history from a distance. So yeah, that's kind of how I landed at the question. And I'm really grateful that you guys jumped on it and everyone's so willing to talk to me.

Meredith McCoy: You know Erin, I know that your original post generated a lot of thoughts, and this is something that really resonated with me. I teach histories of Indigenous education. And this week, I'm doing a unit with my students on the federal Indian boarding schools.

Erin Green: Mm-hmm.

Meredith McCoy: And I was similarly struggling with how do I teach such sensitive and potentially traumatizing content with my college students when I can't see them, and I don't know how they're responding to the content.

Erin Green: Yeah.

Meredith McCoy: As I was looking through the responses to your original question, I noticed that there was one teacher who had a lot of great ideas, and that teacher was Deborah March. So I asked her to join us. Deborah March is the multicultural studies curricular resource teacher for Fairfax County Public Schools. Deborah, could you start by telling us a bit about your work, and particularly the materials you've been working on around enslavement?

Deborah March: So my position was conceived as a position focused on identifying and addressing bias in the curriculum as written. Although I serve across the disciplines, you can imagine that one major priority is the social studies curriculum. It shapes how students feel about themselves as learners and as human beings in our classrooms.

Meredith McCoy: Erin, what strategies seem to be working with your students so far?

Erin Green: From a distance, I didn't know how I could possibly show the photographs that I might show otherwise or look at those primary sources that reveal that brutality. So what I kind of did this past week, I focused a lot on abolitionists. Really looking at empowering positions of people who were enslaved and fought to end slavery. A lot of kids and adults come into the understandings of like, well, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery. And so really pushing back on that idea and looking at who really ended slavery, and how this took a coalition of hundreds of thousands of people to end something like this.

Meredith McCoy: I'm so glad to hear that. And you mentioned that one of Deborah's original comments on the social media page was about thinking really carefully about what images we choose to show for our students right now while we're in distance learning. Deborah, I wonder if you could talk a bit more about some of the strategies and resources that you're recommending for teachers to think about right now while they're teaching enslavement via distance learning.

Deborah March: A lot of Erin's insights here even in just talking about her focus on abolitionists and empowerment are aligned with some of the guiding principles that have informed my work, alongside my team in revising the social studies curriculum. One of those principles is affirming human dignity. And this means teaching about a dehumanizing institution without reenacting that dehumanization through our pedagogy. A small question like, "Who gets to be an individual with a name and a face in our curriculum?" You know, disproportionately it's white, wealthy men who are named as individuals, and folks with marginalized identities tend to show up as groups, right? And are treated as a monolith.

Deborah March: It also, I think, a question like, "When do we start the story?" I notice in the fourth grade standards for Virginia that the first-time students encounter Africans is as slaves, right? To me, that stands in stark contrast to decisions that curators at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture made to start the history concourse in the 12th century, so that visitors encounter diverse African civilizations and the many individuals who made contributions to those civilizations over hundreds of years before encountering the middle passage. It's really about centering the perspectives and experiences of people who were enslaved, as well as other people who were harmed by the institution of slavery, such as free African Americans. To me, this is as much about what we teach as it is about the lens that we use to frame the content. You know, when kids are encountering events or figures in history, whose perspectives are framing those events? When we teach about George Washington as, you know, the quote, "Father of our nation," or when we teach about Thomas Jefferson as a champion of liberty, are we teaching hard history but avoiding the hard parts when we talk about our founding fathers, our so-called founding fathers?

Deborah March: And then third—and I feel like Erin touches on this so beautifully in her learning experience around abolitionists, this goal of empowering students as change agents who recognize and address injustice. You know, some of the texts that I've seen that address slavery for young learners either minimize or rationalize this system of injustice. I've seen too many resources that say the South's agrarian economy required cheap labor, right? A sentence like that justifies an unjust and brutalizing institution of slavery on economic grounds. So we have this slavery without enslavers. Calling attention to injustice and empowering kids to notice injustice, it helps students believe that a central part of learning our history is about imagining better and more just and more free ways of being with each other in the world. Better systems, right? And I think a small way to empower students is just to make space for their questions. Why does it have to be that way? What if it were different?

Meredith McCoy: Those are such important and wonderful guiding principles. Erin, I'm wondering how you're thinking about applying those in your classroom.

Erin Green: Yeah, I love that you brought up George Washington, because one of the resources that you shared even on that thread was just a graphic of the people who lived at Mount Vernon. And you can tell that it's overwhelming that the population at Mount Vernon was people who were enslaved by the Washingtons. Something that I was going to do when we were still planning for a typical school year is we were going to do a book study on Never Caught, the story Ona Judge, a woman who was enslaved by George Washington. In this nonfiction narrative, it talks about his relentless pursuit to get this woman back onto his plantation. And I've been looking at some different resources online to really center her story, and then to also look at Thomas Jefferson, and look at these contrasting narratives we have of what even do are our learning standards say about them? Because our learning standards in Texas are pretty bad for social studies. So looking at how are we supposed to learn about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and these men we call our founding fathers, and what are these other histories that we should also know about them?

Meredith McCoy: Hasan, how is all of this resonating with you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Well, I love the core principles, the guiding principles, Deborah, that you outlined, because they really speak to the practice that Erin, that you are trying to implement in the classroom itself: this idea of humanizing the enslaved people, affirming human dignity, centering those who often get marginalized. That's critical. It's difficult under normal circumstances. It's even more challenging now, in part because it's hard to read the students. There's so much in this material that can be misinterpreted, because it has been wrongly interpreted for so long. The response, the hesitancy, the concern is well guided. It's so critical to what they are going to learn going forward, it's so critical really to understanding what they're seeing, the disparate impact on so many people of color. This history is so important to them. We don't have a choice to skip it. We just got to figure out how to do it accurately and effectively in these circumstances. Deborah, did you have one or two things that teachers can do right now that you might want to share?

Deborah March: Yes, I thought it might be helpful to talk a little bit about one of the resources I shared with Erin, the perspectives chart.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Deborah, I just want to jump in and tell our listeners if you want to see the resources she's describing, we've put a link to them in the show notes for this episode.

Deborah March: So if you imagine an infographic with, like, five or six columns. In each of those columns imagine a portrait of a person, the name of that person and, you know, a two- to three-sentence blurb about that person. And these are people that students would not usually find opportunities to encounter or learn about in typical textbooks. Portraits of a People is a really good example of a book that visualizes the history of African Americans in the 19th century. But each of these blurbs and each of these historical figures is represented on this perspectives chart. So I've seen teachers use these perspective charts in a variety of ways. One is just to present kids with a chart and a couple of simple provocations. What do you notice? What do you wonder? We typically have found that Project Zero's thinking routines have been really powerful tools for supporting developmentally-appropriate inquiry among students, and these so-called thinking routines are available for free online to all teachers. Allowing students to engage in a thinking routine like that with the perspectives chart in a small chat room or virtually in a Google doc or another format can add a layer allowing kids to kind of collaboratively construct an understanding of the past. And I would also emphasize they are the wonder portion, giving kids some time to ask questions.

Deborah March: Another great example of how you might use this perspectives chart is alongside the study of any event or important document or historical figure that you might be teaching about in American history. So it's one thing to present Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, but to present them alongside a perspectives chart that visualizes profiles of actual enslaved African Americans who were living during the time and inviting kids to think, "How might that person make sense of Thomas Jefferson's words here? What might that person think about, feel about or care about as that person encounters these words?" This is a way to really shift the lens and reframe the narrative and think about whose lives and perspectives are valuable in interpreting American history.

Deborah March: One of the majorly important interventions that a perspective chart like this makes into the study of American history for young kids is it names individuals who typically are not named in our textbooks, who typically are not named in our curriculum resources, and indeed in the mainstream narrative of American history tend not to be deemed worthy of formal study. So it helps kids see more lives, more experiences, and it really enriches their opportunity to navigate the complexity of American history.

Deborah March: I so far have been talking about an emphasis on individual lives, but I also wanted to think about ways to empower students to see the system. If we're talking about the history of slavery, it's crucially important to affirm human dignity by lifting up and honoring the lives of individuals who were enslaved or who were harmed by the institution of slavery. But too much focus on individuals might cause students to lack a perspective on the institution of slavery more broadly. We really need to foster sensitivity to how systems are designed, so that we can help students see themselves as participants in systems and also agents within those systems who might change in the service of justice.

Deborah March: So I think a lot about data visualizations here. I thought it might be useful to follow up to Erin's point about the data from Mount Vernon. George Washington's Mount Vernon has recently, over the past few years, really done a lot of important work in trying to shift the history that visitors encounter when they visit George Washington's former residence, away from centering the Washington family and toward honoring the lives of the many enslaved people who lived there and worked there and made life possible for that family there. One of the resources that they give to teachers is a set of stick figures representing individual human beings who lived at Mount Vernon in 1799. These stick figures are color coded. Green stick figures represent enslaved people of all ages. Red stick figures represent free workers, and yellow stick figures represent members of the Washington family. There is no other information on this sheet of paper, and so it's presented really without comment. Pairing that with a thinking routine like See, Think, Wonder, has yielded really powerful student thinking about the complexity of slavery in relation to our nation's first president.

Deborah March: I've seen students pose questions in chalk talks or virtual settings around why? Why did slavery exist, right? So big questions all the way down to small questions about the data itself. They're counting the stick figures and noticing how few people were free, how few people were enslaved, and wondering why that was the case. And so the pairing of data visualization with a very open-ended question and just seeing what kids do with it, can be a powerful way for students to begin to make sense of the system more broadly.

Deborah March: There are many really powerful data visualizations related to the history of slavery, but one is an interactive visualization of the Atlantic slave trade. Picture a world map, and it's a time-lapsed video of individual slave ships leaving West Africa for both South and North America. Over the course of 150 years, you can see the individual slave ships and where they land, and you can see over the course of time the magnitude as the Atlantic slave trade increases, the number of ships leaving and where they're going.

Deborah March: There are a few other approaches that I'd love to discuss. One is the use of primary source artifacts. Many museums have made their collections digitally available to educators, and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in particular has incredible resources digitally that I've seen teachers use with powerful results. Joseph Trammell's freedom papers are digitally available. These are the freedom papers that an African-American man carried around in Loudon County. You can see the box that he preserved these papers in. You can see the ways in which the papers are carefully folded and stowed away. 1852 is the date that the papers are marked. Using an artifact like Joseph Trammell's freedom papers alongside other artifacts such as, you know, a cowrie shell found at Monticello dating back to the late-18th century, with just a couple of sentences of the ways in which cowrie shells were featured in the clothing, the jewelry, the practices of many sub-Saharan African and South Asian cultures for thousands of years, right? But the fact that this cowrie shell was found at Monticello during America's colonial period.

Deborah March: And then, you know, a third artifact, a good example might be Jesse Burke's violin, which is also digitally available through the Smithsonian. This is a violin that an enslaved person played during the 1850s and 1860s. And there is an accompanying quote from his descendant who remembered her father's skill, but also her memory of the impact of enslavement on the family's lineage. And so a simple image of the artifact, a name associated with a person whose life that artifact touched or was part of. And most importantly from my view, also choice, right? By offering three or four artifacts, it gives kids an opportunity to decide, what am I drawn to? What am I interested in? Also, what am I ready for? What do I have space for in my mind right now to kind of dig more deeply into?

Deborah March: And so a thinking routine like Connect, Extend, Challenge, can pair really well with this assortment of artifacts. How does this connect to what you already know about slavery and freedom? How does this extend your thinking about slavery and freedom? What challenges or puzzles does this create for you? You can imagine this taking place in a variety of digital formats, synchronous or asynchronous, to kind of find a way into the history of enslavement through these artifacts and try to imagine the ways in which these artifacts were part of the system, but also part of people's lives, speaking to their humanity and their resilience.

Deborah March: And a final approach that I'd love to talk about, so far we've talked a lot about kind of individuals, systems and the artifacts that speak to their everyday experience. What we haven't talked about is resistance. And I know that many scholars of the history of enslavement in the United States point out that a major gap is in trying to imagine enslaved people having agency, that that's part of affirming their humanity. You know, there's a learning experience that we offer teachers and we've actually done it with some teachers where we have individual index cards. You can imagine doing this digitally with individual boxes that have each word or phrase in it. And each of these boxes identify a different form of resistance. Some are violent, right? Revolts, uprising. Some are escape, self-emancipation. Some are about individual nonviolent resistance. Some are about everyday resistance: breaking tools, slowing the pace of work, faking illness. Some are about the ways in which culture might be a part of resistance and resilience. You know, maintaining African cultures and languages, religion, cooking, music and dance. There are also collective forms of resistance, like teaching other enslaved people to read. And so anyway, if you imagine all of these as separate separate cards or separate boxes, what we invite learners to do is to group them according to a grouping that makes sense in the learner's mind. How do these things go together? We've seen, you know, learners—adults and children—group them as, you know, violent or nonviolent, group versus individual. Adults use language like "overt or covert," "organized or day to day," you know? Pre-planned. Confrontation or culture. And students have, you know, developmentally-appropriate language to name some of the same things. Really, the opportunity here is in giving kids a chance to notice the many different ways that enslaved people resisted and preserved their own cultures through this brutal history.

Deborah March: And I would say, regardless of the approach that the individual educator chooses, I feel like it's important to emphasize backwards social emotional planning. What do we want students to be feeling by the end of this? There's an equity thought leader named Beverly Daniel Tatum that has been really important to guiding our work in cultural responsiveness. And I'd love to just read this quote from her. She says, "Learning to recognize cultural and institutional racism and other forms of inequity without also learning strategies to respond to them is a prescription for despair." And so, you know, of course, as educators, we neither want students to feel complacent or good about this history of injustice, of course, but we don't want to leave them despairing either. So where do we want them to be? And I think, you know, imagining one possible goal as empowering students as potential and current agents of social change, empowering them as actors in their communities and in their world, is a good starting point for thinking about where we want students to be by the end of their learning about the history of enslavement.

Meredith McCoy: Deborah, these are such phenomenal resources. And this idea of helping our students to both wrestle with hard history and also find ways out that are hopeful and action-driven, I can see so many of these tools being applicable in my own classroom, thinking about perspectives and systems, about artifacts, primary source materials. I'm particularly excited about this attention to resistance, and think that it's so important that we engage our students in thinking about ways of resistance that apply to the past and are also so relevant to our present moment. Erin, in thinking about the different tools that Deborah has offered to us, which resources or tools can you see being useful to you in your own teaching with your students online?

Erin Green: The first thing that I think I really want to make sure my kids get out of this is just language. Teaching our kids why we say "enslaved people" instead of "slaves," which for us who are in these conversations all the time seems so basic. To kids and to their parents who maybe are not engaged in these conversations, I think that's huge. To just start with language, and how do we talk about this hard history. And I think that is a—just the initial building block towards affirming human dignity. And then with that, I've also really been thinking about this idea of the system and also individuals and giving both of those stories and both of those realities a lot of weight. In my own classroom, I would love to do this, specifically looking at Ona Judge, who was enslaved by the Washingtons. Pairing that with the infographic that Deborah shared, it just seems like a beautiful way for my young students to be able to see this is a story of a person, and this is also a story of a system. And just that infographic in this distance-learning atmosphere, I feel okay as a teacher giving my students that to look at in a space where they might be at home by themselves, and they might not have an adult there who's going to walk through this with them.

Erin Green: Because I think I mentioned this earlier, but a lot of what I'm doing right now is asynchronous learning. Like, we're not all logged in at the same time. And then I think continuing the conversation afterwards to empower students as change agents, and to harp on this idea of resistance today. I think that looking at the idea of reparations, like, what does this look like today in the sense of reparations? And this is where it's hard because I'm not physically in the classroom with them, because usually it would be such a larger conversation of, you know, slavery didn't end at the end of the Civil War. How has slavery transformed and evolved? That's the conversation that I would want to have in the classroom, and I'm grappling still with how to have that conversation from a distance. But I do think that talking about what's happening today, what's needed to be done today, and how can we engage in that resistance in that fight today in 2020 is something that I would want to end this unit on and to have my students walk away with this understanding that there's still work to be done to fight the system.

Meredith McCoy: Erin and Deborah, thank you both so much for allowing us to learn from you as you're learning from each other.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was awesome.

Meredith McCoy: It was awesome, yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That was great.

Erin Green: Thank you so much.

Deborah March: Thank you.

Meredith McCoy: Erin, I look forward to hearing about your students' response to the unit once it's done. And Deborah, thank you so much for your work developing those materials and sharing them with us today.

Deborah March: Take care.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thanks.

Erin Green: Bye.

Meredith McCoy: Thanks y'all.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm so glad Erin asked that question, but of course, not everybody who is interested and wants to teach these difficult subjects and wants to teach hard history and wants to talk about slavery in the classroom is a social studies teacher. We received a call from Justin Aion in western Pennsylvania, and Justin teaches math to middle and high school students outside of Pittsburgh, PA. And here's what he wanted to know.

Justin Aion: As a math teacher, not a history or English teacher, I try to incorporate as much social justice into my math class as I can, but it's incredibly easy for teachers and administrators to talk about how mathematics is not a political subject. It is a political subject from the way that we decide which topics we're going to teach and which kinds of mathematics history we're looking at. I was wondering if you could address how non-social studies, literature, English teachers could tackle some of these topics in their classrooms as well, especially when we're told simply to teach to the standards which do not include social justice or slavery. Thank you so much.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We thought this was a great question and reached out to Justin. So he's joining us here now. Justin, how you doing, man?

Justin Aion: I'm doing very well, sir. And how about you?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I'm making things happen. We're here, we're excited. We're really thankful for your question and the work that you do. How are your students? How are you doing right now under these new conditions?

Justin Aion: The district that I'm working for recently is an adjudicated residential school. So at the moment we are all laid off. So my teaching has been really helping with my own kids as they try to navigate this landscape through distance learning for elementary.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Man, I'm really sorry to hear that. And hopefully the district, as many other districts, especially for that population, will realize we have we cannot lay off teachers. But you know, let me ask you this: What ways have you tried in the past to incorporate hard history with your students and in your classrooms?

Justin Aion: So there are a lot of aspects of social justice that I've been able to pull into my classroom. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has set out a whole bunch of guidelines and ways to advise on how to incorporate those into class, and that's been really helpful as sort of a guide for moving forward. In my own class, we have a tendency to talk about specifically things like media literacy. When a graph pops up in the news, when statistics pop up in the news, we talk about what informs the decisions that were made to create that study. What kinds of inherent biases might already be there?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know Justin, when we received your initial question and now hearing what you're wrestling with in terms of teaching media literacy, I immediately thought of a wonderful teacher and a friend, Liz Kleinrock, and reached out to her because I know she has some wonderful insights into this very issue. Liz, of course, is an anti-bias anti-racism educator and consultant based out in L.A., California. Liz was in the classroom for 10 years and now works with educators across the country. I had the chance to meet Liz in 2018 when she received the Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence in Teaching. And Liz over the years has developed some really wonderful resources, techniques and practices for addressing equity and inclusion, talking and teaching about social justice across grades and subject areas. So we're really glad that Liz was available and made some time to join us on this episode. Liz, welcome. How are you doing?

Liz Kleinrock: Hey, I'm doing okay. Every day is a little bit different, but happy to be here today and happy to be talking to all of you. Thanks for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No. Thanks so much for joining. And you're absolutely right, it's crazy because on the one hand, every day seems like the same, but every day is so different, especially when you just think about just what life was like a few weeks ago.

Liz Kleinrock: Right? It's pretty wild.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, it is. You heard Justin, and Justin was talking about ways to incorporate teaching about social justice and social justice issues in the classroom for teachers who are not teaching social studies. What advice and what experiences have you had and developed that might be helpful for Justin and others who are facing the same issue?

Liz Kleinrock: This is actually a really common question, thinking about weaving in social justice issues or teaching from an anti-bias, anti-racist perspective might seem a little bit more manageable than if you're just responsible for a subject like math or science that have been deemed to be more objective or neutral. But that really isn't the case at all. But what I try to break down for educators is that this is like a lens through which you teach. It's a pedagogy. It's not a particular strategy. It's not one specific lesson or unit. And the way that I try to explain it is you have your how you're teaching, your pedagogy, and then you also have what you're teaching. So looking at your content. But both of these things need to be working in alignment.

Liz Kleinrock: One of the earliest activities I'll do with my kids is ask them to draw a picture of what they think a mathematician looks like. And it's really interesting to see some of the depictions that they come up with that typically look very, like, Albert Einstein-esque, and talking about why that is and where we get those ideas from. I think a lot about how I can incorporate culturally-responsive practices and that lens, and thinking about assumptions that I have been taught or have learned and need to unlearn about how my Black students do in math, Asian students, boys, girls, students with disabilities, emerging bilingual students, and also being just very aware of how those biases might impact the way that I communicate with them and interact with them in a math classroom. So like, in an elementary school classroom, one example that I have shared in the past is in fourth grade, we have a lot of standards around multi-digit multiplication. So I wanted my students to look at the cost of living in a very expensive city like Los Angeles, look at base like minimum wage rates and average rents, and have them figure out how do you calculate a budget, and what does it actually mean for a person to be able to afford to live in a place like this? So, yeah, just some examples to get started. Different ways to incorporate things like averages or graphing and fractions by looking at topics like voting rights or food deserts, about like gender and racial inequality of pay scales.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I love this idea of connecting and being purposeful in thinking about how you are teaching and aligning that with what you are teaching. And as I was listening to you, two things really leaped out. And Justin, I would love to get your response to it. One, how purposeful you, Liz, are in terms of thinking about who your students are, where they're coming from and what their life experiences are. But then also what the context of the world is in which they are living. In other words, using examples to teach that reflect the end goal of equity and inclusion. So not just about sort of the insular lives perhaps, but about the broader life experiences of those whose lives may look different from them. Justin, what do you think? How might that play out in your classroom with your students?

Justin Aion: Well, so I think that's a really important idea. And for myself as a teacher, I am much less concerned about the content than I am about the relationships that I build with my students. So going back to what was said about how you teach, in addition to what you teach, I love the idea of using fractions to talk about voting rights, to talk about food deserts and access to voting, things along those lines, but also just sort of figuring out how to interact with students who have had vastly different life experiences than my own.

Meredith McCoy: Liz, I'm wondering if you have any other specific examples that teachers can look to or engage in their own practice, especially right now that so many teachers are having to pivot to online learning.

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah, absolutely. Justin mentioned NCTM providing a lot of resources right now for educators in this state of distance teaching that's going on. I know educators José Vilson and Marian Dingle just did a webinar that's recorded on their website about equity in mathematics during this time. I also really love the website Radical Math, which is mainly geared towards, like, middle and high school. So Justin, like, that would probably be, like, an interesting fit for you. And the organization Rethinking Schools has a text called “Rethinking Mathematics,” where actually, I got a lot of ideas about how to be able to implement this type of mathematics in my classroom.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, I think so much of the kind of culturally-responsive or culturally-sustaining pedagogies that both of you were talking about has to do with relationship building. So how do you continue to build those kind of meaningful relationships, looking ahead to the start of a new school year with a new group of students, when you aren't getting that kind of one-on-one face time with your kids?

Justin Aion: I think for me, ideally what I would like to do is to set up one-on-one time with those kids, or even in small groups. So this idea of, you know, every week for this 15-minute group, you can keep that in your schedule. This is when we're going to have our small group meeting so that we can have those face-to-face discussions, we can build at least some semblance of a relationship. And it's not overtaxing if a student is unable to make that time, then being flexible with the timeframe where they can attend. Trying to integrate those standards while still being aware of the drastically different lives that our students have to be having right now, as opposed to the traditional schooling model, which even then didn't work for many of our kids.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, the coronavirus and the global pandemic situation is forcing us as educators to walk the walk of this social justice-oriented teaching that we've always said that we're doing and that many of us practice in our classrooms. And it's both an opportunity and a requirement in this time that we attend to our students' whole lives and find ways to support them in their full selves. We can't just think that, oh, we're going to drop in and do this teaching hard history and then log off of our computers at the end of the day. And I know as a former middle school teacher that our job doesn't stop at 5:00. Our job never stops at the end of the day. We're always thinking about our kids. And I think in this time, that we are so in tune with all of the facets of our kids' lives that need supporting at this moment. Liz, I wonder if you could speak to that, about how to think about the sort of holistic needs of supporting our students during the coronavirus?

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah. I mean, relationship building has been brought up a couple of times, and I really think that any foundation of teaching, whether it's distance learning or if you're physically in the same place, really comes back to knowing your students, allowing them to know you as a human, getting to know them, getting to know how they see themselves. And thinking about even in terms of teaching mathematics, one of the earliest questions I'll always ask my students is just how do you feel about math? How do you feel about any particular subject? What are things that you're really proud of being able to accomplish on your own, and what are things that you still need a little bit more support? I hope that people can look at this opportunity as a chance to kind of redefine what normal is, and understand and recognize that a lot of the traditional aspects of how math was taught and the way that we approached teaching certain subjects with our students wasn't working when we were all in the same place and certainly isn't working when we're physically distant from each other. So hopefully we can take this opportunity to rewrite some of that.

Meredith McCoy: So as we think about teaching STEM in the time of the coronavirus, it's also really important to think about how we are helping our students continue to learn science. And one resource that I've been pointing people towards is Learning in Places, which is a resource from Anishnabe educator Megan Bang. And Learning in Places offers lesson plans for teachers and families to think about how to ground students in place, learning in place ecologically and learning in place historically. So thinking about the significance of place. And this is coming from an Indigenous way of knowing and Anishnabe etymologies, these lesson plans are available and applicable to non-native students as well. Liz, how are you thinking about science in this time of distance learning?

Liz Kleinrock: In my practice, I've thought a lot about how both science and math have been used as weapons to uphold pillars of white supremacy, to uphold beliefs of racial superiority, and trying to also, like, reclaim those tools to show students how we can begin to push back and dismantle them using science and math. Ways that I've incorporated this in the past is just being very intentional about whose knowledge has been validated. If you look at the discoveries of European scientists or explorers, knowing that they actually weren't the first people in certain places, were not the first to quote-unquote "discover" anything, but why did they also receive the credit, and why is history written from that perspective? Why are science textbooks written from that perspective?

Liz Kleinrock: I've also used science to tackle aspects of environmentalism and climate justice. In my classroom, my students and I learned about, like, the Standing Rock protests, you know, water in Flint, Michigan, looking at the proximity of communities of Black and brown folks to toxic waste sites, places that are hazardous to one's health. And really showing them how science and racial justice are very, very strongly interconnected.

Justin Aion: If we have the time, I'd like to maybe sort of address the other half of my question, which was looking at convincing colleagues and administration that this is a topic that needs to be addressed not just in social studies and English, but also in math and science, in art, in all of the other subjects as well.

Meredith McCoy: Liz, do you have some thoughts about how teachers working in the STEM fields might be able to engage in conversation with their colleagues and administrators about the importance of this topic?

Liz Kleinrock: Sure. I think that there's kind of this ridiculous myth that anti-bias, anti-racist teaching or teaching from, like, a culturally-responsive perspective is somehow only benefiting students of the global majority. But really, this type of work benefits everybody. And I don't think of it as a zero-sum game. It's possible to handle your standards, it's possible to do the things that you need to do within your classroom or within your curriculum, but still teach from this perspective. I think that in any situation, there are going to be people who are going to be onboard and they're going to be people who aren't. And quite frankly, we do not have the time to wait around for everybody to buy into this and understand its importance. If you are working with a school administrator who might be particularly resistant, I think sitting down and having the conversation about why they're resistant is going to be hopefully the most productive first step that you can take. Show them a lesson plan, show them resources and texts, invite them into watch you teach and show the engagement of your students.

Liz Kleinrock: But I think also just being able to recognize what is under your control versus what you can't and that teachers in their own classrooms, even if you're working with an administration that is really resistant, there are small decisions that you can make every day. These, like, micro-disruptions. My friend Tamara Russell uses that term a lot in thinking about how you can kind of reclaim that sense of autonomy in your classroom, if it's the text that you're teaching or the topic that you're engaging your students on, but still having the standard on your wall. So if your administrator comes into the classroom, you're able to point out and say, "This is what we're working on today. This is the means of how we're achieving that."

Meredith McCoy: Justin, any final thoughts or resources that you would like to share?

Justin Aion: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate being able to have this discussion about content beyond social studies and English. Specifically for math teachers, I would also like to throw out there Catalyzing Change in High School Mathematics. It is a book from NCTM on initiating critical conversations. It has been an incredible resource on how to start those discussions, not just with your students, but also with colleagues and administrators. And being able to see the importance of it and how to have those discussions in a meaningful and sustainable way.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Justin, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate you sharing your question and your experiences. And Liz, thanks so much for jumping on and sharing your insights, observations and expertise. I always learn so much any time I'm in your presence.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah. Really excellent insights, Liz, And thank you, Justin, so much for your question. Awesome. Thank you both so much for the work that you're doing, and for taking some time to hang out with us today. We really appreciate you.

Justin Aion: Thank you so much for having us. I really appreciate it.

Liz Kleinrock: Yeah, thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bye-bye. Be safe. Be well, everyone.

Meredith McCoy: Take care.

Justin Aion: You too.

Liz Kleinrock: Bye.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Let's listen to some of the other voicemails we received from teachers. This message is from Yolanda Fintak. Yolanda is a violence prevention specialist who works with middle school students.

Yolanda Fintak: I teach social skills and skills that help students understand how to get along without using or resorting to violence. We do specifically talk about subject matter around race, and how it relates to their conversations and their communication and their interaction with one another. The question that I guess I would have is, what is the best way to introduce this kind of hard teaching to sixth-grade students that may not have the background of history coming from elementary to middle school. I want to kind of start there and then see where we can go with moving up through grade sevens and eighth grade. Thank you.

Meredith McCoy: Laying a good foundation for new middle schoolers is such a good question. While students may not have a strong background in history itself, they do have their lived experiences. And so thinking about the way the world works today might be a great way to help them start thinking about the past, as you make direct connections between the long history of enslavement and contemporary ramifications for marginalized communities.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's also important to recognize that students, even at this age, certainly and younger even, have a sense of fairness, have a sense of right and wrong, have a sense of justice and injustice. And so, talking about those core human principles and societal principles, I think is also a way to begin to develop a framework for understanding the injustice that is connected to this long era of American history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We also heard from teachers who were nervous because hard history was already controversial in their school. And now that their lessons are on video, they feel even more vulnerable. And they want to know what they can do, especially since they also can't really rely on textbooks which tend to offer a traditional narrative of the American past.

Meredith McCoy: And so I reached out to social studies scholars Sarah Shear and Noreen Rodriguez. They suggested having students critically engage the textbook and engage in an inquiry lesson about whose perspectives are being represented in the text? Whose perspectives are missing and should be included to help us better understand the issue? And then students can do their own research online to find those voices that are missing from the text, that speak to different experiences. And then students can create their own questions and engage in inquiry together to answer them. They might ask, "Who wrote the textbook?" And what that says about why certain voices are represented. And where else could you find more information, and why is that additional finding of information so important? They're able to pursue answers in a way that is student-derived, rather than having to come explicitly from teachers.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: There is an opportunity and real value in just letting the history speak for itself.

Meredith McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And you allow the students, you create an opportunity for them to do research and you let the primary sources do the teaching. And that shifts the burden of criticism and critique off of you as the teacher. I didn't say I wasn't a big fan of George Washington, the people he was enslaving said that.

Meredith McCoy: Right. And, you know, we also had a few callers who asked about supporting and engaging parents and family members who are now during the pandemic involved in helping their students learn about hard history. So here's a message that we got from Christie, who teaches sixth-grade social studies.

Christie Nold: As many of us know, a lot of the young people in our lives are surrounded by caring adults, trying to help navigate their curriculum alongside them. What resources exist for the adults in our students' lives that can help as they navigate hard history, in a way they—the adults—might not have learned it themselves? Thanks.

Meredith McCoy: And now let's listen to Marley who called us from Birmingham, Alabama.

Marley Davis: Hi. I am looking for some resources to talk to my little brother about the history of slavery that explains how the history of enslavement continues to impact our present in a way that he can understand and also explore for himself. Thank you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Unlike any time before, parents and family members and caregivers are thrust into this more central role in the education of students, of young people, of children. And when it comes to teaching difficult histories, difficult subjects, hard history, you know, what do you do and how do you do it? Thankfully, Teaching Tolerance has been doing some work around this very issue.

Meredith McCoy: Yeah, Hasan, you know, I think about the frameworks as a really good place to start here, because they do offer so many supplementary resources: books and videos and things that parents and students can engage with together. It's okay to tell our younger siblings and nieces and nephews and children that we don't always have all the answers. So saying things like, "You know, I wasn't taught this, but let's go learn about it together," can model some of that knowledge-seeking behavior that we want students to develop as they become life-long learners themselves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What I would actually start with are the key concept videos that are based on the framework. There's about 10 of them. They're only a couple minutes long each. Key issues to touch upon when thinking and talking to children and teaching children and ourselves about the history of American slavery. That really is, I think, a great place to begin.

Meredith McCoy: I also want us to all just take a breath and think about what is actually possible, and what we should actually be spending all of our attention and energy on. So there was an article this week from Dr. Rachel Mahmood in the Teaching Tolerance magazine. And in her article, she says, "Instead of expecting caregivers to become teachers, educators can complement family engagement by partnering with caregivers to address childrens' social and emotional needs. For families, educators can be the person who checks in on their child." So as we think about the relationship between caregivers and teachers at this moment, part of this is about reworking what each of our roles are and how we work together to make sure that our young students are taken care of holistically.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Here you have to, if possible, be even more engaged at a different and deeper level than before. I love this idea of this is looking at the upside as an opportunity to model a shared kind of learning that, in many instances many parents haven't had time to do before.

Meredith McCoy: We know also that some parents are stretched to the breaking point already. And the idea of taking this on, this additional role of co-learning with their kids may feel just untenable. And so I just want to emphasize that this is not adding anything on; the same time that you're already spending with the children in your household, figuring out how to get them to do their assignments, this is just a different way of approaching it. So instead of putting the pressure on yourself to already have all the answers, just be open that we don't all have all the answers all the time, and sometimes we have to find ways of finding those answers together.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I love this idea of what you were talking about with the modeling sort of shared learning. And for me it's not sort of deep social studies, because I can talk to my nine-year-old daughter Asha, who's in the fourth grade about slavery, and we're doing these side readings on the African-American experience and social justice, but I'm also trying to do fourth-grade math. And I'm bumping up against this, "All right. I don't know, how do we do this again? And why are they assigning this now?" And so I've seen being able to confess that, to be somewhat empowering to my daughter once she got past that sort of quizzical like, "Wait, you really don't?" I mean, she literally told me, "But this is the fourth grade!" And I was like, "Yes, I know it's the fourth grade, and I'm no longer in the fourth grade. Work with me. We'll figure it out." And so—but we sort of smiled and laughed about it. She came to this realization, and then we figured it out. It's not easy by any stretch, and we have to get comfortable with doing things that we are uncomfortable doing, but that's the whole project that we've undertaken here in the realm of hard history. And so it's an extension of the same. And this too shall pass. We'll get through it, and I'll gladly hand them back to their teachers at some point with more than a wink and a nod, but a big hug and saying, "Thank you for doing what you do." But in the interim, I think it is about taking cues from those who do it so well, and just trying to hang in there and using it as an opportunity to model a different kind of learning.

Meredith McCoy: So to all of the teachers and caregivers who are supporting our young learners from long distance or inside your own home, know that we see you and you're doing a great job. We know it's hard right now, but we can do this together. Thank you so much to all of the educators who left us messages and participated in this episode. We have all benefited from your questions, your experiences and your expertise. So hang in there, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

Meredith McCoy: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—helping teachers and schools prepare their students to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance offers free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find these online at Tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And to find resources mentioned during this episode, visit Tolerance.org/podcasts. This podcast is produced by Shea Shackelford. Russell Gragg is our associate producer, with additional support from Barrett Golding. Gabriel Smith provides content guidance. And Kate Shuster is our executive producer.

Meredith McCoy: Our theme music is “Different Heroes” by A Tribe Called Red (featuring Northern Voice), who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University.

Meredith McCoy: I’m Dr. Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American studies and history at Carleton College.

Meredith McCoy and Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And we’re your hosts for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

 

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