Resources and Readings

• Teaching Hard History: American Slavery
• Teaching Hard History Key Concept Videos
• Teaching American Slavery Through Inquiry

Maureen Costello
Former Director, Teaching Tolerance

References:

• Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations
• Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States
• Kathy Swan, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Kentucky
• National Council for History Education
• Learning for Justice: Text, I Have a Dream by MLK
• Learning for Justice: Webinar, Beyond the Bus: Teaching the Unseen Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Learning for Justice: The Moment, Teaching the Truth about Confederate History

Eduardo Díaz
Director, Smithsonian Latino Center 

Renée Gokey
Teacher Services Coordinator, National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) | Learning for Justice author

References:

• Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
• NPR Genevieve Valentine, Horrors Pile Up Quietly In 'The Other Slavery'
• Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America
• Christopher Columbus, Extracts from Journal
• Indigenous Peoples' Curriculum Day and Teach-In
• Native Knowledge 360°
• National Museum of African American History and Culture
• NMAI exhibition, Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean
• NMAI exhibition, T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America
• Learning for Justice: Text, Indian Removal Act: Primary Documents in American History
• National Museum of American History, Molina Family Latino Gallery

Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Department of History, Ohio State University | Teaching Hard History author

References:

• CARTER Center for K–12 Black History Education, Teaching Black History Conference
• Carter Conference 2019, Teaching about the Beauty, Power, and Resistance of Black History
• Dr. LaGarrett King, founding director CARTER Center, University of Missouri
• James Madison’s Montpelier (Ohio State University students' visit)
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
• Barry Thomas, Director of Equity and Diversity, Omaha Public Schools
   

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have always wanted to visit Colombia, to stroll through the streets of the walled city of Cartagena, to take in panoramic views of the capital, Bogotá, to commune with nature at Tayrona National Park, perhaps even to take one of those tours of Medellin that explores the life and times of the notorious Pablo Escobar. And this summer, things were actually lining up perfectly for me to steal away to Colombia, meaning that my mother-in-law was taking my kids to Disney World for an entire week at the end of July. But alas, it wasn’t to be. My girls made it to Disney, but I didn’t get to take my bucket-list trip to the gateway to South America. I did get to go to Columbia, Missouri, though. On July 26 and 27, the CARTER Center for K–12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, hosted its second annual Teaching Black History conference. Dr. LaGarrett King, the founding director of the CARTER Center, had invited me to deliver a keynote address, which I entitled “Teaching Hard History During Hard Times.”

I wasn’t scheduled to speak until the second day of the conference, so I spent the first day attending sessions. In the morning, I learned about Black Power children’s books, and about using young adult fiction to teach middle and high school students about police violence. In the afternoon, I sat in on a presentation by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, who skillfully deconstructed teaching slavery through children’s literature. It was a rich and rewarding day. When I spoke the next morning, I shared my experience from this past fall of taking students from The Ohio State University to James Madison’s Montpelier, to explore slavery and freedom in America. I talked about why slavery is hard history. Why it’s so difficult to think about, talk about, teach about and learn about. I outlined the typical responses to hard history: the purposeful historical amnesia, the attempts to rationalize evil and the creation of false historical narratives. And I concluded by explaining the five keys to teaching hard history effectively―knowing your history, knowing yourself, knowing your students, knowing your school and knowing your community.

My address was well-received, sparking thoughtful questions and a thought-provoking discussion that continued even after the session ended. As the conference attendees headed off to the late-morning workshops, I struck up a conversation with Barry Thomas, the director of equity and diversity for Omaha Public Schools in Nebraska. I didn’t know Barry, but he knew me. It turns out that he had been listening to the podcast. Barry started his career with the Omaha Public Schools in 2002 at McMillan Magnet High School. Four years later, he began teaching social studies at North High Magnet. And in 2012, he became the district supervisor for social studies instruction, responsible for supervising, coordinating and improving the teaching of more than 200 social studies instructors in the district. As we talked, I learned that Omaha’s public schools had not yet fully embraced a version of the American past that portrayed slavery as it actually was and that acknowledged that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War.

“I have seen the propagandized instruction that we were all taught as students ourselves, maintained in the classroom,” Barry told me. “I have received phone calls from disgruntled parents who report that their children have had to analyze the pros and cons of slavery for enslaved Africans. The fact that anyone thinks that there were pros to being enslaved is absurd,” Barry continued. “Another parent,” he said, “complained about a slavery video game that a teacher found online that had some questionable depictions of the enslaved, and that fed into the white savior narrative.” But Barry explained that classroom activities were actually less of a problem than the attitudes of some teachers. “There is a nervousness and anxiety when we teach race,” he said, “states’ rights as a root cause of the Civil War is an emotional convenience, not just a manufactured lie.”

To help his teachers overcome their distress and uneasiness with teaching American slavery, Barry shared with them the Teaching Hard History framework and encouraged them to listen to the podcast. “The Teaching Hard History resources and podcast give teachers accurate depictions of ‘the peculiar institution,’” he explained, and “provides them with the facts that they need to  ‘dispel falsehoods that they may be confronted with by students and parents who have bought into easy history.’” I immediately wanted to know more. What did the teachers think of the resources and the podcast? Did he think it made a difference in how they taught slavery? After all, that’s the whole point of this project: to help teachers teach slavery more accurately and effectively. Barry told me that the teachers he spoke with were amazed at the wide range of topics that we covered in the podcast last year, and that they were struck by the different approaches we use to examine these topics, approaches they had never considered before.

As to classroom impact, he said, “I didn’t specifically research correlation or causation, but I did note that I didn’t get a single phone call or email about someone doing something in the classroom that I had to go offer some support for.” Barry’s observation pointed to a positive shift having occurred in the city’s social studies classrooms regarding how slavery was being taught, and that was truly exciting to hear. I still really want to go to Colombia, to visit Cartagena and Bogota, and Medellin. But I’m glad that I closed out this summer in Columbia, Missouri, at the CARTER Center conference, listening to passionate teachers committed to teaching hard history. From them, I learned that there remains plenty of work to do, but I also learned that this project and this podcast are having a positive impact on how American slavery is being taught. That was our goal when we launched this project and debuted this podcast in January 2018. And it remains our goal today, a little more than a year and a half later, as we release a suite of additional teaching resources, and begin the second season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, 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. 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. In our second season, we are expanding our focus to better support elementary school educators, to spend more time with teachers who are doing this work in the classroom, and to understand the often-hidden history of the enslavement of indigenous people in what is currently the United States. Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

In this episode, we’re going to explore the new themes for this season and introduce some of the new Teaching Hard History resources that are designed to support educators. We will hear from Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey of the Smithsonian Institution, about the need to understand the history of enslavement of Indigenous people. But first, I had a chance to speak with Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance. She explained how the Teaching Hard History project has been expanded. Among other things, it now includes a first-of-its-kind framework for teaching about slavery to students in grades K–5. She also highlighted some of the new tools that teachers can use to paint a more complete picture of American slavery. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

I’m so very glad to welcome to this episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, the director of the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Maureen Costello. Maureen, it’s so good to have you with us.

Maureen Costello: Hasan, it is wonderful to be here.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Maureen, we have been working together, myself with the Teaching Tolerance team and those who have been working on the Teaching Hard History project for almost two years now. And this has really come out of a vision, I think it’s fair to say, that you have had, as the director of the Teaching Tolerance project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, for how the Southern Poverty Law Center ought to be engaging education and teachers. Could you say a little bit about the work that Teaching Tolerance has done and then how the Teaching Hard History project fits into that work?

Maureen Costello: I’d be happy to. You know, Teaching Tolerance has been around for almost 30 years and we started out as a project that sought to reduce prejudice in classrooms across the United States and we’ve grown considerably since then. But one of the continuing themes that we’ve had has always been about the history of the civil rights movement, and the history of the struggle for racial equality. We are a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose mission is to fight hate, seek justice and to teach tolerance, there are those three pieces of what we do. We bring lawsuits to try to enforce civil rights. We also investigate hate groups across the country, and the most important work, in my view at least, is that we work with teachers across the country to provide information and curriculum, pedagogy, school-climate resources, to help them combat every one of the “isms” that afflicts our society. But certainly, racial justice has always been at the heart of what we do and it’s the vision of my team, of lots and lots of folks who turn to us for this work.

The way it began though, the Teaching Hard History project, is a few years ago, in 2011, we decided to take a look at how well the states were teaching civil rights movement. We became kind of convinced that the civil rights movement had kind of began to calcify in a way and then instead of remembering really all the struggles and the degree of work and the degree of sacrifice that went into it, and the opposition, that it had kind of boiled down to a sort of catechism of two names and four words. So most American schoolchildren can tell you: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, ‘I Have a Dream.’” And we thought, We have to make that better. So we started a project called Teaching the Movement. And we looked at the state standards who are teaching the civil rights movement, in fact, issued a report card, much to the dismay of many of my colleagues at the state education departments. And what that showed is that over 34 states received Fs.

They did a terrible job, and we, of course, were imagining that standards actually mean something because governors had just finished signing on to the Common Core standards and they had said standards really means something — they set a state’s expectation. And so we kind of said, “OK, put your money where your mouth is. If ‘standards’ means something, then how are your standards on teaching the civil rights movement?” So we were looking at that problem and we really studied it for a few years. In fact, we did two reports and we came up with a lot of resources. And some of the problems we recognized is that states were expecting the story of the civil rights movement to be taught without ever mentioning Jim Crow, for example, or without ever mentioning the tremendous opposition or basically, they were expecting the civil rights movement to be taught without recognizing what conditions made it necessary.

And finally, we kind of came to the realization that the problem went much, much further back. And that until we really dealt with the legacy of racism and the legacy of slavery, we were never going to be able to teach the civil rights movement well. And obviously, we were also never going to be able to really take a hard look at the current situations in terms of racial inequity. If we really want children and young people to grow into folks who can change the world, which, you know, is my unambitious goal, they need to understand how things came about and how we are still living with the inheritance of the past. And so it’s really recognizing that we just did a terrible job doing this that led to the project.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It’s so interesting to hear you talk about how we are wrestling with the inheritance of the past, which means both what we embrace and what we reject. So much of what we’ve been doing with the podcast and the guests who have been on, and the topics that we have been probing, has been not only looking at the past but looking at what we inherit from the past and in the present. And so it’s very interesting that the team came to this project by looking at something more modern and realizing that we were unable, and teachers and students, are unable to fully grasp such an important historical event in American history, like the civil rights movement, without understanding the ways in which the problems that folk were trying to address in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, et cetera, really had their origins in this earlier time in the American experience.

You know, Maureen, the podcast is just one element of the Teaching Hard History project. For those who are just sort of tuning in for the first time or have only been listening to the podcast, could you share some of the other elements, some of the other parts to the broader Teaching Hard History project?

Maureen Costello: I can, indeed. You know, the project is built on two sets of frameworks. One framework is for K–5, and that’s one of the new frameworks. And the other one is for 6–12. And the frameworks lay out kind of broad, conceptual knowledge. We have the 10 key concepts, which are based on Ira Berlin’s work, as you know. But also a series of summary objectives for 6–12 and essential knowledge for K–5 that says, “Here’s what we think students should know, when they should know it, and here’s how you can teach it.” What we hope is that the frameworks are flexible enough that any teacher could pick up the framework and rethink the way they teach the subject, and possibly the way they teach all of U.S. history. But that also, department chairs could pick it up, committees within schools, entire districts or even states, or textbook publishers, or anyone else, really can look at this and say, “Ah, here is an orderly system that traces this history of enslavement and racial oppression from the very, very beginning.”

Through certainly to Reconstruction, but by implication, if you know that story very well, you’re going to see modern echoes of it as well. So the framework are the skeleton upon which we laid a lot of meat. The materials that we’ve provided for teachers are student materials like a rich selection of leveled student texts. Some of them are original that we have commissioned, especially at the elementary level. Some of them are historical documents, but what we’ve done is we have selected them to support the items in the framework. We have put them on our site. In the cases where we’ve had to get permissions, we’ve secured the permission so that teachers can use them. We also have a learning plan builder tool onsite so that people can build their own lessons. We’ve worked with Kathy Swan and some other folks who are part of the C3 and we’ve created some IDMs. For the people who don’t know what IDMs are, they’re Inquiry Design Models, and they are complete units to explore a central question.

One of my favorites of that is "Why does it matter who freed the slaves?" And it really examines not only the real question of self-emancipation and the role it played, but it also raises that historiographical question of: Who gets to tell the story, and who takes the credit? So we have the IDMs, we have texts. We also have videos that we’re about to put out, and which will be out by the time this podcast airs, from really renowned historians across the United States discussing the key concepts.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The videos that are connected to the frameworks, are those just for teachers or are they just for students, or for both?

Maureen Costello: I think they’re for both. We actually made them with the intention that they’d be used in classrooms. And then when I saw them, I thought, I’d want to study this first as a teacher, because I think the stories are probably unknown to a lot of teachers and they give you a lot of starting points.” So both and.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Awesome.

Maureen Costello: Also, we have a lot of links to online databases because one of the most exciting things these days is the amount of information that’s available online. And that I just think, prompts inquiry. You know, if you look at a database of the transatlantic slave trade, and you see the patterns, and you see the movement of ships and the movement of people, I think it just sparks curiosity, and instead of answering questions, you’re asking questions; that’s what we want students to do. And of course, we know that there are databases now of plantation ledgers and of fugitive slave ads, and all sorts of things that are rich primary sources. So we’re kind of providing a map to those. We also understand though that a lot of what we’ve included in this framework is fairly recent scholarship. And if there are teachers out there like me who haven’t been in graduate school for 30 years, they need to have that recent scholarship.

So we’ve done a lot of professional development work too; this podcast is part of that and I’m really, really pleased with the way people have been so excited about it. But the videos are in a sense for professional development. We also have webinars on-site, so you can go in and take them on demand. And where we actually have in-person training on Teaching Hard History as well. So we’re really trying to make this a full suite of components that will address all the needs that teachers have. This is a hard topic, and we want to give as much support as possible without telling you, “Teach exactly this,” because we also realize that teachers are working in different districts. They have different state histories they have to teach, they may have different curriculum requirements, but the framework gives you that skeleton that you can follow to figure out how to make it work in your particular district.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, that’s one of the things that I have heard from teachers over the course of the last year and a half as I’ve traveled the country talking about the work that we’ve been doing, is that the information that has been available online, through the podcast has been so teacher friendly and teacher accessible, that they’re really able just to sort of dip in, dive in, pull out what they need and they’re ready to go. And we all know that that is so helpful to teachers who just don’t have the time to go back to graduate school and study this stuff up. And yet, here it is, including teacher plans for lessons and the like.

Maureen Costello: I’ve heard a lot of anecdotes too. Last year, we mailed copies of the framework and the report to 100,000 educators across the United States, all the way from the state departments of education down to U.S. history teachers in high schools and we got a lot of emails in response. And one of my favorites was from a teacher who said, “I just was looking at this one lesson that I’ve taught every year and I was getting ready to teach it again next week, and I looked at your framework, and I am completely revamping the lesson.” And it was wonderful to see that. So we’ve heard a lot of that.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So what has been the impact over the last year and a half, from the initial rollout of the Teaching Hard History materials?

Maureen Costello: Several states have advised us that they are going to take the frameworks into consideration during their review cycles of standards and frameworks. We know that Massachusetts has done that. We’ve been told that Michigan has looked at them as well and certainly we’ve seen a lot of interest in Virginia. We’ve seen entire districts that have aligned their curriculum to the frameworks. In fact, I did a workshop last March, in March 2018, at UVA for teachers in northern Virginia and Maryland. I mean, they came from as far away as Maryland and Delaware to go to this workshop. And about a year later, in fact, it was March, I was doing a presentation at NCHE, the National Council of History [Education], you were there too. And not only were you on the schedule, and I was on the schedule, but there was another “Teaching Hard History” project on the schedule.

It turned out to be from teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, who had been at that UVA workshop, went back to their district and brought together another group of teachers and completely revamped their curriculum, the U.S. history part of the curriculum that taught about slavery, to follow the framework. So we’ve seen entire districts be changed, revise their curricula. We know that it’s being used as reference to revise standards in frameworks in some states. It’s been cited by the news media. It’s been cited by scholars, and at least one Democratic candidate for president has cited it in his plan for racial justice. And finally, in Illinois, a state senator who was proposing a bill to mandate the teaching of African-American history and slavery in K–12, cited our report; that bill has passed. And in Connecticut, such a bill is already under consideration now and that legislator has also cited our report as evidence. So in a short year, it’s gotten a lot of traction.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: A lot of traction, indeed. And I don’t think anyone would be too upset if we just rested on our laurels and said, “Look, we’ve put a lot of work in. This is reaching the people that we wanted it to reach. Let it do its work, and we’ll just see what happens.” But that’s not what we’ve done. In fact, the team, especially down there, has said, “No, we’re going to build on the initial iteration of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, and expand it, make it wider and dig deeper,” and that’s what’s coming out very soon. Could you say a little bit about the expansion to the Teaching Hard History materials, and you mentioned some of the videos and some of the professional development stuff. But really, what was the thinking or the emphasis that went into building this out, if you will?

Maureen Costello: One of the things I’ve learned as director of Teaching Tolerance and doing other kinds of projects like this is that nothing is ever final. As soon as you put it out there, you start hearing from people about how it works in the world. And that’s one of the things that we heard: We need this at the elementary level and we always knew that we needed it at the elementary level. Very, very few educators in elementary school are history specialists. They’re usually reading specialists or math specialists, or special education specialists. They don’t have a lot of room in the curriculum for history, although they do often cover the story of slavery through literature. So we knew that we needed to provide a framework for elementary school, also partially because so much of the narrative gets laid down in elementary school. My earliest memory of learning something in elementary school, was learning that Columbus crossed the ocean blue in 1492. It got hardwired into my brain. And I know that there are kindergarten students out there today who are learning about Harriet Tubman, leading her people out of slavery who haven’t a clue about what slavery is.

So we wanted to make sure that if hardwiring was going on, it was going to be hardwiring that high school teachers and college professors could build on instead of having to unteach what had happened earlier. And the second thing that we got a lot of feedback about and we also knew was an issue, was that the history of enslavement on this continent, in what is currently the United States in the Western Hemisphere, is not simply a history of chattel enslavement of people who are descended from Africans. It is also a history of Indigenous slavery. Both of those things, the K–5, and the integration of Indigenous slavery, needed more time. We needed more experts at the table, and we decided that they would be part of phase two. So phase two is the K–5 framework, which I’m very, very excited about. As far as I can tell, and given everyone I’ve spoken to and all the experts who have worked on this, this is literally a first-of-its-kind attempt to bring this kind of structure and order to such a difficult topic in elementary school.

And the Indigenous enslavement piece, really most of the scholarship in that field has been within the last 10 or 12 years. And so it was also bringing in the right voices. It’s a vast topic. There are so many Indigenous nations in what is currently the United States. It is a widely varied experience, but it actually makes an interesting connection between the past and the present because the enslavement of Indigenous peoples preceded the trans-Atlantic slave trade and it lasted longer. The 13th Amendment did not apply to domestic nations, which is what American Indians were considered. It’s also not chattel slavery [necessarily]. It could be things like debt peonage or something that looks like indentured servitude. And in that sense, it’s a much more modern definition of slavery. And of course, we know that today, 40 million people around the world are involved in some form of slavery, which is some form of coerced labor.

And so including the story of Indigenous slavery not only fills out the picture, which was truly unknown to me even as a history teacher for many years but also makes these connections to the present and reminds us that exploitation of human beings is not something that just happened in the past.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That sounds like one of the things that I’ve heard from a lot of the listeners and those who have engaged with the materials, a lot of the things that they have said to me is that they have not only learned how to teach this subject, they’ve learned what to teach. I mean, this has been one of the strengths of this whole project, is that it’s been teaching teachers. And I think those teachers who really approach the work that we have been doing as students themselves, as people who are learning, I think they really get the most out of it. Maureen, you were in the classroom for 20 years before you moved into this aspect of sort of education. Did you pick up on some new stuff through this process and through the work that we’ve been doing?

Maureen Costello: I picked up on so much new stuff that, it’s just been incredible. So much that I didn’t know or that I thought I knew and just didn’t think about how to teach. A good example is from early in the first season, and the whole story about the New England, New Bedford particularly, and its role as kind of a grocer to the sugar colonies. And the ideas there were so specific, they are wonderful, that I actually built a workshop activity out of it. But there’s just, I realized that I still have so much to learn. I feel like what we have provided for teachers is this marvelous opportunity to take graduate-level courses in the subject via podcast, via the videos and we have Annette Gordon-Reed, Christy Coleman, Ibram X. Kendi, Adam Rothman, Martha Jones, Edward Ayers, Tera Hunter, Daina Ramey Berry doing videos that we can use in our classes. But frankly, I think they’re master classes in how to think about such a difficult topic and personalize it.

And I’d just like to say that I think the podcast has been so powerful and that because sometimes this is a difficult topic for educators to figure out how to deal with; white teachers often are dealing with their own sometimes fragility, but also just discomfort around talking about race. We’ve had teachers talk to us about the fact that they feel uncomfortable acknowledging that as white people, that they’ve benefited from a society that was based on racial oppression. You know, there’s been a lot of discomfort and one of the things I think happens with the podcast is that you’re sitting there in your car or you’re taking a walk, or you’ve just got your phone plugged in and it’s just you, and Hasan, and whoever your guest is. And there’s time to kind of think about it and process it and think about how you’re going to use it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Speaking of those videos, they really are phenomenal. Are there a couple that stand out to you personally that really struck a responsive chord with you?

Maureen Costello: To some degree, every one of them does. Annette Gordon-Reed, who did two of the videos, I think she helps answer that question about the past being a different place and sort of not being a different place at the same time. She’s so careful when she talks about the founders to discuss the world in terms of what they believed. So she really confronts this notion, this presentism that we often encounter in students who want to believe that people in the past thought the same way we did. And I think that she does that really, really well. Edward Ayers talks about family separations in a way that just kind of catches you and you suddenly realize, Wow, this is really what this meant. The things that are most human to us, that really define us, our connection to our mothers, our fathers, our siblings, our aunts, our uncles, and the ability to believe that those are eternal in some way, that they can be broken that easily. And he just boils it down that simply.

He says, “If a student asks you what slavery meant, it’s that you could be separated from your family at any moment.” I think that’s just incredibly profound. Tera Hunter talks about the infant, Rachel, who’s just about a year old, who is sold at auction and the person who’s charged with bringing that infant to the auction is an enslaved man. And it turns out that the decision to sell Rachel was made while her mother was pregnant. They are the kinds of stories and videos that just, I would hope make you see the world differently.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the things that we have done in expanding the materials for Teaching Hard History is to move beyond this idea that America is shaped and slavery is shaped solely by the British, that this is simply a sort of British colonial thing, ignoring the French and ignoring most especially the Spanish, and even the role of the Dutch for a certain extent, in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Could you say a little bit about the importance of moving beyond this Anglo-centric, British-centric understanding of the origins and development of slavery in what we now know as America/the United States?

Maureen Costello: Well, I like the way that you said, “What we now know as America/the United States,” because we tend to think of the colonial period is the 13 colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard, which was only the British colonies. But every part of the United States that we live in today has had its own colonial experience with those different powers. And all of them enslaved Indigenous people at some point in their history, and in many cases, even after they cease to be under the control of colonial powers. And so we really need to shift this idea that “colonial” only refers to the British colonial experience. And we also have to realize that we’re talking about hundreds of years of European involvement in exploiting people across the continent, and enslaving them and look at the ways that that shaped their cultures, their behaviors, what became the system of chattel slavery and how wealth was produced. That’s one story.

And you know, again going back to my own teaching, even with thinking about the British colonies, the typical story was that the British came, in — particularly, in the Carolinas, and with rice cultivation, they attempted to enslave the local Indian tribes and that the Indians basically were, turned out to be bad slaves. I mean that’s kind of the conventional wisdom. They die, they are weak, or because it was their home territory, they figured out how to like get up in the middle of the night and go off someplace else. And so the conventional wisdom in a sense, in a lot of textbooks, is that they tried with Indigenous people to enslave them, but it didn’t work and that’s why then, European colonists turned to Africans. But in fact, they tried. They succeeded. And when I say “they,” it is the French, the Spanish, the British. They devised myriad forms of labor exploitation. They reaped massive amounts of wealth, and they developed notions of race that we still live with today.

So Indigenous slavery is part of the story and it’s the part of the story that has been much more erased than the story of the enslavement of people descended from Africans. And I think a really good time to teach that is in November, when Thanksgiving is approaching. The person that helped the Pilgrims, who most of us know as Squanto, but whose real name was Tisquantum, was helpful to the Pilgrims because he spoke English. Well, how did he speak English? The reason that Tisquantum knew how to speak English was because even before the Mayflower arrived off the coast of what is now Massachusetts, Tisquantum had been captured, had been brought to England and had been enslaved, and had managed to get back to North America, but had picked up the language while he was in England. He was one of many Indigenous people who had been plucked off the shores of what we now called the Atlantic Seacoast, prior to the English landing at Plymouth Rock, prior to Jamestown settlement, prior to all of that and who had already spent time in Europe as enslaved people.

So that throws a whole different light on that story, and it’s a light that we should shine on the story, and we should ask the question, why do we tell that story without that particular piece of information? So even before the pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock, before the Mayflower drops anchor, there is a history of Indigenous enslavement that they are going to encounter, and how does that shape the story? Those are questions we should be asking.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I really love the idea of connecting the past to the present in that way, since Thanksgiving, or some call it Thanks-taking, as a nationally recognized and observed holiday. And so you can put the present into context in this way to make the past a little bit more relevant.

Maureen Costello: And maybe also ask ourselves the question of, why is this traditional story that we’ve whipped up so appealing?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s a great question. What does it do for us?

Maureen Costello: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Today.

Maureen Costello: Exactly. And then how does the way we talk about history do for us today, which also sheds light on the kind of arguments about the Confederate monuments and whether ethnic studies should be in school, that these are ultimately stories of representation and power.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely, absolutely. What would you say that we should learn about the present from studying slavery in the past?

Maureen Costello: That things as they are, don’t just happen naturally, that they were created by decisions and choices made by people in the past. And that choices and decisions made by people in the present and the future can create new things. That’s the simplest way of looking at it. But as I’ve looked at many of the stories and themes that we’ve unearthed in Teaching Hard History, I see those kinds of cycles of history, ideas, the control of the black body, the desire that leads us from enslavement to Jim Crow, to debt peonage, to mass incarceration. The talk that’s required of children, I can’t remember what guest it was on the podcast, but she talked about the fact that at some point, every young enslaved child knew two things, maybe by the age that they were six. They were loved by their parents, that they understood that they had the love of family, and that they could be sold away at any moment.

And you imagine parents or care keepers, if there are no parents there anymore, whatever members of the community are taking care of those children, letting them know that and there’s a straight line between that and the talk that African-American parents have to have with their sons today, and their daughters. Our beliefs about how to explain the wealth gap, the education gap, all that are so much still echoing the beliefs of the 19th century. And more important, I guess, I’m speaking very broadly and very philosophically here, but that belief in American exceptionalism: that we somehow are a nation outside of history, founded in an idea that’s always been struggling to just get better and better and closer and closer to that ideal, is a complete denial of how much we’ve all benefited from the oppression and elimination of people. And it hurts to acknowledge that that’s the case, but if you don’t acknowledge it, we’re going to hurt ourselves even more because we’re just believing in a fantasy that does not match the reality.

We are human beings, like every other historical group of human beings in the history of the world, which means that we can do horrible things to other human beings. And we’re not going to prevent horrible things from being done to other human beings in the present or in the future unless we acknowledge that that’s something that we are capable of and that, as Americans, we’re not uniquely exempt from it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think all of the work that has gone into the Teaching Hard History project, these new videos combined with the elementary framework as well as the additions to the framework as a whole, expanding it out to incorporate these various elements of the enslavement of Indigenous people, really speaks to this broad idea that you’re laying out of the importance of this history, not only to understanding fundamentally how American history actually was, but really so that we can see these myths for what they are, being myths, this myth of perpetual progress and American exceptionalism. Let me ask you, Maureen, the Teaching Hard History project has really touched and reached a lot of teachers. It’s doing good work. They’re taking it into the classroom. What is your hope for this expanded version, including the second season of the podcast?

Maureen Costello: Well, one thing I hope it does is that it puts an end to the news stories that I read all the time about mock slave auctions and simulations of the Middle Passage. What I hope is that we start learning to do a better job teaching this very, very, very hard history. But I also hope that as part of a larger kind of picture, that as a nation, we come to grips with our past and that has two pieces. One is that we recognize that the story of this nation is the story of many, many people, black and brown people, Indigenous people, people who were captured and brought here, people who were incorporated into what the country is now, that it’s all of those stories and that we’re stronger because of all of those stories. And so I hope that in education will raise up the stories of the Mexicans who became Americans and the Indigenous people who managed to survive despite incredible odds, that all of that becomes part of the fabric.

And the other piece is that I just hope that we start having a conversation about how do we right the wrongs of the past? I think that we’ve already seen that reparations is being discussed. And this is not me saying we need to have reparations, but we sure as hell need to have that conversation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What advice would you give to teachers who are looking at the materials, who are visiting the website, who are listening to the podcast, for how they ought to approach teaching the hard history of American slavery?

Maureen Costello: Let your students know where you are in relation to that history. If I were teaching it today, I would start out by recognizing and acknowledging that my position is as a white woman, who has inherited the benefits of white privilege and who has in fact, probably benefited from the wealth that was built by enslaved people in this country. And I would also further acknowledge for myself, that even though my ancestors were European immigrants who came after the period of enslavement was over, that that does not really make a difference because I inherited this story as an American and I inherited the wealth, and I inherited the history and that we’ve all inherited that history. But that for teachers to acknowledge kind of who they are, what land they stand on, what their own position is, and probably that they also are learning as well, and that they don’t have all the answers. I think that this topic more than any other requires humility, requires listening and requires courage.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Maureen Costello, thank you so much, not only for joining us for this opening episode of the second season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, but for your leadership at Teaching Tolerance, and for really helping and making sure that we get this information about American slavery, about how to teach it accurately and effectively to teachers so that they can do the job that they are committed to doing. Thank you so much, Maureen.

Maureen Costello: Thank you, Hasan.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: American slavery shaped the modern world and impacted the life of every person living on the four Atlantic-facing continents and nearby islands. Students deserve to learn this complicated but essential history, a history that includes the millions of Indigenous people who were enslaved by European invaders, settlers and their descendants. Eduardo Díaz is the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, and Renée Gokey is the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian. They begin their conversation by telling us about their personal discovery of this often-hidden history.

Eduardo Díaz: My name is Eduardo Díaz, I am the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, which was established in 1997, to ensure Latino presence at the Smithsonian Institution.

Renée Gokey: And I am Renée Gokey. I’m a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, although my family has other heritages as well. And I am the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian, both developing learning experiences, teaching experiences for students and teachers. Eduardo, can you describe your personal journey to learning about this history and how that journey has shaped your approach to this work?

Eduardo Díaz: Thanks for the question. I am of Mexican descent. My parents are from Mexico, but I was born in the United States. I am a mestizo, which means that I am of mixed blood, most prominently European, probably Spanish, even the last name, and Indigenous of unknown origins in Mexico. And I’ve always wondered about that. I am also a product of the Chicano movement, which was a movement of Mexican Americans that paralleled the civil rights movements of the ’60s and ’70s. And the Chicano movement was, in many cases, very much about an exploration of Indigenous roots and a rejection of European or Spanish roots. Folks were giving their children names — Tizoc, Xóchitl, Nahuatl names — and there was really an earnest effort to explore these traditions, these roots, visit Mexico, become grounded, start learning how to dance Native dances from the main nations in Mexico. And so I wasn’t really too engaged with that part of it, I became more interested in the political angles of things.

So not surprisingly, after I graduated from undergraduate school at San Diego State, I went to law school because I thought that was the route to serving my community. But I always had this lingering question about my own Indigenous background. So, I happened to be at a bookstore in my neighborhood called the Potter’s House. It’s an old-school, lefty bookstore that one might associate with someplace like Berkeley, California. And there was this book on the shelf, The Other Slavery, and at the time, I just kind of wanted to get my cortado and forget about it because I just was not ready to pick up a book with that kind of title. But it just kept on speaking to me as I went back the following week, and I said, “OK, this is enough. Just pick it up and check it out.” And as I started to read this book, written by Andrés Reséndez, who’s a history professor at UC Davis, which is incidentally, where I also went to law school, I was just engaged.

I read the book, and I just flipped through it very, very quickly. It was a page-turner for me. And I thought, Wow, I work at the Smithsonian, I don’t know that we have ever dealt with this issue. We have obviously dealt with the issue of African slavery at the Smithsonian, we have a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, and of course, plenty was going on in the exploration of that particular slavery, but nothing that I could recall had ever been done on what is now known as the “other slavery.” And so I had a conversation with the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, where you work, of course, and also the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And I said, “Guys, what do you think? I think this is something that we need to explore.” So they embraced it. I think both of them read the book and were equally enthused and agreed with me that this was something that we really did need to look at.

So part of it is a personal journey, but the other part is it’s very professional, on the other end too. I mean, I work at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is about the increase and diffusion of knowledge, that’s been the mission of the institution since day one, and it is viewed as the nation’s museum. So if we are the nation’s museum, then perhaps we ought to explore this little-known but major aspect of the national narrative, which is about the bondage of Native peoples, either through slavery itself, indebted servitude or debt peonage. So Renée, tell me about your journey.

Renée Gokey: Well, I grew up in Oregon. So my family is from Oklahoma on my father’s side, and the other side of my family is from actually California. And so I had a very similar experience, I think, to a lot of people growing up in Oregon, in a public school. You know, we learned about the Oregon Trail. We heard a little bit about the California missions. And we heard very, very little about slavery, in association with the California missions. And I heard nothing, of course, about my own Native history and culture. It didn’t really exist in public schools. And our museum’s really been embarking on trying to uncover and really see where teachers and students are and what they’ve been taught. So we have also done a textbook study of 23 of the most widely used textbooks in K–12 classrooms. And we found a very similar story. There are sort of 10 big stories that are told about Native peoples. And what we found is they’re often incomplete. Sometimes they’re even inaccurate, and they’re very, very rarely from a Native perspective.

And so my experience was very similar. And it wasn’t really until I was much older, and recently really, that I read this book by Dr. Stephen Warren called The Worlds the Shawnees Made, Migration and Violence in Early America. And for the first time, I was confronted with the role that Shawnees played in the slave trade, particularly in the 1700s, where my community, Shawnees, are originally from Ohio, but really moved to these frontier areas, I learned, where the English were vying for power, the Spanish in Florida and so kind of all these areas. And so the Shawnees actually went to these places as a form of resilience to try and act as middlemen in the slave trade. And we were both capturing slaves and selling them to the English and Spanish, as well as adopting them into our community or there was actually torture in our community, where our people would use that as a form of retribution for deaths in our own community. So we either adopted, had this retribution factor in our community, or we actually sold people to other communities and the colonizers around us.

And actually, this led to a lot of the Confederacies forming in the Southeast because some of the bigger nations also came together in these new Confederacies in ways to survive as well. So it’s a very complicated story that I’m uncomfortable with, I’m also at the same time intrigued by because it’s something that I knew nothing of. And so I guess it’s personal in that there’s just so much that our communities are interested in, engaged with revitalizing our languages and all of these issues today. But we really need to understand this history in the full spectrum of the human experience, and it humanizes us even more. And we know that we’re working very much against a lot of stereotypes that have been propagated through our school systems and things like that. And so we need to work against that, but we also have to understand ourselves and our roles and what this means for us today. So it’s been an ongoing journey for me as well, and I have a lot more to learn.

Eduardo Díaz: I think we all do, actually, a lot to learn. Your work in education at the National Museum of the American Indian, so why in your view, do students need to learn and why do teachers need to teach about the history of Indian slavery?

Renée Gokey: I think we need to understand ourselves and understand some of these moral dilemmas that we’re faced with even today. And I think that these are based on past experiences where people had choices in their history. And I’m not saying there’s one way or another way to think about these choices, but I think it’s important to understand that we’re all, as a society and as individuals and as communities, part of these decisions that are going to affect the world around us. And so understanding those histories is really important and this has completely been a hidden history. And so it’s really easy to just brush past this and not understand the full complexity of Native people, as well as their interaction with all the communities around them. This was a very tumultuous time period for our communities, and really for everyone. And so I think it’s important to examine those and for teachers to feel more comfortable with this content.

I think it’s going to take some work to get teachers prepared for this. And that’s why a framework to understand how to teach more about these difficult topics is really important and also learning as we go, setting up safe spaces in classrooms where there’s certain norms where respect and facilitated dialogue and these pedagogical practices that we’ve been working on can be put to use. So I think it’s an ongoing learning process as well. How about you, Eduardo?

Eduardo Díaz: Well, I’m not an educator, nor have I ever been a teacher. But I do think you hit on it. I think these are the stories — these are narratives that need to be elevated. These are obscured histories which need to be discussed and we need to infuse them into the American narrative. I think students and teachers, especially after Reconstruction, were quick to obscure the experience and histories of enslaving folks of African origin. But it has since been recognized that, of course, slavery is a foundational story to telling the American and I would say continental history. And so its impact on largely every aspect of our nation’s history has been pretty well defined and pretty well known. However, the story of enslaved American Indians has been quieted over many years, practically to the point of whispers, if not just silence, and hushed aside and especially relative to those who have inherited it as a legacy. And so I always think it’s important to teach subject matter from a first-voice perspective.

So I think the Smithsonian and particularly in an institution like the National Museum of the American Indian, and even the Latino Center, has the responsibility to create opportunities for people to hear about history, directly from the people who have been the most affected by it. I think that it’s our responsibility. I think that’s our mission. And if we don’t do that, I think we betray that mission. And I think the students need to hear it, right. Students need to hear it directly, in a way that’s appropriate for the age group. And teachers also have to have the guts to teach material that they may feel uncomfortable with or that they feel might offend some students or perhaps they don’t know much about it. I think this is the point: that the National Museum of the American Indian has the resources, has the tools, has the people to be able to help teachers get to that level of comfort and confidence to be able to handle the subject matter and work with students to ensure that it is a learning experience that really resonates.

Renée Gokey: How does thinking about this history inform the work that you’re now doing at the Smithsonian, Eduardo?

Eduardo Díaz: When somebody ask me what my job is, my response is “My job is to transform the Smithsonian into a Latino-serving institution.” And my view is, the only way we can do that is to have our content experts at the various museums and research centers of the Smithsonian, conducting the research, organizing the exhibitions, building the collections, informing public and educational programs, also informing digital content that goes online, mentoring and publishing, if possible. And so it is very important for us to understand that Latino history is American history, period. Latino art is American art, period. Portraits of Latinos are American portraits, period. And so this history is part of us because so many of our community are mixed heritage. We have to remember that when African slaves escaped their masters in the Caribbean, and they ran into the hills or into the swamps, who did they run into? Native peoples, you know? “Monte adentro,” they say. “Cimarrón de monte adentro,” means “an escaped slave or a maroon.” “Monte adentro” means “mountain way in in the hinterlands.” So “Eso era un cimarrón de monte adentro,” so, that escaped slave went into the hills and who do they associate with?

And as I always say, well, slaves didn’t go back to Africa and the Spaniards didn’t bring any senoritas. So let’s just do the propagational math here. So I think it’s just thinking about miscegenation, or “mestizaje,” is a very natural thing that we, at the Latino Center at the Smithsonian, are thinking about all the time. And if you’re Mexican, Mexican American, the chances of you being a mestizo are pretty good. And so there’s just that very basic genetic code question that you are curious about. Who formed you? Who were these people? Who were your ancestors? At least, you know Renée can say, well, she’s Shawnee, right. I can’t even tell you what Native group I am descended from in Mexico. I have no clue. And I don’t know that I’ll ever get to that point. For me, the key is, and I think for a lot of Latinos, those of us who are of Indigenous backgrounds, to understand and come to grips with our indigeneity from an Indigenous perspective, versus a Latino perspective.

Because Spanish is still dominant in our language in some cases. And the Latino identity, or Chicano identity, in my case, is what pervades. But it’s still very much a Latino perspective. It’s not an Indigenous perspective. And I think for many of us, we have to find a way not to discard that Latino part, but to engage with the Indigenous part in a way that’s more serious, that’s more intentional. That’s more honest, and a way that really forces us to be open and accepting of that part of who we are. So I think we are bound to tell this history in the only way we know how to do it at the Latino Center at the Smithsonian, and that’s straight up with facts, and not to shy away from the difficult stories and it’s all mixed up. It’s the heritage of African slavery, the decimation of Native populations in the Americas, and the arrival of Europeans and the whole notion of first contact.

Again, going back to who’s going to be using this, teachers, I think can find creative ways in which to tell the story in a way that’s going to register with their students, in a way that’s really going to resonate and that will stick with them. So Renée, how does thinking about this history inform the work that you’re doing at the American Indian Museum?

Renée Gokey: We tackle a variety of content, but what we found is that often, we have to take a few steps back and really meet teachers where they are when teaching and learning about native peoples or Indigenous people, so even something as simple but important as checking our language, and giving some guidelines on terminology and kind of understanding some of the assumptions or the biases that we might have in our language. For example, with the term “Indio,” that’s considered derogatory. And our museum is called National Museum of American Indian. So it’s confusing for people. And so we try and give some feedback on the history of why our museum’s called National Museum of American Indian, which comes from the collector itself and the legislation that was passed. But we also look at the first time that the term “Indio” was used. And it was used, as far as we know, according to primary sources, in the journals of Cristóbal Colón or Christopher Columbus. When he landed on Hispaniola, he took a lot of notes, and he held a journal. And so I think it was October 14, that that term “Indio” was applied.

And so we try and give teachers some guidance on both the history and origins of these terms, and then give them some preferred terminology, and talk about why it could be problematic and why it is problematic to use that term. And then we complicate the story and I say, at least from my own family experience, my grandmother grew up in Oklahoma, being called “half breed,” which was also a derogatory term. It’s something that you would call dogs. And this is how she grew up going to boarding school and some of those pretty tough experiences. And so she called herself an Indian because Shawnees didn’t call themselves Shawnees in the 1920s and 30s. So my grandma, that’s the experience that she had, and so I try and be authentic and real and tell that story.

And then I talk about how today, we’re really reclaiming those terms, and we’re calling ourselves by our names. And some communities have been involved in that for quite a long time but other communities are really going and reclaiming these words that we call ourselves and not words that were put on us by the colonizer. So an example: Ohkay Owingeh, San Juan Pueblo.

Eduardo Díaz: It used to be San Juan Pueblo.

Renée Gokey: It used to be San Juan Pueblo. So these are really important, because the ability to name things and the ability to put things on a map, those are colonist practices. And so it’s important for us to kind of talk about some of that. So because that’s a frequently asked question, we address that and we have teachers think about terminology, even when it comes to teaching about American Indian removal, which I’ve done a lot of. And so we have these online lessons that we use primary and secondary sources to answer this question: What does it mean to remove a people? And when we’re discussing these resources, and we’re looking at exhibitions that help us tell more complete narratives, we also look at the term “ethnic cleansing.” And we talk about how it actually does meet the definition of ethnic cleansing when you’re looking at American Indian removal.

So there’s power behind these words, and I think that it’s really great teaching and learning opportunities to have these conversations, not only with teachers — but for teachers to have these conversations in their classrooms with their students. In terms of slavery in particular, we have what’s called Indigenous Peoples’ Curriculum Day and Teach-In, and we hold that before Columbus Day so that teachers are prepared in the local D.C. metro area to address these issues around Columbus, and slavery really starts there. And so we have a session, we have a keynote, and we’ll have several breakout sessions in which teachers can choose. And one of those sessions is a dialogue and a role-play around Columbus Day, and if he should be put on trial. So these are some of the ways that we start to address and find these entry points into talking about slavery and the other broader topics that teachers need support on.

Eduardo Díaz: We started a program looking at Taíno groups. Back in 2011, Taínos are the larger group that Christopher Columbus “discovered” when he arrives in the Caribbean. We started small with a symposium. So we brought in scholars and community members from Cuba, from Puerto Rico, from the Dominican Republic, from Jamaica—Jamaica, of course, the Taíno name—from actually Belize, because there was a relationship with the Garifunas. And the first symposium was really the myth of extinction because the narrative is the Columbus narrative and the Spanish narrative is Columbus arrives, the Spaniards come, they wipe out all the Indians in the Caribbean, there are no more Indians in the Caribbean. That’s the myth.

And so we continue to explore this notion of indigeneity in the Caribbean. And finally, we’re able to open the show on “Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean,” at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. And when people ask me about that show, I say, “Well, basically, it’s the flip side of the Columbus narrative. It’s looking at first contact from an Indigenous perspective versus the traditional European perspective, so I think it’s very important that we at the Smithsonian flipped the narrative and we have to do it to be able to round out the story. And working with American Indian [museum], of course, for me has been a godsend. This is the only place we could have done it, obviously. It is a Native story but we’re also part of that story, because so many of us, particularly those members in our community who are from the Caribbean, Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, in particular, this is their story. And so we needed to tell it.

Renée Gokey: Well, I was just going to add to that. So one of the ways that we’re also working with teachers is so often I mean, I think something like 83 percent of the workforce, the teaching workforce is white females. And so a lot of times, a teacher will come to us and say, they kind of exoticize — sometimes Native Americans, not all, but here and there we’ll get a comment. And what we’re really working to do is have teachers recognize their own culture, and start to break apart their culture, because everybody has culture and kind of expand their thinking around culture. And then they can start to teach about Native people in more inclusive ways and more complex ways.

And so that’s a really important thing is to start with yourself. I remember one teacher, we were doing an activity where we kind of sort different primary and secondary sources and we look at false narratives. And we kind of define that. And we look at incomplete narratives and talk about some of the characteristics of those. And then more complete narratives where we hope to provide first-person perspective and some documents and journals and quotes and art pieces that help to tell these more complete narratives from Indigenous perspectives. And this teacher, all of a sudden, she was engaging with the activity, and she threw her hands on the table, and she said, “I get it, we tell the stories that make us feel good about ourselves.” And so we’re also these people who were taking identities and shifting and changing sometimes. We’re using terminology in ways that can help us elevate ourselves and society. And so these are really important things to really talk about and look at some of the assumptions and biases that we have in using this terminology and who has the ability and who has a representation to be able to share those because we’re not all the same in that respect at all.

Eduardo Díaz: And kind of follow up on that, what do you say to the teacher for perhaps being intimidated or maybe feeling ill-equipped or not confident to talk about indigenous slavery in the classrooms? What do you say to them that relieves them from being intimidated or feeling guilty or just not feeling equipped to tell the story?

Renée Gokey: Well, to be honest, I haven’t taught on this topic. And so in terms of content, and in terms of pedagogical approaches, those are things that we’re still kind of working on but I would maybe go back to some of the practices that we know do help teachers and help them feel supported. And first, it’s based on just Teaching 101, which is relationships, building respectful relationships where teachers feel comfortable asking questions, and building that respect and sharing and being part of the learning community as a facilitator. So I guess my own philosophy has really shifted.

We do want to bring in content experts and curators, of course, but we also want to set up situations where teachers feel comfortable asking new questions, and the facilitator’s also learning alongside the teachers as well. So I think that providing a nice array of primary and secondary sources, where teachers and students can really confront the sources and grapple with history, that can be contradictory because even when we tell more complete narratives, it gets more complicated, right? So then we have contradictions sometimes, where one community says this, and another community says that or one family says, “Well you don’t necessarily represent a whole community’s perspective,” which is true.

And then we have to find ways to provide more complete narratives because we don’t want to put too fine a point on the incomplete narratives that are out there. We know there’s a lot and we know we’ve been dealing with stereotypes and incomplete stories and narratives about Native people for a long time. But what we need to do is counterbalance that with more complete narratives and a plethora of resources that teachers feel that they can turn to that are accurate, that are authentic and that can really help be relevant to students in their classrooms. So I think connecting it with contemporary issues is really key, connecting some of these broad ideas and these moral questions with the lives of students today, and there’s a lot of issues in which we can do that.

Eduardo Díaz: I think in terms of the areas that need to be explored, we need to begin with a historical grounding, right? This is the slavery that was practiced in the Americas. It led to the development of some customs and some edicts. There were economic factors, as we know, because slavery’s a business at the end of the day. There was inter-ethnic complicity, as we’ve discussed. There were wars that were fought over this. The geographic spread of Indigenous slavery was immense, not only in the Caribbean, but as we know, throughout Latin America, the US colonies, including the Philippines, and most states, we need to go deep into the areas of removal, reservations, Indian schools, boarding schools.

And I think that a comparative analysis with African slavery and the diaspora is something that would be important to do, I think, because people recognize and they know about African slavery, so I think that the comparative analysis would help it resonate with them. And then there’s family histories and traditions, looking at genealogical and genetic research, which in my case is what drove me to the subject matter as a mestizo very much about looking at identity formation and mythologies and religious conversions and cultural practice, euphemism, stereotypes as Renée has mentioned the importance of unraveling.

And then I think so much needs to be done in the area of research relative to the artifacts or the records of enslavement. So the documentation, what’s the invisible archive, what about material culture? We have not even scratched the surface, I bet, at the Smithsonian. And that’s something I think we need to really look at. And then there’s art and creative expression as a way of dealing with this. So one of the things we’re doing is organizing a one-and-a-half-day symposium on the subject in 2021.

We are going to be bringing together scholars, of course, and community members to talk about geographic reach and the history and the aesthetic and culture and treaties and wars, and so forth, and inter-ethnic complicities and whatnot. So that’s going to be an opportunity really for us to go deep into the subject from a variety of perspectives, and to also bring artists as well into the picture so that they can also reflect from their creative standpoints on the subject. Looking at slavery, aesthetics, and cultural resurgence and multi-genre traditional and contemporary art practice to the point that Renée brought up about the importance of showing how this subject resonates in a contemporary way.

I mentioned we’re doing a symposium in a couple of years, and one of the things we’re going to do is ask people to respond to an image, right? So one image might be a photograph in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History, which is of a Mexican, I’m quoting, this is how the photo caption reads, “Mexican boy captured by Comanche Kiowa Alliance.” OK, the exhibition at American Indian in New York, the Cannon exhibition” Wow, you could pick two or three images, paintings of his, T.C. Cannon, and ask a scholar or an artist to riff on that from the perspective of slavery. And it would be an extraordinary discussion, I think. I think all of these things that I’ve just sort of outlined are things that need to be looked at as a complete package of exploration into this subject that we are referring to as Indian slavery.

Renée Gokey: For our sort of pedagogical approaches, we found that poetry and art are really effective tools to start to bring about conversation. So they can be a really nice catalyst for conversation, and just get teachers and students thinking in new ways, and listening and hearing from other perspectives on the same artwork. So sometimes we don’t sit teachers down, for example, and say, “We’re going to talk about cultural appropriation today.” No. Instead, what we do is we look at some artwork, we look at some contemporary artists, and we even use our hands to make things ourselves and have conversations and then it will come up maybe, “Well, you know what, should I be using dream catchers in my classroom?” And so then we’re ready with some conversations around that. And so I think that that can be a way to — I don’t want to say a backdoor into approaching difficult subjects, I think it’s also important to hit it head-on. If you have the content, and you have the skills, and you’re ready for that but I think that it can be a really powerful way to talk about difficult subjects through poetry and art. We found that to be effective.

Eduardo Díaz: It seems that oftentimes, Native people in the United States, we owe these communities or, “We’re sorry, we took your land, decimated your populations and your buffalo herds and moved you and so forth, took away your language and whatnot.” But then in the exploration of this whole issue of Indian slavery, do you come to the... you learn that Native peoples were complicit and active, very active in the slave trade? I know we always point our fingers at the Comanches, who were like supreme at their business of slave trading. And in fact, it was a business and they enslaved other Native groups, even in Mexico and were running slaving raids into Mexico to provide the supply of human labor in the United States, and brought them back across the border. And it was a business. It was a business and Native peoples were engaged with that business, as you mentioned with the Shawnees and their role. That kind of disrupts that whole narrative about we have to be kind to Indians, and we have to be empathetic, and we messed them over. We got to make it up to them. You know what I’m saying? And it’s like, “Well, OK, but when we deal with the issue of slavery, if we do the whole truth and the whole history, there’s some very uncomfortable conversations that are going to come up here.”

Renée Gokey: Yeah. But at the same time, though, I think we have to acknowledge what was the context that made this happen. What was the context? There were so many challenges and Native communities were so disrupted due to disease, and due to forced removals, even before the 1830 Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. Native people were also removing themselves. So this was a very tumultuous period. And so yes, we don’t want to sort of get into this finger-pointing or saying we should apologize or we shouldn’t apologize. But I think what we do need to do is provide context. And so we do need to really look at the context in which this was happening and the kind of challenges that people were having. It doesn’t make it OK, but we need to provide that context.

I think apologies actually go a really long way. I say that because just a few weeks ago, I was giving a tour on removal, and there was a sort of quiet moment where I was just telling both my personal experience, some with my family or my heritage, and then the larger American story of removal. And a teacher from the back of the room said, “I just want to say that I am really sorry.” And I don’t say it with... because it was actually a kind of an important moment, everybody sort of felt it in the room. And people were nodding, and it was a really important moment, actually. And I can’t accept that apology. I didn’t endure any of the removal or anything like that. But our families still carry some of those stories. And there were so many different policies. So I just think that it’s really important to understand these and it’s so little taught, even basics like boarding schools, that’s not taught. You ask a group of 30 teachers in any given workshop and about two people raise their hands, that even know that boarding schools occurred, so I think this is a chance to really kind of widen our eyes and help us all wake up.

Eduardo Díaz: Yeah. I agree. I had mentioned the book The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez. I wanted to quote from a book review that was done by Genevieve Valentine at NPR, just a short paragraph, which I think is relevant to what we’re talking about here. And it reads, “It’s unfortunate, though inevitable, that some of the facts under discussion have lost historical resonance amid the longstanding cloud of white defensiveness. The fact that some Native American nation sought to maintain autonomy by adapting European horse culture and becoming slavers themselves is an object lesson in the trickle-down horrors of colonialism. Rather than self-contained billiard balls colliding with one another on the frontier, as Reséndez puts it, sometimes he writes as if he knows that any engagement with Indian slavers is doomed to erase some of the nuance of his research.”

You’re right, I mean, slavery was not practiced at this level before contact and before European colonialism that some tribes “got with the program.” Oh, boy. Anyway, lots to explore.

Renée Gokey: Another thing that I would add is that sometimes these types of subjects can bring about strong emotions, so they bring about anger or guilt or shame. And I think one way to deal with that is find ways for anyone, teachers and students, but just people in general to be empowered to rectify some of these injustices that are around them today. So how can we look at some of the issues that are important in society today, we were really... when we’re teachers, we’re really guiding students to be better human beings.

We’re guiding them not only to mentally accept or grapple with information, but really to improve their civic society, to improve our civic society and move towards a more perfect union. So how do we do that? Sometimes we have to heal. And sometimes we have to kind of really grapple with our own situations, and be intentional about the types of conversations we have, and when these emotions arise, how can we set up learning communities where we can actually tackle injustices today. So I think that that helps a little bit with some of the empowerment that we can find when we feel like either we have big gaps in knowledge, we don’t have a personal connection to this, maybe some people would say, “That was 300 years ago, how does that affect me today?” Well, let’s look at the issues that do affect you today and let’s talk about some of those dilemmas and debates today.

So I think that this kind of full humanity not only in talking about Indigenous people and Latinos and mestizos and other people that are part of these conversations, and Europeans and African Americans and Africans, but also the myriad experiences of humanity. And so I think that those are really important things to grapple with as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Eduardo Diaz is the director of the Smithsonian Latino Center, whose mission is to increase and enhance the Latino presence at the Smithsonian Institution. He is particularly excited about the establishment of the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the National Museum of American History. When it opens next year, it will be the first permanent exhibit space dedicated to the Latino experience on the National Mall.

Renée Gokey is the teacher workshop coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian. She is currently expanding the museum’s Native Knowledge 360 initiative, which offers educators and students new perspectives on the history, cultures and contemporary lives of Indigenous people through online content. The museum also provides many teacher professional development opportunities across the country, including the National Teacher Institute each summer, which you can learn more about at americanindian.si.edu.

And Maureen Costello is the director of Teaching Tolerance and a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s senior leadership team. Before joining Teaching Tolerance, she led Newsweek’s education program. A former history teacher, she believes passionately that the past informs the present, and that studying the past makes us better citizens.

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 also find these online at tolerance.org.

Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of what is currently the United States, or how its legacies still influence us today. Now in our second season, this podcast is part of an effort to provide comprehensive tools for learning and teaching this critical topic. Teaching Tolerance provides free teaching materials that include over 100 texts, sample inquiries and a detailed K–12 framework for teaching the history of American slavery. You can find these online at tolerance.org/hardhistory.

Thanks to Ms. Costello, Mr. Diaz and Ms. Gokey for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is our executive producer. Our theme song 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. If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. Tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

That’s what we’re aiming to do in this guide: provide fundamentals that lay a foundation for future learning about slavery in the past and in the present. These fundamentals balance oppression with stories of resilience and agency. They show that slavery wasn’t a “peculiar” institution at all, but a national institution motivated by a desire for profit. And they invite young people to see that enslaved people were human beings—with names, families, music, food, hopes and dreams. 

For teachers concerned about walking the fine line between overloading students and sugarcoating the truth, this framework for the elementary grades identifies age-appropriate, essential knowledge about American slavery, organized thematically within grade bands. For those unsure where to start, the resource is complemented by new additions to the Teaching Hard History Text Library, written especially for K–5 readers. The framework itself also includes concrete recommendations for introducing these ideas to students. 

Teaching young people about our hard history should engage them in important questions that have relevance to their lives. We hope that teachers will choose to engage children with the big questions: what it means to be free and how humans make choices even in the most adverse circumstances. 

The framework reflects the work of scholars and experts in history, child development, educational psychology and children’s literature. They have built a remarkable path where none existed, and it’s one we hope many teachers and curriculum specialists will follow. 

About the Teaching Hard History Elementary Framework

In 2018, we published Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery. The framework identifies key concepts and summary objectives supported by instructional strategies. It is designed to help secondary teachers cover this important and often-neglected history.

This elementary framework expands our focus to include teachers and students in the elementary grades. It identifies essential knowledge and suggests developmentally appropriate strategies and texts for teaching about slavery. We believe that schools must tell the story of this country’s origins and trajectory early and often. This will help students to understand our past, comprehend current events and envision a better future.

Students deserve to learn the full and true history of the United States. As early as three years old, young people evaluate source credibility to decide if information is reliable.1 Telling the truth, even when it’s difficult, builds trust―an essential quality for strong relationships between teachers and students. Elementary students also have a strong and personal understanding of the differences between justice and injustice. They often talk and think about freedom, equality and power. They are aware of differences in national origin, culture, ethnicity, race and gender.

Young students want to create a more just and fair society. Teaching about slavery in elementary school, done properly, can build on children’s instincts and help students apply them to their classrooms, communities and study of the United States.

Unfortunately, neither state departments of education nor the publishing industry provide effective guidance for teaching about slavery to young people. This is particularly true in elementary school. Teachers are asked to celebrate Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass as early as kindergarten, even though their state’s curriculum may not include slavery until fourth grade. In Ohio, for example, the state elementary social studies standards mention slavery only once, in the fourth grade: “Sectional issues divided the United States after the War of 1812. Ohio played a key role in these issues, particularly with the anti-slavery movement and the Underground Railroad.” In other words, the standards seem to expect that teachers will cover abolition before they cover slavery.

Elementary educators face many obstacles when it comes to social studies instruction. They are accountable for teaching math, reading and science. Usually, teachers specialize in one of those areas rather than in social studies―a subject generally left out of statewide testing regimes. There is little support for teachers in this area. School libraries and English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms may contain many books about the Underground Railroad, but none about the day-to-day lives of enslaved families and children.

What’s missing is guidance about how and when to teach this important topic. This guide fills that gap. To inform our work, Learning for Justice sought advice from teachers, historians and experts in elementary education.

Done correctly, teaching about slavery covers all 10 of the major thematic strands for social studies education recommended by the National Council for the Social Studies.2 It opens possibilities for classroom conversations that address important and essential issues. And it fits into existing instructional plans. While each state’s curriculum differs, all―in ELA and social studies across all grade levels―offer opportunities to explore this topic even though they rarely offer formal geography or history until the fourth grade.

As students learn about the history of slavery using this framework, they engage in conversations about the meaning and value of freedom. They analyze how power organizes our past and present. When we prepare young students to understand the larger arc of American history, they learn about identity, diversity, culture, time, change, citizenship, conflict, imperialism and capitalism.

Slavery is a fundamental part of United States history. Just as history instruction begins in elementary school, so too should learning about slavery. By waiting until high school to study this hard history, we do students a disservice that hamstrings their ability to understand both American history and current events. 

Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history. To be clear: We are not saying that kindergarten teachers must enumerate the grim details of the Middle Passage or the minutia of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Instead, they should intentionally build instruction that prepares students to understand the long, multidimensional history of slavery and its continuing consequences. Long before we teach algebra, we teach its component parts. We should structure history instruction in the same way.

As educators read this guide, there are a few guiding principles to keep in mind.

Be ready to talk about race. 

It is impossible to teach about slavery without talking about race, racism and white supremacy―something that makes many teachers, particularly white teachers, uncomfortable. But talking about race, especially encouraging students to understand it as a social construction rather than a biological fact, can be an opportunity to have productive and thoughtful conversations among students, if properly structured. First, teachers should take some time to consider their own identities and the way that those identities structure how they see the world. There are a number of resources at LearningforJustice.org to help with this process. Teachers should also consider the makeup of their classroom and develop fluency with culturally sustaining pedagogical strategies that recognize and draw upon students’ identities as assets for learning. 

Teach about commonalities. 

When teaching about other eras and cultures, it is important to focus on similarities with students’ lives first before moving to discuss differences. Learning about “cultural universals” such as art forms, group rules, social organization, basic needs, language and celebrations helps students to recognize that people are bound together by similarities regardless of group membership.3 When students appreciate commonalities, they are also less likely to express fear or stereotypes about members of other groups.4 This approach also helps students to build empathy, an essential skill for social and emotional development. Students might examine stories about children in other communities, children living in slavery or the cultural practices of enslaved people to find similarities with their own experiences.

Center the stories of enslaved people. 

One mistake that teachers sometimes make is to begin by discussing the evils of slavery. This subtly communicates that enslaved people lacked agency and culture. Instead, start by learning about the diversity of African kingdoms and Native nations, including their intellectual and cultural traditions. Focusing on specific nations (for example, the Benin Empire or the Onondaga Nation) will give depth and specificity to these discussions. Students should learn that people were doctors, teachers, artists and community leaders before they were enslaved. This approach begins by focusing on the strengths and humanity of people who were enslaved. Once discussing slavery, students should center the humanity of enslaved people by exploring sources that speak to the diverse experiences of enslaved people from their own perspectives and in the words of their descendants. 

Embed civics education.

When students learn about the history of American slavery, they have ample opportunities to explore the many dimensions of civics. First, students should consider the nature of power and authority. They should describe what it means to have power and identify ways that people use power to help, harm and influence situations. Beginning with examples from their classroom, families and communities, students can examine how power is gained, used and justified. Teachers should ask students what makes authority legitimate. As they learn more about the history of slavery, students should begin to understand the layers of U.S. government (local, state, tribal and national) and the idea that rules can change from place to place. Finally, the study of American slavery creates opportunities to learn about activism and action civics. Students should study examples and role models from the past and present, and ask themselves: “How can I make a difference?”

Teach about conflict and change. 

The history of American slavery is a story of terrible oppression; at the same time, it is also a story of incredible resistance and resilience. Students should learn that enslaved people wanted to be free, and that while some did escape, it was extraordinarily difficult. Teachers should be careful to show students that enslaved people resisted in other ways, such as learning to read colonial languages or by developing ceremonies like “jumping the broom” when marriage was forbidden. Students should know that slavery was widespread and not, as commonly thought, restricted to people of African descent or contained in the South. They should also know that many people did not agree with slavery and wanted to end it. These conversations should lead into discussions about current injustices―particularly those that continue to disenfranchise and oppress the descendants of enslaved people―and possibilities for activism and reform.

 

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We dropped the first episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery over a year and a half ago. Since that time we’ve released some 19 episodes covering a wide range of topics, from slavery and the Civil War to using young adult trade books in the classroom. And we’ve featured an amazing group of educators, from leading scholars to innovative museum professionals, who have shared their knowledge and experiences inside and outside of the classroom with us. And we haven’t been speaking into the wind either. The podcast has been downloaded over 150,000 times. But even though we’ve put in some serious work since we started, and even though we’ve reached far more teachers than I ever imagined, we still have a long way to go before we can say with reasonable confidence that we, as a nation, are teaching American slavery accurately and effectively. 

News Clip 1: Continuing our coverage tonight on a board game used to teach 4th graders about slavery.

News Clip 2: Activists want to change what they call distorted social studies standards.

News Clip 3: An African-American child was chosen to play the role of an enslaved person for a history lesson. 

News Clip 4: The standards currently list slavery, states’ rights and sectionalism as causes for entering the civil war, which critics say downplays slavery’s historical role.

News Clip 5: A New York State Attorney General investigation actually found that black students — and we’re talking about fifth-graders here… they were cast as slaves in a mock slave auction. In two separate fifth-grade social studies classes, a teacher asked all of the African-American students to raise their hands and then instructed them to exit the classroom and stand in the hallway. The teacher then placed imaginary chains or shackles on these students’ necks, wrists and ankles, and had them then walk back into the classroom. That’s when their white classmates were encouraged to bid on them.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As we just heard, there is more work to be done — a lot more work to be done. Fortunately, we’re coming back on August 14th with a whole new season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. Our focus will remain the same: to help educators better teach the history of enslavement and its long legacy. We will be expanding our focus, however, to more specifically support elementary school teachers. In fact, we’ll be spending even more time with teachers who are in the classroom doing this work every day. We’ll also be taking a deep dive into the often-hidden hard history and legacy of the enslavement of Indigenous people. For some of us, this isn’t a history that we know very much about. Few, if any, textbooks talk about what historian Andrés Resendéz has called “the other slavery.” But we need to know this history, and our students do too. 

Transatlantic slavery shaped the modern world, impacting the lives of every person living on the four Atlantic-facing continents and nearby islands. So when we talk about American slavery, we must account for the 2.5 to 5 million Native people who were enslaved by European invaders, settlers and their descendants. Their stories require us to rethink not only American history but also the history of the Americas. We have to decenter the British colonies, expand our definition of slavery, reconsider the North vs South binary, and reimagine emancipation, since the enslavement of African and Indigenous people persisted in the Americas well into the 1880s. 

But this season is not only about the past. We will continue to draw critical connections between the past and the present because understanding American slavery is vital to understanding racial inequality today. The formal and informal barriers to equal rights, erected after emancipation, were built on a foundation constructed during slavery. Unfortunately, our narrow understanding of the institution prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of fixing problems.

The intractable nature of racial inequality is a part of the tragedy that is American slavery. But the saga of slavery is not exclusively a story of despair; hard history is not hopeless history. Finding the promise and possibility within hard history requires considering the lives of the enslaved on their own terms. Enslaved African Americans forged unbreakable bonds with one another. They fought back, too, in the field and in the house, resisting enslavers in ways that ranged from flight to armed rebellion.

In much the same way, we need to consider the lives of those belonging to Native Nations, including those who were held in bondage. Indigenous people experienced a horrific genocide, but they survived this holocaust, buoyed by a fierce determination and a spirit of resistance that reflected longstanding cultural traditions and political practices.

Indeed, Native Nations fought back just like enslaved Africans. From the Pueblo Revolt to the Seminole Wars, they challenged European invaders and settlers in an effort to live free of colonial oppression. Native resistance enabled indigenous people to survive European colonization and American territorial expansion. And despite the myth that Native people have somehow disappeared, they remain — profoundly impacted, to be sure, but with their cultures vibrant and communities strong.

The enslavement of Native people, Indigenous identities, Native resistance and rebellion against European encroachment and preserving Native history — all of these topics are crucial to deepening our understanding of American slavery. And starting on August 14, we will begin exploring them together. Until then, be sure to check out some of our past episodes, so you’re ready for the upcoming school year. 

I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and your host for season two of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. And of course, I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

 

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Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So are you ready?

Bethany Jay: I’m ready. Let’s go.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: All right. Let’s do this.

This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, 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. And this is the final episode of our first season.

I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and today I’m joined by Bethany Jay. She and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly co-edited the anthology Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series, we have featured scholars from that collection, and we invited Bethany back to help us wrap things up. We’re going to spend most of this episode answering questions we’ve received from educators around the country. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

I’m very excited to welcome Bethany Jayback to the podcast. Bethany Jay, what’s going on? How are you?

Bethany Jay: I’m doing well. I’m excited to be here talking with you about this stuff.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We have wrapped up this season; we’re coming to the end. And so there’s really no better way to end this first season of the podcast than to have you with me here answering questions from our listeners.

Bethany Jay: Thank you for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I wondered what was it that led you and Cynthia to get together to write Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, the book from the University of Wisconsin Press.

Bethany Jay: There are two big reasons. And the first is really a deep belief that we need to be talking about this history in our classrooms, and that that’s just not happening at this point. And in teaching slavery for about 10 years—and Cynthia has been at it a little bit longer than that, what we realize is that when we talked to educators about teaching slavery, there was always this sense that slavery was something that they were going to teach at one point in the curriculum. And we realized that that was causing people a lot of anxiety because they were imagining this moment where you’ve been kind of gliding along on a very nice narrative of U.S. history, and then, boom! Here’s two weeks of slavery that comes out of nowhere. And so we really created the book to change that approach.

I always say that I begin my American History courses saying there were Africans in Virginia before there were Pilgrims in Massachusetts. So we’re going to talk about African-American history, and we’re going to talk about slavery, and we’re going to talk about it throughout our course. And if we talk about slavery across the time and landscape of American history, if we include slavery as part of the American story right from its very start, then we start to build capacity in our students to understand the subject, to deal with its complexities, and the hard conversations don’t come out of nowhere and shock your students. 

Instead, they’re part of a sort of larger and deeper understanding of the course and the subject from the start. So I think the problem that we’re seeing as we’ve talked to educators throughout this entire process is that teachers feel anxious because they feel ill-equipped to teach slavery, and they feel ill-equipped to teach slavery across that sort of landscape of American history.

And this is natural because, for a large part, today’s teachers have been trained by the same system that we’re trying to change. So Understanding and Teaching American Slavery was created to provide content strategies and resources that will help teachers to include slavery across American history curriculum and the Teaching Hard History project picks right up on that as well.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Do you see ways of incorporating the material, the approaches that are in the book, as well as with the framework and with the podcast, into existing curriculum? Or does it require a total revamp of what exists? I mean, can teachers plug and play? And if so, how does that work?

Bethany Jay: The way we created the book, and the frameworks that are on the Teaching Hard History website as well, was really to address that exact issue. Because I think teachers are also thinking, I’m going to have to completely reinvent the wheel in order to incorporate this kind of history, into their classrooms. And that’s just not the case. 

Because slavery is so integral to every part of the American history curriculum, you don’t need to completely rethink your curriculum. So, how we made the frameworks and how we made the book was to say, “Look, here are the subjects that teachers are going to teach. When you teach immigration into the British North American colonies, talk about the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, you can talk about the Quakers in Pennsylvania, but also talk about the forced migration of Africans as part of the Middle Passage. When you teach the Revolution, right? Do your George Washington and your Bunker Hill, and all of the things that you’re used to doing, but also talk about African-American soldiers. Talk about those who—who joined the British [at] a chance for freedom, right? Talk about the Book of Negroes in New York. That you can plug and play certain examples. 

I think what teachers find, is that when they start doing that work of switching out an example, of being more mindful of how slavery is represented in their curriculum, it does end up changing the narrative that they’re telling, but it’s not necessarily a top-down approach of saying, “Look, I need to completely rethink American history.” It’s something that happens organically as you start paying attention to these different sides of the story.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, that really addresses a number of questions that we received. One from Aretha Brown on Facebook and that was, you know, “Before I could even teach this material, I have to sort of get my administration on board. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions for how to get principals and assistant principals and the decision-makers within school buildings on board with the importance of teaching hard history, not in just a day or two, but really fully involving it and integrating it into the curriculum?”

Bethany Jay: I think one of the things that we’ve seen is the need for professional development around these kinds of topics. That teachers need to have time to talk with one another about strategies that they think will or will not work in their particular districts. They need time to sort of think about resources together as educators who are working in a particular community. You know, going to administration to support things like faculty learning communities or team teaching opportunities seems like a good way to sort of get support behind that. But of course, every district is different, right? And that’s not going to work everywhere. I will say that I think the approach that we were just talking about, of really saying, “Look, this is part of American history. So when I’m teaching American history, if I’m just teaching this as part of the curriculum in the frameworks that I’m being asked to teach, then it just becomes a part of my classroom.” Are you really asking to do anything different than you’re doing already? Does that make sense?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, it does. It makes a lot of sense. It’s somewhat about how we frame it.

Bethany Jay: Right.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How teachers frame what they are doing in the classroom to get buy-in from those who are not in the classroom to actually hear what they would be doing. You know, Bethany, that actually ties into a question that we received from Liz Kleinrock via Instagram. And she asks, “How do you recommend engaging families as part of this learning process when they might be against teaching about enslavement in the classroom?” And that raised two issues for me because that’s really two different constituencies, I think, and I’d love to get your thoughts on both of these. Historically, slavery has been taught poorly in the classrooms. So for parents of children of color, particularly African-American parents or parents of African Americans, there is a good reason to be hesitant and skeptical when you hear that slavery is suddenly going to be taught, and there can be pushback from them about this. 

But then you have white parents, we see this coming up in Texas most recently, who are resistant to talking about slavery in the classroom at all, because they don’t want their children to feel white guilt and shame and all these other things. So both groups, they both wind up saying, “Don’t teach it.” Obviously, we need to teach it. So how would you address those two different constituencies that are approaching the issue from two different angles?

Bethany Jay: Those are tough questions, right? I mean, they’re—and they are in some place, in some ways, place-specific, right? And teachers need to know the communities that they’re teaching in. But the way I’ve really dealt with this is by using the advice that Steven Oliver offered in both that sort of chapter in Understanding and Teaching American Slavery and his episode here, which is, with families of black students who may be hesitant to have their children learning about slavery from a white woman like myself, the idea is to be clear about one’s intentions. I make it very clear to my students that I’m talking about this history because I care deeply about it. That we’re going to be examining it because it’s an integral part of understanding our common history. And I also make it clear that I know a lot about the subject that I’m talking about. And so that gains my students’ trust pretty quickly.

And then with those white parents who are hesitant to have their students learn about it, because of either white guilt or hostility or whatever it might be, making our intentions clear as well. You know, one of the things that Steven says in the episode is—is starting some of these conversations with the idea that none of us in this room are responsible for the history that we’re talking about, no matter what your background. What we’re trying to do is learn from it, right? And create a better future together. So being really clear about the intentions, not laying any guilt on anybody, I think can help to create a productive foundation for these kinds of discussions.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I think one of the issues that African-American parents would have with teaching this subject, is how do you teach the brutality of it in a way that is sensitive to the young people in the room? We had a question from Melissa Aguedelo from Twitter, who expressed her worry that focusing on the brutality of slavery would de-emphasize the fact that enslaved Africans built this country. “What’s the right balance” she goes on to say, “between talking about and teaching about the humanity and contribution of black folk who are enslaved, to teaching about the sheer horror of the institution itself?”

Bethany Jay: I thought that your conversation with Izzy Anderson on the “Resistance” episode with Kenneth Greenberg was one of the best examples of a real teacher dealing with that exact question. Feeling like she was in a difficult position, teaching a majority African-American student population in the Deep South, and really sort of grappling with this question of, How do I balance? Making sure that these kids are hearing this history somewhere. And if I want to make sure they’re hearing it, then it’s going to have to be in my classroom. But also thinking, I don’t want to just beat them down. And that question of resistance, and the way that she addressed sort of, “We’re going to talk about the horrors of slavery, but we’re also going to talk about the fact that, through all of this, enslaved people built cultures and lives and families,” right? And persisted. So it’s resistance in the face of slavery. And I think that’s such an important balance to strike. It’s a hard balance to strike, but it’s an important one for our students to hear in the classroom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I was thinking about a conversation with my oldest daughter when she was just five years old. I’m telling her and talking to her about the brutalities of slavery. And then her response was like, “Well heck, I don’t want to be black,” right? Like just, “I can’t. That’s too much for me.” And I realized then that I had to strike just in that conversation, the balance between black beauty, black humanity and black pain. Because if you emphasize one over the other and you don’t strike that balance, you either get pushback, “I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” or you don’t provide the adequate context for understanding what was really an amazing struggle in human history. So it really is a fine line to walk, but it’s so critical that we actually do it.

You know, we received a question from Erin Annis on Instagram, who asks, “How do we counter the quote unquote ‘No one thought it was wrong’ question with regard to people owning other people?” Which reminds me of a very common question that occurs at historic sites. Our friends at Montpelier, James Madison’s residence, if you ask them, “What’s one of the most common questions that you get when you talk about James Madison as a person who claimed ownership over 100 enslaved African Americans?” And they’ll say, “Well, wasn’t he a good master?”

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Or, “He was just a man of his times.” Where does that come from? And what is the proper response to that?

Bethany Jay: I think it comes from this deep desire to have American history be completely celebratory and progressive.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hmm.

Bethany Jay: I once heard Colonial Williamsburg’s early tours being, “America started off great and it’s been getting greater ever since.” And I think it comes from the desire to sort of maintain that narrative and to maintain our heroes. Mount Vernon had a memorial to enslaved people placed there in the 1920s and another one in the 1980s, before they ever really started connecting the fact that those enslaved people lived on Mount Vernon meant that George Washington owned enslaved people. Somehow, those two narratives worked on parallel paths. They never intersected. And I think that’s the way we’ve been dealing with this history for a long time. Montpelier is the best example of bringing those two narratives together.

I think it’s still a sort of battle in many of our public history sites, and it’s still a battle in our classrooms. And when my students bring up a kind of “men of their time” argument: “Well, we can’t judge them, right, by our standards today,” my response is, “No, but we can judge them by the standards of their day.” And I usually bring up two examples. I bring up George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, who were in a continuous dialogue about slavery, you know, from the end of the Revolutionary War until Washington’s death, with the Marquis de Lafayette being a committed abolitionist and in favor of equal rights, and sort of dragging Washington behind him in some ways, right, into these conversations. I also talk about Thomas Jefferson and his mentor, George Wythe. Wythe, who was an enslaver, becomes an abolitionist of sorts after the Revolutionary War, ends up freeing his enslaved people and advocating for equal rights. Jefferson takes a very different path after the Revolution.

And so these are men who are in communication with each other. They’re not just living at the same time. They’re friends with one another. And we see that there are counterexamples that were present for Thomas Jefferson and for George Washington. And they each chose to sort of deal with those conversations and those examples in different ways.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And these are very much, as you point out, conscious decisions that they’re making to participate and to engage in the ownership of people.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And at the same time, they also have a conscious awareness, right? So not only are they engaged in dialogue in the defense of their actions, but we see sometimes in the writings of Madison, “Yeah, we’re gonna pay for this down the road,” you know? I mean, so they’re not walking through the world with blinders. They know this is fundamentally wrong. And yet ...

Bethany Jay: It’s like Jefferson’s “wolf by the ears.” Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Exactly. Very much so. I mean, they know they are handling fire. And yet they can’t put it down, partly because, I imagine, not only the personal stake, the personal financial investment that they have in it, that some people will acknowledge like, “Oh well, it’s hard to sort of put down what makes you money.” But then you can’t also separate that from the—their deep belief in white supremacy. So you know, in theory, they know it’s wrong. But they’re like, “Look, James Madison. He’s a third-generation enslaver. This is his life and connected with that is this deep belief in white supremacy.” And it’s hard to separate yourself from that because you don’t want to, because of what you believe.

Bethany Jay: And it is. It’s sort of, like you’re saying, very conscious ignorance. And I remember Paul Finkelman talks about an example of Jefferson receiving all Benjamin Banneker’s work on astronomy, and he dismisses it saying, ‘Well, that must be the work of his white mentor.’”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Hmm.

Bethany Jay: Jefferson’s smarter than that, right? We would think he would be better than that. Even when presented with examples of achievement, he sticks to his sort of white supremacist guns.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I think you’re absolutely right. That has more to do with how people want to remember the past than how the past actually was.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m very much of the mind when thinking about that question that there is no such thing as a good master. I mean, the system itself is so inhumane and so corrupt, that even if you are less violent than somebody else, you still have to, by your very—the very nature of you participating in that system designed to exploit the labor of other people, the cornerstone of which is violence, you yourself have to be corrupted. You cannot engage, participate in any small way in that evil system and not be corrupted by it. Look, in my mind, the only good master’s a dead master. But that’s a story—this is why this is the final episode of this podcast.

Thinking about other questions that came up. One of the things that struck me were questions that teachers asked about the initial questions that students ask coming in. We all know that students don’t enter classrooms as empty vessels. Even if they haven’t spent a lot of time in formal instruction on American slavery, they still picked up things here and there. And Kinette Richards, who’s a middle school psychologist, shared with us a common question that she hears from middle school teachers and that is, “Why did Europeans enslave African people?” In other words, why were Africans the ones who wind up as the central labor force in this system of involuntary labor? It seems to me that that really opens up this bigger question of, “Hey, we got to talk about sort of the global Atlantic slave trade at some point. But how do you respond to that in a way that a student could understand?”

Bethany Jay: It’s a good thing it’s not a hard question, right? So I’ve used this in my classrooms as an opportunity to teach students about historical interpretation and really think about, you know, how different historians have studied the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its causes and the enslavement of African people. And my methodology for it is actually pretty, pretty specific in that I use a collection, David Northrup’s The Atlantic Slave Trade, where he’s got excerpts of all of the big thinkers about why were Africans enslaved. You know, you’ve got Williams, Jordan, Eltis, Davis in there. I have my students read those portions, and then together as a class, we dissect them. What are their arguments? What are their evidence? What are the ways that they agree or disagree with one another? And then together as a class, we come up with a sort of compiled list. Taking from all of those different sources, the various sort of economic, cultural and even coincidental reasons why African people were enslaved. We talk about the fact that Europeans were enslaved at different times as well. 

And it really sort of works well, because you’re dealing with these very difficult questions of race, and you’re dealing with them head-on, you’re dealing with them sort of at the beginning of the course, right, of—of your discussions, but you’re doing it in the context of historical arguments, right? Evidence about medieval thinking about race. The way that you’re having these conversations is very grounded in the sources that you’re looking at.

Where teachers get in trouble sometimes is asking their students, “Can you think of any justifications for slavery? Can you think of why African people might be enslaved?” That’s not what we’re asking students to do. What we’re asking students to do is say, “What have been the reasons historians found for why Africans were enslaved?” And I’ve found that that’s gotten us through some very productive conversations. I’ve done that work with world history students who were not majors in history—you know, freshman kids, diverse classrooms—and in every instance, it’s worked. To treat kids like adults. They can handle these sources, they can handle these difficult arguments, but work them through it as a classroom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It seems that part of what you’re saying is, and this goes back to what you were sharing at the very opening of this episode, is that you just can’t drop in on American slavery, you know, halfway through a semester.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Or just pick it up in, you know, the 1810s, 1820s, or before the Civil War. But you really have to put American slavery in a global context. And that begins starting sort of in the colonial era, and before it really even touches these shores. Is that—is that right?

Bethany Jay: That’s what I try to do. And I try to also talk about Africa before Africa was embroiled in the transatlantic slave trade as well, right? Thinking about the great civilizations of Africa. We think about Europe and why Europeans and the English, you know, left England, and we—we reach back to Europe to understand immigration to British North America. Let’s reach back to Africa so that we can understand what was going on there before British North American migration.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Yeah, one of the things I think that does is that it helps humanize those people who will become enslaved.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In other words, we think of slavery as an eternal condition when we drop off the element of “Africa before.” These are people who are coming from a people. Their existence doesn’t begin solely with this status of slave. I think that is critically important.

Bethany Jay: The other piece of that that I often hear is, “Well, didn’t Africans enslave other Africans?” right?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ah. Of course.

Bethany Jay: “Weren’t Africans the ones selling enslaved people?” And that just speaks to our sort of larger misunderstanding of—of Africa as sort of one monolithic place, and not a vast continent filled with different peoples who may or may not like one another, right? But—but thinking about how does the trans-Atlantic slave trade change Africa? Like yes, slavery does exist in Africa before the Portuguese start buying people to work in, you know, the Cape Verde Islands. But the incredible demand for enslaved labor in the West Indies and South America and North America fundamentally changes slavery in Africa. So yes, African people engage in selling other African people to the slave trade, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, we all get to wash our hands of culpability. We need to understand the systems—right?—that operated within that slave trade and how the slave trade changed Africa fundamentally.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right. And that European involvement. I mean in other words, there’s systems of involuntary servitude around the world.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: But I think it’s also something that is explicitly unique about what evolves and becomes the Atlantic slave trade. And part of that is the dehumanization of those who find themselves caught up in it. I mean, literally being cast out of the human family in some ways, and that almost eternal status, or the attempt to make it an eternal status of the inheritance through birth of someone’s condition, this social condition.

So I think that’s also part of an important way to talk about the conversation. What do these different forms of involuntary servitude look like, and what are the distinctions that we can draw between the two? Because it’s not just simply oh, taking one person from one system and putting them in another. It’s a transformation, moving one to the other. And then the impact that that has on some of the demands for a population of involuntary labor.

Bethany Jay: Right, right. How do you talk with students about the fact that slavery ends, but this oppression continues. And thinking about the creation of those systems, right? These are vast, massive systems, and the culture that supports them—right?—the underlying assumptions and pseudo-science that supports them, doesn’t go away with the 13th Amendment. That’s what a—part of what makes all of this so hard to talk about, is that we’re still in many ways living with the structures that supported slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right.

Bethany Jay: With the assumptions and stereotypes that supported slavery.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Do you think that that’s part of the reasons for the hostility? For teaching it? That if you look too deeply, there is a concern and fear on the part of some, that it becomes an indictment. It becomes an implication that we then have to, if we’re being honest with ourselves, do a full assessment of who we are and where we are as a nation and as a people?

Bethany Jay: I do. I do think so. And I think it goes back to wanting to look at the founders as good slaveholders, right? Of—of wanting to sort of believe the—the celebratory version of American history, instead of really grappling with the nation’s more complete history. And when we’re talking about things that persist to today. So it’s also talking about making a change today, you know? Understanding slavery and its impact kind of compels us to want to do something more today. And I think that’s also threatening or dangerous in certain instances to people.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, we had a question from Joe Schmidt along these lines. He asked: “Many students see history and slavery as something that happened in the past,”—as we were just talking about. “And something that is over and finished. A terrible thing that’s done.” And so he asked, “What are some strategies for guiding students to seeing the connections between slavery and modern-day events? Sort of the contemporary implications, or maybe even the legacies of slavery today.”

Bethany Jay: I’ve had terrific conversations with my students about things like, you know, mass incarceration of African-American men. And we start talking about that with Reconstruction, and it naturally happens, right? You talk about things like vagrancy laws, and students naturally make these connections. Convict labor. Again, they’re not—they’re not as sheltered as we think they are. They know more than we give them credit for, and they’ll make connections. At some point we were talking about stereotypes of African-American men in slavery. And one of my students made the connection to the way that Michael Brown was described by police. And it was in a very sort of mixed classroom, probably about 60 percent African-American kids, 40 percent white kids. And my white students were like, their mind was blown by this. And my African-American students were like, “Yeah. This is—this is every day—right?—that we’re navigating the different ways that people see us, as we go through our world.” 

And it was really this very kind of profound moment. I found that that has happened naturally with what my students are bringing into the classroom, as much as what I’m trying to sort of allow them to see or get them to see.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: As you shared that story about Michael Brown, and Michael Brown of course was a young man who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. 2014. I was thinking about Trayvon Martin and the Stand Your Ground bill. Trayvon Martin of course, a young man who was shot by a self-deputized sort of local—I don’t even know what you would call him. Wannabe police officer. But his actions, in combination with Stand Your Ground gun laws, are very reminiscent—and trying to police and patrol black bodies by non-law enforcement are very reminiscent, if you look at slave codes in South Carolina in 1740 coming out of the Stono Rebellion and revise where they literally say all white men are empowered to police black bodies, to police black folk, whether enslaved or free. You know, can carry arms, can stop, can detain. And if people refuse, they can kill. So there literally are echoes today of behavior that was institutionalized in law back then.

Bethany Jay: One of the misperceptions that I think many of my students have come to class with, is the idea that white privilege means that all white people’s lives are easy. And really just thinking, no, white privilege is partly just the freedom from those kinds of assumptions that people—right?—white people don’t need to worry about being shot for wearing a hoodie in the wrong neighborhood, or getting pulled over for driving through an affluent neighborhood, for the most part. White privilege is just not carrying the racial baggage of 250 years of American history with you everywhere you go.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think right along those lines, I mean whiteness bestows the privilege of not having to remember this history.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I mean, you can forget it and your life can go on just fine. But for African Americans or people of color, they cannot afford not to think about their relationship as citizens to law enforcement. To do so runs the risk of putting them in serious physical harm and physical jeopardy. It also doesn’t help you understand the world in which you are in. It’s a privilege that African Americans, descendants of enslaved folk, just simply don’t have. They cannot not remember the past, because it’s still alive and present today.

Bethany Jay: That reminds me, just last night I was talking with my—my history preparation students. My students are going to be teachers, and we were talking about teaching the students who are in your classroom, right? Teaching the kids who are in front of you, and how do you reach them? And one of the texts that we were talking about was Christopher Emdin’s book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood …and the Rest of Y’all Too. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It’s a great book.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Bethany Jay: But he quotes the poet Adrienne Rich, and he says, “The poet Adrienne Rich affirmed this sense of negation when she observed that, quote, ‘When somebody with the authority of a teacher, say, describes a world and you’re not in it, there is this moment of psychic disequilibrium. As if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.’” And that just hit home with me and sort of 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 in our classrooms. And even if you don’t teach in a classroom with a ton of African-American kids, to make all of your students aware of our shared past. And it just seemed to sort of bring a lot of these ideas together for me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, we had a couple of questions from educators who teach in overwhelmingly or exclusively white environments, and the question was very much along those lines: “How do I convince my students that this history and this aspect of this history, learning about the African-American freedom struggle and slavery, so not just the economics of the institution, but really understanding the full complexity of the entire system, including the lives of black folk, why should they know about that? Why should they care?” And it seems that that begins to speak to the importance of that. But are there some strategies for, not just the college level who you can lay something out and that really becomes clear to them, but even for younger white students in nondiverse, racially or ethnically diverse environments, to get them on board with this history?

Bethany Jay: Just making this history our history. The sense that somehow George Washington is a part of our shared past, but Harriet Tubman isn’t, right? Or thinking that learning about the average experience of a Revolutionary War soldier is part of our common past, but the average experience of an enslaved person is not our common past, is creating a very artificial understanding of who built this country and the factors that have gone into this country, right? I mean, if most of us look at our past, we’re not a direct line to George Washington, right? You know, most of us come from backgrounds of diverse, average people who don’t necessarily show up in history books. So you know, talking about the great varieties of people who have built the United States is reflecting all of our past, much more than just talking about the great white men who did things. I don’t know if that—does that make sense?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, it does. It does. I mean, what you’re sharing with us, what you’re telling us is this is American history, right? Like, this is the history of all of us. And in some ways when you study African Americans, folk on the ground, folk who were enslaved, folks whose names we remember, folks whose names we never will but that were the labor force behind the growth and development of this nation, that that is fundamentally American. That we can dive deep and study and explore the African-American experience, but to do so is also to peek at, to look at the American experience from a very important angle. Because the two, in fact, can’t be separated at all.

Bethany Jay: Right. They’re completely intertwined.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is the last episode. Last episode, first season. Second season will be about Teaching Hard History: The Civil Rights Movement. What are some of the legacies of slavery that we should be paying attention to as educators as we move out of the era of slavery into the post-emancipation era and the era of freedom?

Bethany Jay: I think part of what we need to pay attention to is that the idea of the post-emancipation era is, in some ways, false. That slavery as we know, continues for many people, just in a different form. And that even for those people who live as free people, that there’s a lot of structural inequality that exists. And that that’s not just confined to the South. My students in Massachusetts like to think that we are free from the racial baggage that the South carries. And again, when you pay attention to African-American history across the United States and across chronology, you realize that’s not the case. So paying attention to structural inequality, paying attention to all of the ways that slavery persists in the absence of, you know, one person’s ability to own another. That we see all of the different ways that forced labor persists. Maybe “in the absence of slavery” is a better way to put that.

I was saying earlier, one of the hard things about teaching slavery is we want to draw a line at 1865 and say it’s over. But really, when we’re talking about the end of slavery, and when we’re talking about sort of real progress towards racial equality, we’re not talking about 1865. We’re talking about 1965, right? That’s a much shorter history that we’re dealing with.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, one of the things that I think we do too much in the classroom, is we drop slavery just as you said, in 1865. Or we drop the discussion of it.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And in essence, slavery is a way of ordering society. And once the legal protections for that are removed, that does not mean that the desire to order society in a similarly hierarchical way disappears. And I think that’s important for us to understand as we move out as educators into that new era, that we do not just suddenly set aside the desire of white people in America to control black labor, and to regulate black behavior for the purposes of enriching themselves. And as a result of that, are looking back at what they had done during slavery to figure out, or to inform sort of actions, behaviors, practices and policies in this post-emancipation, post-slavery moment.

Bethany Jay: How do we accomplish that in the absence of—of legal slavery, right? In the form it existed before? And, you know, when we talk about the civil rights movement, it doesn’t make any sense if we drop slavery in 1865. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm.

Bethany Jay: And that’s another thing that I think we do. If we pick up and we begin talking about slavery in 1820 or ’30—right?—is where I think most curriculum frameworks want you to kind of bring in a narrative of slavery, so that you can deal with it as part of the sectional crisis and you can end it with the Civil War. You know, if we do that, then slavery doesn’t make much sense. And in the same way, if all of the sudden African-American people reemerge in the 1950s to be reintegrated into a society, but we haven’t dealt with segregation, we haven’t dealt with Jim Crow, we haven’t dealt with the oppression of that era, then what context do our students have to understand civil rights, right? In some ways we diminish the accomplishments of civil rights by not discussing the contexts that they came out of.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that is so true. And when we get them in the classroom and they’re looking at us all confused, we can’t then look at them and be like, “What’s the problem?” right? Because we haven’t done right by them, just as you said, in terms of providing them with the context that they need to understand these important moments in American history where dramatic changes and shifts are occurring. Like, we cannot go from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. That line, without understanding and explaining not only the context of the times in which they lived, but what was happening in those moments in between, explains how you can link them. But in the absence of that, it just makes no sense whatsoever.

Bethany Jay: Right. I—my best friend is a kindergarten teacher, and she’s always wondering, How do I teach Martin Luther King to kindergartners who have no context for what King’s fighting, you know? And it’s part of her curriculum framework. She always finds she’s backing up and doing a lot of—a lot of work, you know, to teach Martin Luther King, you know, in January. Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, it’s the same thing with, you know, by comparison, if you just drop Harriet Tubman on a student even at a young age, without actually introducing what slavery was first?

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Then it's like, “Well, what was her point?” Like, “What was she doing?” It’s like, “Oh, she’s this great person of resistance. Example of resistance.” But you’ve never actually explained what is she resisting.

Bethany Jay: Resisting. Yup.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And it’s the same thing with sort of Dr. King, right? He’s just upset over some signs? Like, “No you have to really dig deep.”

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So I think there are real parallels between the pedagogical challenges that we face in teaching the hard history of American slavery and the hard history of the civil rights movement. And so I don’t think you can separate the two, both in terms of helping to understand one and the other, but then also understanding the best ways to teach it accurately and effectively.

Bethany Jay: I completely agree. Yeah. And I guess within the sort of large context of all of the sudden these big things coming out of nowhere, the fact that slavery is the cause of the Civil War makes more sense when you’ve understood the broad sort of cultural, political and economic context of slavery. And if in your classroom, you haven’t raised the issue of slavery before you talk about the Civil War, then slavery as the cause of the Civil War doesn’t make much sense, right? Understanding the Confederacy as a nation that was built to preserve slavery doesn’t make sense without the longer context of the social, political, cultural, economic benefits that slavery brought to the southern part of the United States.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One of the principal legacies, if not the principal legacy of slavery, is white supremacy. The beliefs that undergird the entire system. The justification that rationalized the enslavement of one people by another people. And when emancipation ends, white supremacy doesn’t suddenly evaporate. It still serves as the guiding principle, the guiding ideological belief in America. And it’s not just confined to Southerners or former slaveholders, it’s a nationwide national belief. And so when we look at discriminatory practices and behaviors in a post-emancipation period in the 20th century, early and later and even today, there are direct connections that we can make to a belief in white supremacy. 

Jim Crow is undergirded by white supremacy. Lynching, the use of racial terror to prop up the Jim Crow system, is undergirded by white supremacy. Some of the justifications for mass incarceration and the criminalization of black behavior that we see in the early 20th century, just as we see in the early 21st century, are guided and informed by a belief in white supremacy. And so there really is no discontinuation, unfortunately, between slavery and freedom. When we think about the links between the central ideology that undergird it all, which is this deep and abiding belief in white supremacy that goes back to the very founding and beginning of the nation.

Bethany Jay: And in fact, I think 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. So we think of the sort of cultural resonance of these ideas.

I think one of the things that’s really impacting the way that teachers are approaching this subject is the kind of “gotcha” culture that we’re in. Where you feel like anything that you say can be live tweeted, when you’re having a fight with your spouse on an airplane, or there’s a snapshot that shows up on you, and everybody is afraid of sort of going viral. And I think that’s a lot of what’s kind of driving some of the hesitance to teach this history in our classrooms, is that teachers really are afraid that they’re going to say something and they’re going to end up, you know, a national news story. And there’s just a couple of things that I want to sort of address within that fear, because I completely understand it. But we need to sort of keep those viral examples in context. There are thousands and thousands of teachers who are doing this work every day, and the vast, vast majority of those teachers are not ending up shared on Twitter and Facebook and with an NPR story about them.

Teaching slavery does not automatically land you in the news, and it doesn’t automatically land you in your principal’s office explaining things. But—right?—you do want to be sure that you are teaching this topic in a responsible way, and the way to do that is to just familiarize yourself with the content, be intentional with the resources that you’re bringing in to your students. Make sure that your discussions are grounded in the historical facts and resources that you have on hand. And just start doing it, because what you’ll find is that a lot of that anxiety is anxiety that is understandable but misplaced.

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?” This is so important, and it’s righteous kind of anger that they come with. It’s not anger at me for talking to them about something they don’t want to hear. They want to hear this history. And again, we are fooling ourselves if we think that they’re not already aware of a lot of what we think we’re tap dancing around in our classroom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And I think the reward for that is not only a more informed student, a more knowledgeable student, about both the past and the present like we have been talking about, but it’s also a more engaged student.

Bethany Jay: Mm-hmm.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When you begin to unravel this critical component about, not only early American history but also modern American history, that helps explain so much, students’ eyes, once they get over the fact that they hadn’t been taught this before, their eyes just open up and they become sponges that want to absorb more and more and more. Not only, “If I haven’t learned this, what else about the American past and American slavery don’t I know? What else about American race relations and the African-American experience don’t I know?” But, “What else about America don’t I know? What else has been held back from me because of people’s political leanings or social sensibilities?”

And I think as educators, as teachers, like, that’s what we want. We want our students to be hungry and yearning to learn. And when you take a subject like American slavery that so many people have danced around their entire lives, and you just make it plain for them and accessible and lay out these fundamental truths about the American past, they get fired up to learn more. And there’s nothing better than having a student in your classroom or a class as a whole that’s just yearning for more of what you have to give them.

Bethany Jay: It’s true. And I think teachers think that they need to be the ones telling their students about slavery, and what’s great about the resources that are compiled with Teaching Hard History and with Understanding and Teaching American Slavery, is that they point you to the resources so that students can discover this history for themselves as well, right? And I think that takes some of the anxiety off, too. Let me send them to the sources. If they want to understand the slave trade, let me send them to the sources on the domestic or the international slave trade. That becomes key in my classroom.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And in many ways that, as you pointed out, that not only relieves some of the burden from you as an instructor, but that sense of learning on their own, that sense of self-discovery is empowering for the students who then will turn around—and this has been my experience, who will then want to learn more from me. It’s like, “Okay, I learned this here. So what else? Point me in another direction. Help me—help—help explain this to me.” I think that is so critical, because sometimes we can get in our own way, and we also have to deal with the biases that students will bring with them into the classroom. For whatever reason. And so sometimes we as instructors have to get out of the way and let the students, as you said, point them in the right direction so they can have a sense of self-discovery, and then come in and offer the assistance and guidance for further learning and further discovery, and deeper dives into this history.

Bethany Jay: Yeah, I like to think of it as guiding discovery, as opposed to imparting the history.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany, I have really enjoyed hearing your thoughts and answers to these questions. This has just really been a fantastic, thoughtful and thought-provoking way to wrap up this first season of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. So thank you so much, not only for bookending this season for us, starting us off with those great two episodes on the Civil War, and wrapping up with answering these questions that have come up over the course of the season, but thanks especially for really laying the foundation for this podcast with your co-edited collection, [Understanding and Teaching American Slavery]. So thank you so much, Bethany.

Bethany Jay: Thanks so much for having me, Hasan. And thank you for the work that you’ve done throughout this season to give an additional layer of context and meaning to so much of the scholarship through these podcast episodes. I really appreciate it, and always learn from you. It’s always a pleasure talking to you.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thank you so much.

Bethany Jay: Oh, no worries. You, too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Since you started us off, how about you join me in closing us out?

Bethany Jay: That sounds great.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Bethany Jayis 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 the informative book that this series is based on.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series we have featured scholars to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that award-winning collection.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at tolerance.org/podcasts. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching the history of American slavery.

Bethany Jay: Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at tolerance.org.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Thank you, Dr. Jay, for sharing your insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is the project manager. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

Bethany Jay: And if you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. And tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback.

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

Resources

• Learning for Justice, Lies My Bookshelf Told Me: Slavery in Children’s Literature
• Teaching Hard History, A Framework for Teaching American Slavery
• Learning for Justice, Examining Stereotypes in Books

John Bickford

• Social Studies Education, Eastern Illinois University
• Selected Works of John Bickford

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: The documentary film The Abolitionists explores the people and personalities who breathed life into the crusade to end slavery in America. The two-hour film made its national broadcast debut on PBS’s “American Experience” in January 2013. Not too long after that, I assigned it as required viewing for students in my African-American History through Film class.

I began teaching my film course in 2012, just before The Abolitionists came out. Then as now, the class meets one day a week—always on Mondays—for three hours. During our time together, my students and I watch a major motion picture that attempts to chronicle an aspect of the black experience, from slavery through the present. Over the years, we’ve watched everything from 12 Years a Slave to Fruitvale Station to Moonlight. Last year, I tossed in Mudbound. This year, I’ve added Blackkklansman and The Hate U Give.

This class has proven to be wonderfully effective in getting students to think critically about popular perceptions of the black past. The key to its success, though, is not the movies we watch together. That’s just what fills seats. Tell a kid that we’ll be watching Black Panther and Get Out in lieu of a textbook, and they’re down for whatever. The reason the class actually works is because I pair each movie with several hours of documentary films on the movie’s core subject. I have a devil of a time getting students to read for 20 minutes, but they’ll watch a two-hour documentary on Netflix in a heartbeat.

The students view the documentaries during the week leading up to our Monday classes. And I watch those documentaries that I’ve never seen before during the weekend before we meet. And so it was a few years ago on a quiet Sunday afternoon that I was watching The Abolitionists in preparation for viewing Glory in class the next day. And as I was doing so, my then five-year-old daughter, Asha, kept popping in and out of the room—stealing glances at the television trying to figure out what I was watching. And whenever she appeared, I immediately paused the program to keep her from seeing slavery dramatized. This quickly devolved into a game of cat and mouse: her peeking, me pausing; me pausing, her peeking. It was not the most efficient way to prepare for class. Then she slipped into the room without me seeing and caught sight of a young Frederick Douglass fending off an attempted whipping by his enslaver.

When I saw Asha, she was staring at the television, mouth agape. I stopped the program and beckoned her toward me. She came, we sat, and I waited. Then finally she asked, “Why was he doing that to him?”

“Well,” I started, quite confidently, “the young black man was Frederick Douglass, and he was enslaved.

And the white man was the one who enslaved him. And he was trying to force Frederick to do something against his will.”

I felt good about my answer, although I wasn’t quite sure “against his will” would register. But, that, I thought, could be easily clarified. But before I could say more, Asha asked, “But why was he a slave?”

I responded quickly, “First, he was enslaved, not a slave.” I thought to myself, That’s a really an important point, but really I was just stalling for time. I knew I was approaching a slippery slope. “Well,” I dragged the word out as long as I could to buy myself a few more seconds to think. “Frederick Douglass,” I continued, “was black. And black people were enslaved.” As the words escaped my lips, I thought, That, was a gross oversimplification; I’m going to have to unpack that.

But before I could figure out what to say next, Asha pressed on: “Were you a slave?”

Whoooaaa. Wait. What? I thought to myself. “No, no I wasn’t,” I answered quickly. “Slavery happened long before I was born.” Good recovery, I thought, before adding, “But had I been born during slavery, I would have been enslaved too.” That hung in the air for a while.

Then Asha said, “Because you’re black?” It was more of a statement than a question, but I answered anyway. “Yes, because I’m black.”

Then she hit me with a series of questions in rapid succession.

“Would mommy have been a slave?”

“Yes.”

“Grandma?”

“Yes.”

“Poppa?”

“Yes.”

“Uncle Hakeem?”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you too.”

“Because we’re black?” She was asking for final confirmation.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Because we’re all black.”

There was a long pause as we sat staring silently at a frozen image of a young Frederick Douglass on the screen. Then all of sudden—in the most nonchalant voice that you could possibly imagine—my five-year old, African-American daughter declared: “Then I don’t want to be black.”

Did you hear that? That silence? That was me, at an absolute, complete, and total loss for words as I watched my African-American daughter bounce off the sofa and bound up the stairs, having come to the conclusion—based on the information that I had provided her—that it made no sense whatsoever to be black in this world.

I think often about that conversation with my daughter; about what went wrong. And I realize now that you can’t introduce the pain of being black in America without first introducing the beauty of being black in America. The problem that occurred is not that I had a conversation about slavery with my young daughter—it’s that I had the wrong conversation with her. I approached it from the wrong angle. Teaching hard history is like teaching the hard sciences; scaffolding is essential. Foundational concepts have to be taught in the early grades so that fundamental principles can be learned in the later grades. The question then is: “How do we do this?”

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Learning for Justice—a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Young adult literature allows us to introduce fundamental themes and information about slavery to elementary school students. We can also use these fiction and nonfiction trade books to critically explore slavery in our middle and high school Language Arts classes. In this episode, I talk with John Bickford about the vital role these books can play in teaching hard history. Dr. Bickford is a professor of Social Studies Education who has researched how slavery is presented in works for children and young adults. And he has some valuable suggestions for us on how to capitalize on the strengths as well as the weaknesses of trade books. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

I’m really excited to have with us Professor John Bickford, who teaches at Eastern Illinois University and really is a specialist on the kinds of books we use and should be using in the classroom for curriculum, instruction and the like. John, thank you so much for taking time to share your insights and expertise with us.

John H. Bickford: Thanks for having me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Absolutely. So, we’re all familiar—certainly as students, and former students, and teachers—with using textbooks to teach the history of American slavery. But you, in your research and in your teaching, you focus on trade books. Could you explain to us what’s the difference between trade books and textbooks?

John H. Bickford: Sure. Sure. Trade books are like biographies, narrative nonfiction, expository texts, historical fiction. It’s different books that you’d give kids on a different topic—Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Tubman, narrative nonfiction about the Middle Passage, things like that. Those are trade books. And they’re great for teachers because you can really pick the reading level. And say you’re doing a topic on the Middle Passage or Harriet Tubman, you can find high, middle, and low books for your particular grade range. There’s hundreds on virtually every topic. When you get more into certain historical figures, there may be just a dozen or so, but there’s a lot of options.

And unlike a textbook—where there’s one narrative, and there’s one voice, and it presents it kind of like, you know, Morgan Freeman narrating history—in a way the trade books—where students look at different trade books; they can see what different authors focus on. This is really the historiography that historians engage in. When they look at different interpretations of the same event or era, and they can see how different authors focus on different things. It’s more discipline-specific than simply reading a textbook that tries to be but is never comprehensive. Textbooks, they’re a mile wide and an inch deep. In trade books, you can delve deeper.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So what are some of the strengths of some of the best trade books that you have encountered that deal with the topic of American slavery?

John H. Bickford: Oh, in the last 20 years there have been 2,000 books published focusing on slavery, or some aspect of slavery, or a slave, or a slave owner—you know, like Jefferson or Lincoln. There are thousands of options. And it is not just boring biographies. There are some remarkable, remarkable different trade books, historical fiction books and books that are very difficult to categorize within a genre.

It is not just historical comprehension where you’re giving kids names and dates. These are stories. And E.L.A.—whether it’s in second grade or 12th-grade AP Literature—E.L.A.’s all about stories. And there are some remarkable stories that are stranger and more engaging than any fiction. And there’s some historical fiction out there that’ll blow your mind, too.

Julius Lester is a remarkable author. And he’s perhaps my favorite children’s and young adult author. He’s written some remarkable books. One of my favorites is To Be a Slave, where he had etchings from artists on different slave plantations and different oral histories. And they’re juxtaposed in powerful ways, powerful ways. When I used to teach the seventh grade using different excerpts from this book, every year there would be kids drawn to tears looking at some of these images with some of these stories. One that just blew me away was a guy talking about looking for his kids after freedom. He kept saying, “After freedom, I’ve been looking. I’ve been looking since freedom. I’ve been looking since freedom.” It was in 1888 ... 1888 that that oral history was captured. And he’s talking about how he just wandered. He was a vagabond looking for his kids, for 23 years. Oh, it’s powerful stuff.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So what are the commonalities in the books that really treat slavery in a way that can help a teacher teach it accurately and effectively in the classroom? You mentioned Lester as an example. And one of the things that he does really well is give voice to enslaved African Americans who are caught up in this historic and horrific sort of sale of human beings—largest in America. What are some of the other things that he does and that others do in these trade books that really make them essential for teaching in the classroom?

John H. Bickford: Oh, they offer space for exploration into the primary sources. Sometimes they’ll show an image, say of a slave poster. Okay? Where it’ll say, you can get clues for certain things. And it just shows the image. But now teachers can locate the original Library of Congress document or in the National Archives. And they can explore in more depth. For example, if one of these slave sales or 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.” Okay?

Now, this is just an image that’s inserted in a trade book. And students may look at it, skip it, you know what I mean? Move forward. But the teacher then has the opportunity to get the original, to print it off so they can look at the details and then to ask, “Look at that small scar. Where do you think she got that? And those missing teeth? Did she get hit, or is this malnutrition? Now, what does ‘branded’ mean?” And in a way, these trade books hop and skip between secondary source, like a narrative of an event, and the primary sources. And students are able to go back and forth, back and forth between the contemporaneous historical documents, and then what historians know. And that’s the secondary narrative. And I love the way Julius Lester especially brings in archival documents right into the narrative. And he adapts it in a way that’s very accessible for young students. Because for these kids, if they’re 10, if they’re 15 years old, their working memory is all in the 21st century. And to go back 200- some years, it’s very difficult.

And these trade book authors, they’re specialists when it comes to children’s and young adult readers— their reading levels and things like that. And in a way, they’re kind of at the convergence between reading and history. If it’s a Venn diagram, they’re right in the middle there. And they make very difficult topics accessible for young learners.

Another thing that teachers really value is how you can differentiate. One great book isn’t going to cover every topic. You can’t. You just can’t. So you get three or four books and you let the students pick. Teachers know that choice is powerful in the classroom. Students value choice. They want choice: “Look: you can read this book, this book or that book.” Or the way teachers can organize it into literacy circles for high, middle and low students’ abilities. It’s a wonderful way to adapt and to differentiate: using materials that aren’t available in a textbook.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Given that there are so many trade books out there to choose from, on the good side, what should teachers be looking for in these books to help them select which books to use in the classroom?

John H. Bickford: Well, first, I always say, “Teachers need to consider the reading level,” ’cause that’s number one. If the kids can’t read it, it’s not worth it. So pay attention to the Lexiles and the reading levels, and, you know, that’s available on any website that sells books. The second thing is, pick a topic that’s engaging because American chattel slavery was three centuries. And you can’t cover everything, so pick a topic that’s really engaging. And the next thing I’d encourage them to do is to go to the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery framework and look at those themes. See what is present within the book, and see what’s absent. Because that framework is a wonderful guide for things to pay attention to. You can’t cover everything in every class, but in a week or a two-week period, the teacher can pick what’s most important.

And as they’re looking through the book, they can pay attention to, say, white owners’ compassion and even assistance. This is so common in trade books, especially the younger you go. And it’s so historically misrepresentative. 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. That’s ridiculous.

Or pay attention to your book when it comes to, say, slavery’s brutality. Is it actually present? So often you’ll hear threats like, “Don’t make me slap or punish you.” And if that’s the most [threatened] that slaves were in this book, then you’ve got to find ways to insert primary sources to fill this gap. This is a gap that shouldn’t be left alone because, otherwise, it makes slavery look like an exchange of free work for food, clothing and shelter. And it wasn’t.

Teachers can easily insert that primary source about the runaway slave advertisement to show “This girl got this scar somehow. This girl lost [these] teeth somehow. Her face was branded.” I’m not saying that you need to terrify children. I’m not saying that this should be things that you should incorporate, say, with second-graders. But if you look at the framework for Teaching Hard History, this gives you guideposts, signs on a highway, things to pay attention to. “Is the family presented as a nuclear family? Or was there a lot of forced family separation? How are the origins of slavery presented?” A lot of times they just skip it, like it’s the weather: “Well, winter comes after fall. So you know, slavery happened in North America.” That’s so false, it’s ridiculous.

Slavery was created and maintained by a group of people that benefited tremendously from it. How is that incorporated in the book? Paying attention to these things so that the teacher is aware of what’s included, and minimized, and excluded, will help teachers focus on important things that they’d like to include. Now those are common gaps. You could call them misrepresentations by omission. There’s also misrepresentation by commission, where they present anomalies as if these are the typical. Like Harriet Tubman—love the lady; I hope she gets on an American bill—but she represents a typical slave’s life about as well as September 11th, 2001, represents a typical day in New York City. She was an anomaly.

Take a look at Thomas Jefferson. In nearly all of his trade books, and I’ve reviewed a hundred on Jefferson, if you were to look in books that were intended for second grade and 12th grade, 20-page books and 200-page books, they all 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. These are lies by commission, where they’re presenting the anomalies as typical. Bill Gates is not a typical college dropout. Harriet Tubman was not a typical slave. And if only Harriet Tubman’s story is told, then it implicitly blames other slaves like, “Why didn’t you run away? Why didn’t you fight back?” You know what I mean? It presents the anomaly as the typical, and that’s wrong. And teachers need to be aware of that. And that’s why paying attention to the Teaching Hard History framework—those 10 targets are wonderful goals to think, Okay, what is included, what’s minimized, what’s disregarded? How can I integrate these sources? It guides you to specific primary sources and others to help you fill the gaps, so to speak.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: One approach to dealing with those problematic trade books is simply not to use them, to avoid them completely. But no book is perfect. And of course, any book that you use in a classroom is going to have its own flaws and shortcomings, both—as you pointed out—perhaps by omission and perhaps by commission.

But it seems to me as well that we shouldn’t run away from the problematic books. These texts on Thomas Jefferson, for example, can, in fact, be used in the classroom, although they would have to be treated in a particular kind of way. Can you suggest some ways that teachers can use these problematic trade books on American slavery in the classroom itself?

John H. Bickford: Oh yeah, absolutely. Sometimes the worst historical books are the best curricular resources. You know, they’re easy targets for kids to knock down. The bad books that are the most historically misrepresentative are also wonderfully evocative classroom curricular resources. And I encourage teachers to spark students’ curiosity and elicit their critical thinking and disciplinary literacy in ways that are very cognizant of their children’s educational psychology.

We know how kids think and what gets them excited. Young learners are remarkably inquisitive, so we have to give them something to be curious about. Organize your curriculum so it’s a puzzle that they can piece together. Or adolescents. We know they are remarkably egocentric and confident. A teenager in a roomful of mathematicians and physicists knows he’s the smartest. So find ways to prompt him to act like he’s an authority. Find ways to put him in a position where he’s acting like an authority figure because that’s what adolescents want. Or all kids have a deep sense of fairness, a deep sense of fairness. So find ways to get kids to empathize with folks who are being mistreated and subjugated.

And there’s ways that you can do this for second grade, for seventh grade, for 12th grade. There’s ways you can do this in a social studies classroom and also in an English, or reading, or Language Arts classroom. The Teaching Hard History framework, it’s wonderful for teachers. I worry that it would be only adopted in the social studies and history classrooms. But with Common Core focusing on about half of all reading, writing, word study, Language Arts topics should be nonfiction, there is a place for history and social studies in the English Language Arts curriculum. I can give you some examples with, with say, the elementary grades and middle grades and high school, if you like.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Oh absolutely. Let’s start with the elementary grades and work our way up.

John H. Bickford: Sure. The first one is for second- or third-graders. Deborah Hopkinson wrote this book called Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt. In it, there’s a young female slave named Clara. And it talks about her experiences on the plantation and the Underground Railroad. I’m going to focus on different close-reading tasks that students don’t just seek to answer, but answer again and again, and build their answers as they’re going through the reading. And there’s also different text-based writing tasks that you can engage the students with when it comes to different forms of narrative writing. The themes that are included are family separation, and the division of labor between field and house slaves, and slaves trying to free themselves through escape. There’s also some misrepresentative themes, like the lack of violence or how easy it was to obtain freedom.

Clara makes a quilt based on a map with guidance about locations from other slaves on how to escape to Canada through the Underground Railroad. Now she sneaks off her plantation onto her mama’s plantation to set her mama and her baby sister free. From a historian’s standpoint, it’s remarkably implausible that she escapes so easily; and that she even knew exactly how to go to a boat hidden in the brush along the Ohio River hundreds of miles away; and that she left a quilt on the plantation as a guiding tool for other slaves to escape. There’s also no violence, there’s just threats of violence.

But it’s also very representative in [various] ways. She’s tended to by Aunt Rachel who (and I’m quoting here) “wasn’t my for-real blood aunt, but she did her best to care for me.” So it shows that slave families were separated frequently. Clara also works in a field, but Aunt Rachel works in the big house. And there’s some disparities between field slaves and house slaves, and that’s brought up in the book. Or how the master joins the pattyrollers, their euphemism for patrollers, to catch escaped slaves. These are very historically representative aspects.

Now, it’s a great story. Second- and third-graders will probably be engaged by this story. And there’s some good aspects and some bad aspects. Now, what if a teacher were to say, “Okay, I’m going to give you these three or four questions, and we’re all going to look at these questions now before you read. And as you’re reading, I want you to answer them. And answer them as many times as they come up. Don’t give me one answer because you saw ‘an answer’ on page two. Give me all the answers that come up. Here, let me give you a couple.” And these close-reading questions can guide students’ scrutiny of the book.

And if you were to say to these second-graders, “Tell me about Clara’s family and friends and other folks in the plantation. What did kids and adults do on the plantation?” Or, “How was Clara—and her enslaved friends—treated? How did she escape? Who helped? What was scary? What was lucky?” Or, “Clara escaped. Did others?” And thinking back, “How did slavery begin?” Or, “Why did it begin?” Now these are for children to answer, and reconsider, and adjust their answers, and add to their answers as they’re reading this book. And if you hear them again, you’ll see how these questions carefully humanize the enslaved African Americans with language like, “Clara’s family, friends and other folks on the plantation.” They weren’t slaves, but people. And each of these questions target different elements—often minimized elements—of chattel slavery, like the division of labor or treatment and violence, or the sheer luck of escape, or the origins of slavery.

Some of these, there are no answers to, like, “Why and how did slavery begin?” That’s not in the trade book, and kids won’t find that. That’s a wonderful opportunity to insert primary sources. Some of the other ones kids can target, like, “What was lucky and what was scary about escaping?” The idea of finding a boat that was safely hidden 300 miles away. Second-graders can look at that and see that it’s implausible. These are wonderful opportunities to add engaging primary source materials, like oral histories, that can illustrate plantation life. Or teachers can integrate other aspects, like a slave whip—just an image of a slave whip—to talk to the kids about different forms of punishment. There’s definitely rated-R and -PG examples of primary sources that you probably wouldn’t want to give these second-graders. But there are G- and PG-rated versions that can show that slavery was more than just “free work.”

One of my favorite primary sources that I would insert—especially with this particular story—it’s about a slave named Jordan Anderson. He escaped from his master, I think in 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.” And what you have is Jordan’s response. You have Jordan’s response to his former master, the guy whose dad owned his dad and whose grandfather owned his grandfather. And statements like, “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 in asking his former [slaveholder] for back pay. And he also integrates things about how incredibly precarious his escape was. And that’s very different than Clara’s escape, which was very serendipitous and lucky.

And it gets into the starvation where he’s saying, “I’d rather freeze up here in Canada than scrounge for food down there with you. I’d rather be a man here than your servant there, even if you’re giving me your freedom.” You know? To show that slavery was far more than just ownership. There was indignity and marginalization and subjugation that came from this. And this primary source is a wonderful little supplement to Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt that you can add into a trade book that can really, really add nuance and detail to the story.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You know, I really love the way you are suggesting that teachers incorporate the primary sources as supplements and complements to fill in gaps and to enhance the reading, especially for the youngest students. At second grade, we often don’t think about using these kinds of primary sources at that young age. Would you do something similar for middle school kids?

John H. Bickford: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the primary sources aren’t perfect, just like the secondary sources aren’t perfect. Take Jordan’s story or an oral history. So often the slave dialect comes out. One of the things from my own experiences when I was a teacher: kids looking at the dialects and the accents as if they’re indicative of ignorance or something silly. And a lot of times children try to present it and talk like that. In a way, it’s like literary blackface. And teachers need to be very mindful of that. Whatever they include, teachers need to carefully consider, “Big picture, what’s the worst thing that can happen with this?”

And within the middle level, you’re probably going to use more text-based sources; you don’t need to rely on visual sources near as much, because they’re much stronger readers. But teachers need to pay attention with that. When you get into adolescence, bullying is ubiquitous. So we can’t give them a victim to mock. We can’t find ways to teach about the worst subjugation in American history and allow it to be reason to mock those people that were subjugated.

Within the middle grades, my favorite book is the Julius Lester Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue. It’s remarkable. It’s about the largest auction of enslaved African Americans in American history. If I could just give a brief synopsis: Pierce Butler, this enslaver, he had to auction off his chattel slaves to pay for debt accrued from a divorce from his abolitionist wife Frances, or Fanny. Fanny didn’t know that he owned a slave plantation. They lived up in Philadelphia. And the book is problematic because the violence is minimized, and it’s only to the slave men, not women and children.

There’s a lot of positives, too. Family separation was sure obvious. But slaves’ literacy and white benevolence—those were very common in the book. There was a white abolitionist store owner who lived down near them who taught Joe, a slave, to read and later told Joe how to escape. But the book shouldn’t be jettisoned because this story gives voice to folks who’ve history [we] really haven’t heard from— especially history students in the middle schools. They haven’t heard these stories of these particular folks in this one particular event.

And the primary sources that you can include—the Kemble Collection of the Lenox Library Association has photographs on this plantation, on this plantation, where it just says, “A slave girl.” But you can look in the book at the list of the slaves that were sold and wonder, Which one would this be? She’s probably 12 or 15. We know their ages by their slave sale records. “Who might this be?” And saying to the kids, “This photo is a nameless, enslaved, African-American girl. Look at what she’s doing in this image. Based on the story, who do you think this is?” There’s lots of different, young, African-American chattel slaves in the story. And students can explore and argue and consider who this image is of. And in a way, that’s what historians do. They argue about whose interpretation is right.

This one photograph—and there’s dozens in the Kemble Collection at the Lenox Library—this one photograph can spark remarkable discussions. Or, say when it comes to the threats of whipping, one of the more often reproduced photographs is of Gordon, who was an escaped slave who ran to the Union troops during the Civil War, sometime around 1863 or ’4. And they took a photograph of his back. And those whip marks weren’t just scars. They were raised welts on his back. They looked like worms crawling on his back, they were raised so high. And unlike just a story about a whip or an image of a whip, this one image can very graphically portray to kids what a whip does, what a cat-o’-nine-tails does to the human body.

Or they can read William Lloyd Garrison’s article. He called it “The Peculiar Institution,” the great slave auction at Savannah. Often textbooks use the phrase “the peculiar institution.” This is one of the times where Garrison—one of the great abolitionists and one of the owners of The Liberator—where he uses that phrase. Where he’s talking about this one particular slave sale. And you can get an outsider’s perception. Or you can get the actual journal by Frances Kemble, Fanny Kemble, called A Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation [sic]. And you can get actual excerpts from her diary on what it was like to go by boat to this slave island for the first time and to see these people that your husband owned. And how profoundly sad it was for her, and how she knew she had to do something. And how giving extra food or doing small gifts of kindness got rebukes from her husband. And she’s writing in her journal about this. It’s a wonderful supplement to the story, and it gets students to explore things that they may not have considered.

The trade book is great because it has so many gaps that can be filled with so many evocative primary sources that really spark students’ interests. That’s what I do for the middle grades.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And for high school?

John H. Bickford: Oh, man. I’d go into someone big like Lincoln or Jefferson. Everybody knows something about this person. And it’s great because people have a lot of prior knowledge about this, or they think they do. But there’s a huge gap between what historians, and ordinary citizens, and American teenagers understand about Lincoln. Lincoln’s relationship with slavery illustrates this divide more than anything else. He opposed slavery, but he did not believe in equality. Today, he’d be considered a segregationist. He was not a radical abolitionist as an adult—and he sure didn’t feel that way as a kid. He wasn’t elected on an abolitionist platform. It was one of containment, actually. And he certainly didn’t try to start the Civil War. And he certainly didn’t do it to abolish slavery. And the Emancipation Proclamation, it didn’t free all the slaves. Only those in rebellious states. In reality, African-American slaves contributed mightily and in various ways to their own freedom. But this idea of “Lincoln freed the slaves,” it’s so common. It’s like “Columbus discovered America.”

Now, this isn’t about historical quibbles like, “Who did the Emancipation Proclamation actually free?” That’s just a detail. That’s Jeopardy stuff. My goal is to get teachers to be aware of what’s included, excluded and minimized so that they can use this as a puzzle piece to get kids to examine primary and secondary sources. Not reading to comprehend, but reading to interrogate; reading to scrutinize. Like a detective at a crime scene.

One of the things that I would have the students do is engage in “narrative revision,” where they’re taking different sections of the trade book and they’re picking it apart, sometimes deleting completely misstatements, or adding in citations or endnotes to add details. For high school students, I would say, “Hey, we’re going to include lots of different trade books. Some of these are definitely below your reading level. But I want you to be able to pick them apart. After we’ve explored all these wonderful elements of the Teaching Hard History framework, I want you to find where these elements are present in the books, and where they’re absent in the books.”

And you can see different quotes like, “In New Orleans, young Abraham saw a slave market for the first time. Black slaves in chains were being sold like cattle. Seeing that done to people made Abraham miserable, and he said he would change things when he grew up.” The idea of comparing that to certain things that Lincoln did and didn’t do. When he was a state senator, he criticized a New York presidential candidate who voted to enfranchise free African Americans in New York. When Lincoln was president, he tried to negotiate repatriation back to Africa or Central America, or the American West in what is now Oklahoma. Comparing this quote with Lincoln talking with other folks about, “Look, we’ve got to get ’em out of here. Whites can’t live with their former slaves. Where will we put them?”

This idea of the history versus the history that’s told in that trade book. Or a quote like Lincoln saying, “I helped pass a law that ended slavery in America and freed all those people.” You know, slaves freed themselves in numerous ways. There’s this one journal by a white Southern woman called The Journal of Kate Stone [sic]. And she wrote it two or three years after the Civil War. And she talks about how incredibly difficult it was well before the Civil War—and especially during the Civil War—to control the slaves. How they were constantly slowing down work. They were constantly breaking equipment. They were constantly stealing. They were constantly doing very agentive acts, where they were acting as agents of their own freedom, to make things harder for their owners, and then to run away and to gain freedom.

And in a way, this journal from a white Southern woman who talks about, “Oh, when will this terrible war be over?” It’s a wonderful way to show how slaves freed themselves—but you’re not telling the kids that. If you just told the students that and gave them a test question and they answer it, that’s historical comprehension. That’s not historical thinking.

What I would do is have them engage in what I call “narrative revision.” Say you give these 12th- graders or 10th-graders a book intended for fourth grade. And you were to say to everybody, “All right, pick five pages. You can pick any five pages. And now add footnotes and endnotes—and, including citations—about where there’s omission and where there’s misrepresentation about Lincoln’s attitudes as a child, or where they’re talking about slaves, slaves, slaves. Do you want to point out, ‘These were humans. These were enslaved African Americans, not simply slaves’? Or when they use the phrase ‘plantation,’ do you want to point out this is a euphemism for ‘slave labor camp’”?

The idea of telling these teenagers, “Hey, this adult author got it wrong. This person didn’t enslave, but this person got it wrong—what slavery was about. Let’s correct this. There’s something unjust, not only about slavery, but about presenting slavery in this very innocuous way. Or making Lincoln seem like the hero on high trying to fix everything. What I’d like you to do is revise this narrative. Add to the trade book in certain places where there’s gaps. Add citations where the trade book author got it kind of right and then kind of wrong, you know?” And in a way, this engages students in the close reading and text based writing that’s essential within Common Core for English Language Arts teachers, and also the C3 framework. The idea of: “This is how slavery’s told. How should it be told?” Does that make sense?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That makes a lot of sense. And it also seems to play directly into what you were talking about before, about the sort of psychology of playing into the psychology of the students.

John H. Bickford: And what do teachers want more than anything? They want kids excited about their classroom. They want students engaged, and hooked, and curious. These are wonderful ways to evoke their curiosities and elicit their attention through the puzzle format, or through their sense of fairness, or through their sense of authority. Like, “I know this. This author doesn’t, but I do. They were wrong!” And ELA teachers can use that. In a way, it’s kind of like fire. Where fire can heat your house or burn it down. Students’ attention and their interests is a wonderfully powerful thing in the classroom. And this is a great spark, in my estimation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Right. This sense of empowering the student to say, “We have these texts and we’re supposed to see them as definitive, and yet, based upon what we have been studying in the classroom, you are able to not only pick out and identify the flaws. But now I’m empowering you as the instructor to correct it and to right the wrong—not of the past but of the present and how we are remembering.”

John H. Bickford: You got it. Absolutely. And if you’ve seen Bloom’s Taxonomy—his pyramid of critical thinking: comprehension, application, understanding, so to speak. Those are all at the bottom two or three tiers. “Did Lincoln free the slaves? Did the Emancipation Proclamation free slaves in the border states?” That’s comprehension or application. It’s bottom-level historical thinking, where they’re just memorizing something that somebody else said. What I’m encouraging teachers to do is to look at Bloom’s Taxonomy as guideposts. This is the educational psychology part. And then look at the Teaching Hard History—this is the content part. And kind of mix and match them. How can you get kids to evaluate? How can you get kids to analyze? If analysis is third from the top, and evaluation’s the second from the top, the idea of, “Okay, how can we get kids to scrutinize this? ‘What do you think?’” Or, “‘Where is there something wrong?’” That’s immediate evaluation.

And then the idea of creation, which is the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Not create anything, but creatively demonstrate a newly generated understanding. Creatively show me your new ideas. It comes across in that narrative revision I was talking about, where they’re picking apart the narrative with citations and endnotes, and they’re adding and deleting and crossing out, and then they’re justifying why they’re doing this. Where it’s not just an opinion. They’re making a statement. And then they’re substantiating it with sources.

Students can easily do this. You’re putting them in a position to act like historians. Think about this. A second-grade teacher gives her kids a math problem. “Two plus blank equals seven.” That is pre-algebraic thinking. It’s analysis and evaluation. “Two plus blank equals seven; find the blank.” In a way, those second-graders are engaging in math-level thinking like a mathematician. A kindergarten teacher playing Sink or Float—where they’re looking at boats and bottles and shoes in a big tub of water, talking to kids about buoyancy—they’re engaging in scientific thinking in age-appropriate ways for kindergartners but much like a scientist would, where they’re testing hypotheses.

Our students deserve the same out of history. 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 position them to analyze and then creatively show what they know in new and novel ways. I’ve got a ton of suggestions on different close-reading strategies, or text-based writing strategies that can definitely hook the students. And I’m sure not the only one out there offering these things, but pairing primary sources from the Teaching Hard History framework with different trade books that are age-appropriate, and engaging narratives—teachers can do a lot of fun things with that. And the best part about this is, they’re engaging their students like historians at the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What should teachers do in preparation for using trade books in the way that you’re talking about using them, which I think is phenomenal and really engaging, and should really draw students in? What kind of preparation should teachers do walking into the classroom, so that they can be most effective with using trade books in these ways?

John H. Bickford: The first thing is to explore the Teaching Hard History framework. It’s exceptional. It covers all the gaps.

And I love how accessible it is. So you can see: “Okay, these are themes that cannot be ignored entirely.” And to recognize there are historical gaps in whatever source I take. The diary from Fanny Kemble? It’s a great diary, but this is just one lady, a Northerner who just had a year on what we’d call a plantation. It’s limiting. So recognizing whatever source you pick, there’s going to be gaps. Whatever trade book you have, it’s not going to cover everything.

But be aware of those gaps, and compare it to what’s in Teaching Hard History, because there’s some wonderfully engaging and free resources through the National Archives and the Library of Congress. And Teaching Hard History directs teachers to these places and others. There’s wonderfully free resources where teachers can find ways to fill these gaps.

Now there’s also creative ways to pair close reading and text-based writing using these resources. Okay, take the idea of writing a newspaper, a historical fiction newspaper. If you were to say to the kids, “All right, we’re gonna look at this event. And let’s say that you guys have 1850, which is right after the Fugitive Slave Act. Or 1860, during the election, but before President Lincoln is inaugurated. Or 1859, right after John Brown. And let’s say one group of students does it from a Northern perspective, an abolitionist perspective. Say, “All right, you’ve got Chicago.” And somebody else does it from a border state. Pick a town in Kentucky. “You’ve got that town newspaper because you’re a border state.”

And now another group’s got a group from the Deep South: “Okay, you’ve got Birmingham. Pick an event or a date. Now write a historical fiction newspaper with this date in mind and with this perspective in mind.” And there’s a lot of multi-genre writing that’s involved here. When it comes to the Common Core, take an op-ed, or a letter to the editor. That’s a persuasive essay. That’s one of the Common Core writing standards.

Or do a current event. Something that just happened. “There’s stuff going on at Harpers Ferry with this guy named John Brown who came from Kansas.” That’s narrative writing. That’s a different form of Common Core writing. Or take political or social commentary. That’s an evidentiary argument. All three of these are three very distinct writing styles that are all represented within the Common Core, and English Language Arts teachers know what that’s about. And the idea of, say you’ve got five different groups of five kids in your classroom. And you were to say, “Pick a year, pick a region, get started.”

What if you were to say, “You’ve got the classified ads. What would be sold? What would be sold at this time and place?” And think about how you can incorporate geography and economics into this discussion of history. You know, there’s wonderful ways with just this one idea—historical fiction newspapers—to get kids to select and present different perspectives that they created, that represent different years and different events in the history of our country. That’s what I would have teachers do.

It’s a four-part thing. Identify the gaps in the books that you like—that’s the first one. The second one is find different free resources to fill these gaps. You could pay for them with things like Jackdaws, which are $50 a pop for primary sources you can get free at the Library of Congress. Or you can go to Teaching Hard History and Learning for Justice and they can offer you these. That’s the second step: Find wonderfully free resources that can fill these gaps.

And then the third one, there’s lots of creative ways to pair close reading and text-based writing with the primary and secondary sources. And the last one would be to find ways to use their educational psychology against them. Find ways to puzzle students. This idea of confusion is a wonderful thing. Confusion, in a way, is the antecedent to discovery. Confusion is a powerful thing. When kids are confused, they can be engaged. Not confused to the point of tears. Nobody’s saying make them cry, but find ways to confuse or intrigue them. Just like a puzzle. The goal of a puzzle isn’t to look at the picture at the end. It’s to piece these together. It’s the same thing with these different historical resources that you can fit together in a puzzle.

Find ways to evoke their curiosity and to spark their interest. And with adolescents, find ways to think, The author was wrong. I know something the author doesn’t know. Or find ways to spark kids’ deep sense of fairness. Kids want to empathize. They feel mistreatment very powerfully, ’cause they’ve all been bullied in some ways. So, respond to their sense of fairness. That’s the fourth step, when it comes to how should teachers approach this. And this is just my own suggestions, and I’m sure not the only one out there doing this. There’s some great authors out there doing neat stuff, too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Confusion is the antecedent to discovery.

John H. Bickford: It is!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You’re absolutely right. I mean, it just hits home. And this idea, you’re right. Process means everything in terms of where we want to begin and where we want to end. Let me ask you one more question.

John H. Bickford: Sure.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: We often hear—sometimes they make headline news—of teachers doing things with regard to how they teach American slavery, problematically.

John H. Bickford: Oh, I know!

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In other words, it’s not just sort of the book they use, but it’s what they do in the classroom itself. So in thinking about these trade books, what are some things that teachers shouldn’t do, or should absolutely avoid when using them in the ways that we want to use them in the classroom?

John H. Bickford: Yeah, and I get this. Every year I get sent different articles from former students about teachers doing ridiculous things, like reducing the Underground Railroad to a game of tag on the schoolyard, where one group’s the pattyrollers, and one group’s the escaped slaves, and home base is Canada. I mean, that’s ridiculous. Or making the kids sit underneath their desk as they’re reading stories about the Middle Passage—as if this is going to create the Middle Passage.

So often I see teachers try to engage in a “brown eyes, blue eyes” kind of thing. Jane Elliott in the 1960s after Martin Luther King died, made this popular with teachers: privileged the blue-eyed kids and then marginalized the brown-eyed kids one day, and then flipped it the next. And it was really powerful. And I know that in Riceville, Iowa, a very small lily-white town, I’m sure it worked out well. But you can’t re create slavery. You can make people feel discriminated against, but you can’t re-create hundreds of years of subjugation where that dude owned my dad, and he will own my child and there is virtually no hope unless I do something. So I wouldn’t encourage teachers to try to role-play it out.

I think teachers need to, first, think about the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. If you’re a teacher and there’s 24 white kids and two black kids, don’t find a way to say, “Hey, you want to be Frederick Douglass for this role-play?” Do no harm. Another thing: you definitely want kids to creatively demonstrate what they know, but be careful with the creative writing. Creative writing can be very beneficial because it puts students in a role as if they were this historical figure. But what about the kid that asks, “Can I be a slave catcher?” Or the kid who wants to be the plantation owner’s child who takes pride in his father’s brutality?

Teachers should carefully consider subjugation. And the role of the aggressor, or the abuser—it should never be taken or even toyed with. Suffering should not be trivialized. And I think teachers need to ask themselves this when it comes to the language that’s used: “Is suffering trivialized when it comes to this?” Or when it comes to reading oral histories. I used to say this to my students all the time: “If you’re reading it and you don’t understand it, try to pronounce it exactly as it’s written. Pronounce it like it’s written phonetically, and you’ll probably piece it together. But don’t you dare laugh. We don’t make fun of people from Boston who don’t drop their Rs, okay? And they certainly weren’t picked on the way these slaves were. And we’re not going to engage in literary blackface.” But find ways that suffering isn’t trivialized, and pay darn careful attention to that.

And pick your words carefully, because so often in some of the oral histories, the n-word is present. And slaves refer to themselves that way. Teachers use their own judgment, but I mean that should not be a word that students read and talk about. That should not be a word, in my mind, that students can even read aloud. Do you know what I mean? Find different ways to humanize these folks, because they were forgotten and mistreated for their entire lives. Teachers need to be very cognizant of suffering and abuse in their curriculum because it can get away from them.

I encourage teachers to be very, very mindful of what they do and the implications of what they do. Because sometimes the best intentions don’t mean anything if you’re playing tag on the playground. You know what I mean?

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: No, absolutely. I mean we need to be mindful of the guardrails.

John H. Bickford: Yeah.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: And that if we want to get from point A to point B, there are certain restrictions just because of the world in which we live and the cultural baggage that students are bringing with them into the classroom that they don’t leave at the front door. So these are really helpful reminders I think, of what we should do and also what we shouldn’t do.

John H. Bickford: Yeah, yeah. I agree.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: John, thank you so much. This has really been fantastic. You have provided us with tremendous, not only insights and observations, but practical ways of taking this material, using trade books to teach the hard history of American slavery, both accurately and effectively in the classroom. Thank you so much.

John H. Bickford: Thank you for your time.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: John H. Bickford is an Associate Professor of Middle Level Education at Eastern Illinois University and a former middle school social studies teacher. He has published numerous articles on history literacy and the pedagogy of social studies education, including “Examining the Representation of Slavery within Children’s Literature,” with co-author Cynthia W. Rich.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series, we have featured scholars to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that award-winning collection.

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

Thanks to Dr. Bickford for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford, with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is the project manager. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

If you like what we’re doing, please let your friends and colleagues know. And tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• PBS American Experience, The Abolitionists (film)
• Teaching Hard History, Frederick Douglass Describes Enslavers
• Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Julius Lester, To Be a Slave
• Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (runaway slave ads)
• Deborah Hopkinson, Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt
• Jordan Anderson, To My Old Master
• Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen's Book
• Julius Lester, Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue
• Lenox Library, Kemble Collection
• William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator (abolitionist newspaper)
• William Lloyd Garrison, Inaugural Editorial
• Frances Anne Kemble, A Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation
• Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone
• Benjamin Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
• Learning for Justice, John Brown's Speech to the Court at His Trial
• PBS Frontline, The Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes Exercise (Jane Elliot)
   

Return to Episode Listing

Resources

• Learning for Justice, Reconsider Columbus Day
• Learning for Justice, Twelve Years A Slave
• Learning for Justice, A Slave Auction
• Learning for Justice, Teaching Thanksgiving in a Socially Responsible Way

Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair

• Learning for Justice, “We Are Our Ancestors' Wildest Dreams”
• Jordan Lanfair, Edutopia

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is a bonus episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a special series from Learning for Justice, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In our last episode, we heard from Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair. Now, these two teachers are going to walk us through some lessons they created to explore the history of slavery with their students. We’ll begin with a social studies lesson about understanding resistance and Kanye West, followed by an English language arts lesson that examines holidays as a way to help students understand the history and legacy of American slavery. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

Tamara Spears: I would like to share a lesson that I do on resistance and how I use current events—bringing the present into the classroom—to change up my curriculum. I was sitting on my couch scrolling through Twitter, you know, looking at the latest news, checking out what Black Twitter is saying, what is EduTwitter upset about? And then I saw Kanye West saying that slavery was “a choice.” I literally sat up, grabbed my fake pearls, and I was like, “How, Sway?” Then the reality of the statement really settled in, and how would my students be able to know this didn’t make sense? Would they process it, or would they just take it at face value?

This happened right after we had finished a critical film study of 12 Years a Slave, and my next lesson was to be the types of resistance that the enslaved used. I couldn’t have picked a better statement for the kids to do the real work of doing history and understanding why it’s important—not just to have the skill of research, but to actually use the skill of research. And looking at how this knowledge plays into what you know, and how does that make you a freethinker.

The New York City curriculum, Passport to Social Studies, which was created by teachers—I really like using some of the materials that they have because they focus heavily on primary sources. One of the lessons there—I kind of modify it for my own use—it’s called “Types of Slavery.” And they talk about “What were the passive and active ways of resistance that the enslaved used?”

I let the kids watch Kanye West and the TMZ interview—not the whole thing, ’cause I think it was like 40 minutes. But just the part that we needed, related to when he said that slavery was “a choice.” And then we watched Van Lathan, the producer in the studio who challenged him and his thoughts. So I let the kids watch it, then I said, “We’re not going to discuss this just yet.

I need you to take out your journals,” ’cause I have journals for the kids. I said, “Please write down—what are your thoughts? What are you feeling? How do you feel about this statement that Kanye made? How do you feel about the rebuttal that Van Lathan gave?”

So, they write it down. And all of them are looking at me like, “I want to discuss, I want to talk about it!” One kid shouts out, “He needs to read more books!” and all of these things. And I’m like, “No, no. Not yet. Just, really, write it down. Get your thoughts on paper.” So they write it down. Then I say, I’m going to play two more videos for you. So I played Eve’s response—I think she was on The View—and she talked about bringing facts into your freethinking, and not just having freethinking. And then I play for them the will.i.am response where he was talking about if you’re going to have these thoughts, base them on research, and make connections to what’s happening today, and how these are not choices for the people that are living in these communities today. And he also brought up the point about disrespecting the ancestors, which one of the kids really grabbed onto.

So, I said again, “We can’t have a discussion yet. You guys have to really get your thoughts down on paper before you’re influenced by what anybody else thinks.” There’s one girl—I can’t really say her name, but I’ll just call her “D.” She was scribbling, scribbling, scribbling—so excited. She wrote like two whole pages before we even had time to get to discussion. After we watched those three videos I said, “Okay, now’s the time that we’re going to get into discussion.” So we had a discussion. And I also brought in an article, “The Most Damaging Myths About Slavery” by Yohuru Williams. I took excerpts from it. It was on the History Channel’s website. And he talked about the different ways in which there are these myths that come up time and time again. And even though Kanye thought he had some new freethought, it was actually something that has been used by white supremacists forever and those who want to say that Slavery was a happy situation for the slaves.

So I have them go through the excerpts from his article. And I have the kids really digest it. And after those two days, we got into the actual primary sources, because I wanted them to actually do the work themselves. I said, “Okay, we heard what other people had to say. Let’s hear from the enslaved and the way that they felt that they resisted slavery.” So I begin the class with our central question which is, “What choices do people make in the face of injustice?” We talked about the enduring understanding. The enduring understanding was: “Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.” Again, we’re focusing on the passive and active ways of resistance. I start every class with these things.

And finally, we got to the aim: “How do we debunk the myth: slavery was ‘a choice’?” I tell the kids, “You know, this is again about you actually doing the history.” So the first primary source that we look at is called, “Josie Jordan Recalls an Outbreak of ‘Malitis.’” And I’ll just read a little excerpt for you to give you an idea of how we go through it. The first sentence: “I remember Mammy told me about one master who almost starved his slaves.” And so I pause. I say to the kids, “What does this tell you right off the bat? Who’s telling the story? How do we know that this person was not the actual person there?” You know, just a little inference. Then we move on. It says, “Some of the slaves were so poorly thin that their ribs would kind of rustle against each other like corn stalks drying in the hot winds.”

Now we talk about how the author paints the picture for us. “What does that tell us about the way the enslaver treated the enslaved?” So this gives us the condition, right? So the story goes on to talk about how they called the master over, and all the hogs were laying out on the ground. And they told the master that the hogs had “malitis.” And they pretended like they didn’t want to touch it. So of course, the master says, “Well I don’t want the hog meat. I’ll give it to you slaves.” So then they eat it, and they have a great feast. So the story goes on to say, “Don’t you all know what ‘malitis’ is?” At this point, I stop and I say to the kids, “Do you understand what this story is saying?” Some kids, they get it right away. Some don’t. So we keep going. “And she would laugh remembering how they fooled old master so they get all that good meat. One of the strongest Negroes tapped the hogs between the eyes with that mallet. ‘Malitis’ set in mighty quick. But it was an uncommon disease, even for hungry Negroes around all the time.”

When they read this part, the kids crack up laughing. They say things like, “Oh!” or “Yo!” because they really realized that they tricked the master in order to get the food for themselves because they were so hungry. So we get right into the questions. And one of the first questions is: “What type of resistance is this? Is it passive or is it active?” And they have to get a quote directly from the reading that supports what they say.

Then we talk about the consequences. “Were there negative or positive consequences for these actions? Was it effective? Did they get what they wanted out of the action that they took?” And then this is when we get into the deeper work, where we talk about connecting this to what we’re looking to do: debunk the myth of “slavery was a choice.” So we say, “How useful or helpful is this primary source in providing the information about resistance of slavery by those who were enslaved?” And this is where the kids really can get into the deeper discussions.

The first questions are, you know, to set them up for understanding where they’re going in the learning, right? But this question is to really help them dive into can they actually use this document to support what way the person resisted slavery? And since this is the model document, kids are calling out the answer. We had answers like, “Yeah of course, this is perfect, because it shows that they can trick the master to get any kind of food that they want.” So then I bring them back to that last sentence. “This was uncommon, even though people were hungry all the time.” So, knowing that, could they use this method often, and what would happen if they overused this method?

Another thing, I want them to practice the skill of corroboration. So I say, “How does this primary source support what we saw in 12 Years a Slave? Is there anything that corroborates it? How about when we read the ‘Debunked’ article?” So the whole premise of the lesson is bringing the kids to reading the primary sources, and then making those connections with the resistance and other secondary sources to have their own claim. Like, “What evidence would they use?” There are some other primary sources at this time. I put the kids into their house groups because I use a house system in my class. Each group has a separate document. There is one about Joe Sutherland who learned how to read and write by going to the courthouse with his master. Then he learned how to forge a seal. He’s selling you passes, and people are escaping. And then finally he gets caught. And then he gets sent “down south.” That’s what the narrator says.

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. I’m like, “Okay, you must have got to the part [with] the soap.” And then, she gets sold a few days later. So the kids, when they get to Sukie, they really think about Patsey from 12 Years a Slave.

And I say, “See, Sukie resisted aggressively, or actively, while Patsey was passive.” And they’re able to use the academic vocabulary to pinpoint the different ways that people resisted. There’s also the Nat Turner—that comes with an excerpt about what happened, and it gives the engraving from 1831. And then the kids can analyze. So, you know, bringing some images into that as well.

After we do all of this work, and the kids are working together, and I go from house to house or group to group for better understanding to see what are they talking about. I throw questions out at them. I try to stump them. And I really saw the kids struggling with being able to look at, was the action effective or not? To me, that’s gold right there, because I can see that they go back through their documents, they pull out their guide that they use from 12 Years a Slave. They pull out their article about ‘Debunked.’ And they try to make the corroboration. So they really—I wouldn’t say enjoyed, but—they really got into the work of doing the history themselves so that they can make the claim, and go back to Kanye and say whatever they wanted to say.

So that’s when I bring the class together. We discuss what each house found, and we point out the things that people agreed with or disagreed with. And then I say, “Okay, let’s get back to our journals.” So I have them revisit the question. And now that they can pull in all of this different information from, not just what people told them about it from the secondary sources, but from the primary sources—and even though it’s just three or four that we studied—it’s enough for them to have an idea of their own about the resistance and the choices, or the false choices that people had to make. And we also say what is “a choice”? So that’s when you can get into that whole idea of a false choice.

So once they’re done with their journal entry, I have them do a writing assignment. They can even do an op-ed piece that can be on one of our fake magazines or I can give them a real magazine name and say, “This is going to show up in such-and-such magazine. You need to write an op-ed piece about what Kanye West said, and why or why not what he said makes sense.” They can even do a string of tweets because, you know, Kanye at that time, he had like a ton of stream-of-thought tweets. So I say, “You know what? You’re on Twitter. You’re seeing what he’s saying. You’re going to respond to him.” But, you know, Twitter has a format—I think it’s 280 now—where each of your blocks has to be concise enough, which is more difficult than an op-ed piece because you have to get your point across within that little bit of words. Even though you’re threading it, it still needs to stand alone. So some kids chose to do that.

And some kids said, “Well, can I just write a letter?” And I said, “Okay, that’s fine.” So I gave them those three options because that was the assessment: Could they actually do the work? Could they use the evidence from the primary sources and the secondary sources to come up with a claim and use those sources as evidence as to why they think that Kanye was wrong or he was right? Basically, how can we debunk the myth that slavery was “a choice”? And after we do that, you know, I read over them. Some kids wanted to share and we had another, further discussion. But, you know, I had to move the lesson along. And this is not something you can do in a 45-minute period. It just so happens that every week I have one double period. So you would use this as one of those longer periods, or you would break it into chunks. So if I’m starting with Kanye and what he said, that was three lessons before I actually got to the lesson where the kids had the chance to respond, and write, and get into the primary sources.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Learning for Justice recently launched another podcast called Queer America about how to teach LGBTQ history in your classroom. It’s hosted by professors Leila Rupp and John D’Emilio. You can find our sister podcast Queer America in iTunes or visit LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. Once again, here are Jordan and Tamara.

Jordan Lanfair: We use Columbus Day as an entry point to talking about the slave trade because we get to learn about his role in starting it. And from there, we’re able to move into more complex conversations about—what was slavery? What is its legacy? How do we remember those who survived [as] slaves and how did they shape America?” So that’s our entry point. That is a tangible day on the calendar that we can point to as someone who started the slave trade and everything that they stood for. So that’s something that I use annually. We look at the proclamations from different cities that have changed the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

I try to get it started about a week or a week and a half before Columbus Day. And there is a great article that I like sending home for annotation, “How Columbus Sailed Into U.S. History.” And it’s from NPR. And it talks very in-depth about how, essentially, this push came from Italians when they became Italian Americans. And so they wanted someone who represented them. That is honorable. And we talk about, “Why might people want this?” Because one of the things that I don’t do is just say, “This is bad.” Okay? We need to understand—if it’s been here for so long, why? Who’s still fighting for it?

And so we kind of do some research, as homework after annotations and some work in class. And so, “Who is supporting this? What does that say about them? Do you think we should support it? Why or why not?” Then we look a little deeper. “Who might be hurt by this day? Anyone? Oh, why? You don’t have to. You’re you! You know this man started the slave trade. Well, maybe you didn’t. But you know now. How will you feel when we have the day off? Of course, you’ll have the day off, so that’ll be fun. I’m looking forward to having a day off, too. But it’s a day in celebration of this person. And so generally when we celebrate people, we celebrate the ideals along with them. Do you support those ideals? Hmm. Okay, so what could we do differently?” And then we look at the proclamations that have been written for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We talk about the vocabulary around that: “What is an Indigenous person? Chicago doesn’t celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. What do you think about that? What are some ways that we could change that? Do you want to?”

And so then this takes us a few days because we bring in different nonfiction articles. Reading A–Z has a book about a student doing a project on Christopher Columbus and learning the truth that I use with my struggling readers. Front-loading a lot of information about who he was, so that we come to this clear understanding of, “If we’re going to have this holiday, this is what we’re celebrating. Here are other holidays. This is what, in essence, they’re celebrating. These are the people that we are aspiring to and the values we are. So let me show you another one. Where does this fit with your current understanding? What do you want to do about it?”

For teachers who may be listening, this is—I mean, this is my Juneteenth lesson. This is the one that has it’s—it follows the Columbus Day work that we do where. It comes generally after my students have done either a formal or informal debate. And the reason I station this after is because I want them to take a larger action about our school calendar. So I try to encourage them to push for our school calendar to be changed, or to write letters to the mayor about, you know, changing holidays. And so we focus in on Juneteenth.

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. And so I cut it right there, and we talk about, “How is he depicted? Based on what you know, is this accurate? Recall back to our past few lessons; do you believe that people get the full history when they look at holidays?” Then we just do a few quick review questions such as, “Well, what’s the importance of Columbus Day to its supporters? What holidays is it similar to? Okay, how might it be similar to St. Patrick’s Day? What do these groups have in common? Today we’re going to talk about another holiday: Juneteenth. Who’s familiar with it? Okay.

Well, if I told you that we were going to talk about Independence Day, what day do you think I would talk about?” And of course, you know students, “July 4th.” “Why might that be a bit problematic? Why might that not tell the whole truth?”

Inevitably, you kind of poke, and prod, and guide them to, “Well, was everyone free on the Fourth of July? Okay, so what we’re going to look at is this episode that’s going to very much talk about this holiday. And then we’re going to have some conversations and questions. But this is just one day in our bigger conversation.” So we roll some more. 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.” And it’s like, “Well, you should have led with that one.’ And so I always like to stop here and, “Would we celebrate Magic Johnson Is Still Alive Day? Should we celebrate Tupac’s birthday? Okay, so what is the importance of holidays?”

And this also calls back to a few conversations we have about, like, statues, and the artwork and, you know, who do we post, and who do we name schools after? So then we go through and we listen and analyze some of the songs that come up, including the “We Built This” song. You know, I ask, “What colleges and universities did you hear? Where do you notice many of them are? Okay, what happened recently?” And this was after the Charlottesville protests, also. And then there’s a point where they mention the legitimate dollar costs of slavery, and so we talk about that. “What are the costs of slavery? Huh. How old is the United States? If we assume that we were founded on July 4th, 1776—but how old are we? Okay, looking at some of the things that we know from history, does that make us an old or a young country? Okay, well how did we get the political and economic strength that we have?”

Alright, so add that in. Maybe not the dollar amount that they discuss, but, “What are some of the soft costs, we’ll say, some of the nontangible costs of slavery? How did America get to be who it is? Alright, on the flipside, what are some of the negative costs associated with slavery? What did it do to people? What did it make that might not be positive, based off of what you saw and what you know from your own experience? Okay.” And so then again we go through more of the episode. It is a lot of watching, and because Black-ish is hilarious, we do have moments where we enjoy so we can go deeper into the conversation, and it helps me pull them back out. And so at the end, one of the things that we focus on as far as writing and then bringing into a full discussion over the next day or two is, “How do these holidays relate?” And one of the things that a student said that really stayed with me was, “We have a holiday for the man that started slavery, but not the end of slavery.”

To which you would say, “Why do you think that is? Hmm. What does he say at the end of the episode that you resonate with?” And because there’s, of course, this wrap-up, this summary. And I know for me, one of the things that Anthony Anderson’s character says is, you know, at least if we celebrated Juneteenth, it might feel like an apology. You know, like America actually feels bad about what happened. And then it mentions that there has been a formal apology issued, but it’s a half-hearted apology. “Yes, we’re sorry for slavery. But nothing really happened.” So then we move into inaction.

“Based off of the holidays that we’ve looked at, based off of what we know now, what are some things that we could do? Hmm. Do you think I should keep teaching this? Why? You all said you felt betrayed, like you didn’t know all of this, and people should have told you.” I had a student say, “You know, I’ve been in school this many years, and they’ve been telling me about this day, and I’ve been celebrating the wrong things.” And so, “What can we do to make sure that other students don’t feel that that’s not the case? Who has power that could change some of these things? How would we appeal to them? What’s your ‘ask’? Okay, let’s go ahead and try and take some initiative on that. Let’s move forward.”

And so then, the wrap-up is either a letter to someone who could change things. So we, of course, do the whole “Write your congressperson, write your mayor, write the principal, bring the principal in for your debates.” Because at least we can change it on our school calendar. So they can see those tangible results, but they are adding their voice to this larger debate as well. And that is kind of how that lesson goes. And it can expand anywhere from a day or two, depending on how deep the conversations get—how long the class period is.

Tamara Spears: The use of Black-ish and the episode. When you are watching it with the kids, do they get tied-up? I know you mentioned that they laugh because it’s pretty funny. Do they get tied-up in the actual episode, or can they focus on the history of the episode?

Jordan Lanfair: It gets serious. It gets into the history. I like it because it gets into it in a way that is accessible for them, because it almost gets them just uncomfortable enough, just angry enough, just woke enough that we can keep the momentum going. And the conversations that we have are what drive them deeper into understanding. And because of that—for many of them, deeper into frustration. And so I find that pairing these really in-depth and hard conversations and questions with the episode that, you know, takes you through a multitude of emotions. The episode helps bring them back out, and that’s what I like. We don’t just go so deep into it that I can’t pull them back out.

We use current events to use our historical knowledge, to use our literary analysis skills, our writing abilities, the things that they learn in my class, to challenge the current system. And what that does is, it helps them not feel weighed down by history. If they don’t get to do something—at least for me, because we look at the text a lot, because we look at history a lot, and we read firsthand accounts from people, we read heavy fiction—it can all just feel like this unbearable pain. But giving them the opportunity to challenge, and to resist, and to fight, and to grow helps them take that pain and turn it into action. And so that’s why I like to be able to bring in actual things that are happening that they can impact, so that they understand that it’s their responsibility to not allow these things to repeat themselves.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jordan Lanfair teaches ninth- and tenth-grade multicultural literature on Chicago’s South Side. And Tamara Spears teaches social studies to sixth- through eighth-graders in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Learning for Justice, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series, we have featured scholars to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that award-winning collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at LearningForJustice.org/podcasts. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching the history of American slavery. Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at LearningForJustice.org.

Thanks to Ms. Spears and Mr. Lanfair for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford—with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is the project manager. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries—Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave (film)
• Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (book online)
• NYCDOE, Passport to Social Studies
• American Social History Productions, Josie Jordan Recalls an Outbreak of "Malitis" / "Sukie" Resists a Master's Advances
• NPR, How Columbus Sailed Into U.S. History, Thanks To Italians
• American Heritage, Columbus and Genocide (Queen Isabella quote)
• Museum of the American Indian, Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Rethinking How We Celebrate American History
• Vox, Black-ish's musical episode about Juneteenth is a pointed lesson on American ignorance
   

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In the late 1980s, New York’s Board of Regents did something very few people expected. Together with the commissioner of education, they created a task force to determine if the state’s social studies curriculum adequately reflected the pluralistic nature of American society. 

The task force was a veritable who’s who of scholars of color. And with great care, they examined the curricular materials used in New York’s public schools. What they found was disturbing. In a report entitled “A Curriculum for Inclusion,” they concluded that African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Native Americans were, as a whole, negatively characterized in the existing curriculum. They also discovered that the contributions made by these groups to U.S. society and culture were almost completely omitted. As a remedy, they suggested revamping the entire curriculum so that it reflected the multicultural experiences and contributions of every American.

I was in high school when the task force released its report, just chillin’ at Brooklyn’s finest public school—Midwood High School at Brooklyn College. Midwood is in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a working-class neighborhood that produced the Fu-Schnickens, Special Ed and the Notorious R.B.G.—Biggie’s from around Bed-Stuy. So I can attest to the truth and accuracy of the “Curriculum for Inclusion” report. The black experience was almost entirely absent from my classes. Subjects like slavery were reduced to the unfortunate personal practices of a handful of men way down South somewhere. And when slavery was over, well, it was just over.

The “Curriculum for Inclusion” report came some 20 years after the height of organizing efforts by black Brooklynites to gain greater curricular control over the schools in their neighborhoods. In this sense, “A Curriculum for Inclusion” was long overdue. But it was still the Reagan era, so the report was also very much ahead of its time.

When the report was made public, political conservatives lost their collective minds. They accused the task force of “contemptuously dismiss[ing] the Western tradition” and of contributing to the “reduction of history to ethnic cheerleading.”

Bowing to political pressure, New York’s commissioner of education shelved “A Curriculum for Inclusion.” A few years later, another task force reached similar conclusions. But once again, the findings report infuriated the “Western tradition” crowd, so its recommendations were also largely ignored.

I am often asked, what was it about my early education that sparked my interest in history? Inherent in this question is an assumption that there were subjects covered in my elementary and high school classes that whetted my appetite for more. And in a sense, there were. But my historical curiosity did not stem from what I was learning in the classroom. It was, instead, a result of what I was not learning. I was not learning about slavery and its legacy in a way that made the slightest bit of sense to me given the stark racial inequality that I saw every day as I rode the subway to school. And I was not learning anything about enslaved people or their descendants—nothing about my people or me. My education as a kid was neither inclusive nor accurate.

In recent years, state social studies standards, including those in New York, have improved significantly. Although far from perfect, they provide many more opportunities than when I was in school to teach subjects like slavery. As I have watched these developments, I have often wondered what it would have been like to have sat in a class at Midwood High School where subjects such as American slavery received significant and substantive attention. Would I have chosen a different career path if I had been satisfied with what I was learning about America’s past and present? 

But as I listened to Jordan Lanfair and Tamara Spears, the dynamic pair of high school teachers featured in this episode, talk about the exciting ways they teach the hard history of slavery, I became convinced that I still would have pursued a career as a historian. But I would not have done so to fill glaring gaps in my education; I would have done so to broaden and deepen what I had been learning. My motivation would have been positive, not negative, which I am convinced is the way it ought to be.

I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, 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. In each episode we explore a different topic—walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material, and offering practical classroom exercises.

Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery.

Jordan Lanfair is an English language arts teacher in Chicago. Tamara Spears teaches social studies in New York City. For several years, each has been developing lessons about the history of slavery for their students. So we brought these two educators together for a conversation about their experiences. In this episode, they share their approaches to lesson planning, discuss the reactions of their students and reflect on the challenges they have faced along the way. They also offer practical advice for teachers who are just beginning to revise their curriculum. 

I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

Jordan Lanfair: I am Jordan Lanfair. I teach ninth- and tenth-grade multicultural literature at an IB school on Chicago’s South Side.

Tamara Spears: I am Tamara Spears. I teach sixth through eighth grade out in Coney Island in Brooklyn.

Jordan Lanfair: I’ve worked with students from all across the spectrum, all over the world, but I’m really excited this year to be working with another predominantly black school. And definitely, I love working in my hometown. I’m a Chicago boy through and through, so ...

Tamara Spears: I’m mostly working with black and brown students, and I’ve been teaching social studies for my entire teaching career. So how do you approach teaching slavery with your students?

Jordan Lanfair: So, one of the things that I’ve been really big on, is I don’t teach slavery as an individual unit or, like, just one lesson. I don’t have a slavery curriculum. I have a curriculum, right? But it just so happens that you can’t talk about American history as it is without teaching black history. We kind of interweave our history and the history of black and brown people, but we intersperse it throughout the year. And so I really get a start with it when Columbus Day rolls around. We’ll use Columbus Day as an entry point to talking about the slave trade because we get to learn about his role in starting it. And from there, we’re able to move into more complex conversations about… what was slavery? What is its legacy? How do we remember those who survived slaves? And how did they shape America?

So that’s our entry point. That is a tangible day on the calendar that we can point to. So that’s something that I use annually. And we talk about other holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Pulaski Day we have in Chicago—because all these days are days that were given to immigrants, ethnic groups that are white now but weren’t at that time, and those holidays kind of helped make them white. And then we kind of parlay into talking about Juneteenth, which is our real Black Independence Day. And so we use current events to use our historical knowledge, to use our literary analysis skills, our writing abilities, the things that they learn in my class to challenge the current system.

And so those conversations help ground us in who we are as a country, kind of what we celebrate, why we celebrate it, and then they give me the gusto to kind of change some perceptions about the history that we think we know, and what we can move into from there.

Tamara Spears: That’s pretty similar to how I incorporate the slavery curriculum. It’s interwoven, interspersed throughout the story because, like you said, it is American history. They can’t be separated. So black American history is American history. My course overall objective is to what extent do the ideas and experiences of American history shape the American society today? That’s the way that I weave it in, so each stop that we do on the curriculum train involves something about black Americans.

So, I start talking about slavery really with the Native Americans, and talking about Bartolomé de las Casas when he was suggesting that, instead of using the Native Americans, they use Africans. I also go back into West Africa with the Three Kingdoms, because in my school curriculum they don’t really cover it. We go through, like you said, with Columbus, colonial times, revolution, the invention of the cotton gin. And then when we get to the Civil War, I do stop the formal slavery, but then I start talking about, what are the legacies of slavery? Because that’s the thread that runs throughout my entire curriculum. What are the legacies of the things that we study?

I do use the current events that are happening today. So when we were talking about what was happening in Charlottesville, we started talking about, well when did these monuments actually come up? So, I do go through Jim Crow, we talk about World War I and World War II—how did that influence black thought? The Great Migration? And we go all the way through to the civil rights movement.

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, you know—it opens up all these doors for conversation. So that I still have students who in their heart of hearts never want to read To Kill a Mockingbird again, but they also can talk about all the issues around it. And so it’s always a lot easier for me to give them an entry point and work backwards. Unless I’m talking about, like Columbus Day, in—in which case I’m working forward.

Tamara Spears: So, my curriculum is more social studies-based, because it’s not a humanities class. But I do incorporate readings from outside. I make sure I have a heavy mixture of primary and secondary sources. I feel like primary sources are what the kids can really build their facts on, because when they’re making claims, I stress evidence. Not just evidence from secondary sources, but read the primary sources yourself. Do the history work yourself. So I have a heavy focus on documents and stories as well. So we read some of the narratives. We talk about, okay, what was it actually like for them? Why would they be skilled at growing rice? What were they doing back in West Africa or Central Africa or wherever they came from?

So I try to focus on the actual doing of the history. You know, we can read a text—even though I don’t use textbooks in my class, but we can read a textbook, they say, “Okay,” and they take that as the truth, the holy grail. But I’m trying to get them to see that they can do the work themselves. We have a few documents. Some of them, you know, you have to modify so that the reading they can actually understand what’s being said, but I mostly focus on the document approach. And then each period we go to, taking them through, “Okay, what are the documents from that period? What are the claims that people are making? What claims can we make ourselves?” That’s pretty much the way I focus on giving the kids in there doing the work themselves.

So we’ll start with the Middle Passage. Of course, we can look at the famous image of, you know, them placing the enslaved into the boat, but also, what are the numbers like? Where did people go? So we look at charts. We’ll look at graphs. We’ll say, “Oh! Only 4 percent actually came to, you know, what was North America—becoming America—[50 percent] went to Brazil.” And then that gives them also—this is a side thought—the connection of the African diaspora, and how it—South America, Central America, also the Caribbean. But if I’m thinking about other sources, we look at actual documents. Like, Josie Jordan recalls an outbreak of “malitis,” which is a story about how a group of enslaved people basically tricked their master into giving them some extra food. So that is a primary source that students will look at when we talk about, how did people resist, and in what ways can people resist slavery.

Jordan Lanfair: How do you think your students have handled these somewhat difficult conversations, these bigger topics?

Tamara Spears: I have never taught any other students besides black and brown, but my students range from sadness to rage, pity, denial and we even have apathy and sadness. Those are the emotions that they come with. And I—you know, I give them space and I let them know that you can feel what you’re feeling, but we’re not going to sit in any one emotion too long because we need to analyze these documents and read these stories about how people resisted these things that were happening to them.

Each year I see they have very skewed ideas—even being black and brown—of what is racist. What does that mean? And when I bring up systematic racism, they really have no clue what I’m talking about until I break it down to them and they say, “Oh yeah, I can see that.” So they know, but they just don’t know that they know.
I really had to go in and create a whole, I guess, mini-unit. Well, what is race? Because a lot of our students are products of the colorblind era, where if you say a color black or you say somebody’s white, they think of that as racism. So I really had to go back and do a lot of the work myself and come up with a mini-unit that was appropriate for the age. Talking about what race is. What is racism? How did these things develop? And that’s how I got into this whole… Okay, I have to go back as far as I can, to West African kingdoms. And even going back that far, I didn’t have a lot of information myself, so I had to do some homework. And still, to this day, I’m still looking for resources of what can I use to show that these were human beings who had lives before they came over here.

So when we do the Great Migration, they really get into—especially, you know, Chicago being one, New York is one of the other ones, they get into that. When we do World War I, talk about the Harlem Hellfighters, they get really excited about the fact that there’s a street that you wouldn’t even know was named after the Harlem Hellfighters. And we can go there and see the street and then talk about them. So they get pretty excited as well as the other range. So that’s pretty much how my students react emotionally to it. How about your students? How do they feel when you teach, and how do you approach?

Jordan Lanfair: Whenever I work with my black students, you know, the kids who look like me, and even brown, there’s just this great rage at not being taught it. Because when I’ve worked with Latino students, one of the spins that we’ve also put in is that the civil rights movement supported the workers’ rights movement, you know? Cesar Chavez, you know, had communication from Martin Luther King. I mean, even the 504 protests, you know, for Americans with Disabilities, got support from the Black Panther Party. So, there are… there’s always this great betrayal that they kind of mention feeling. That they’ve been in school all these years and they’ve never gotten accurate history or in-depth history in the way that they got to see themselves, and they kind of feel lied to. It can all just feel like this unbearable pain. But giving them the opportunity to challenge and to resist and to fight and to grow helps them take that pain and turn it into action.

And it’s always interesting because, when you start with Columbus Day in October, and we mentioned—and I mentioned Juneteenth, we inevitably end up talking about elections. And so one of the things I always teach about is, I teach the election, but I teach like, how are schools funded? What is an election? How do you vote? And whenever we talk about school funding, that’s another entry point. It’s because my kids have always realized Chicago’s one of the most segregated cities that you’re going to find. And they realize, like, my school is like this because of where I live. I live here because this is where, you know, people came or were forced to live. They came because of the end of slavery in the South and the racism. They were in the South because of slavery. So like, we kind of draw that line that, kind of where they are now and where we exist is that this cross-section of, you know, our own history and contemporary politics and issues. And so I try and build an action for them so that they feel not just this great weight of history, but that they can do something about it.

You know, when I taught the Holocaust, I would also try and pair it—not one-to-one unit pairing, but I teach the Holocaust in units. I try to teach slavery in units so that we can talk about who we are as people, right? And because one of the big things that I like my kids to know when they leave my course is: monsters don’t exist. People do. Monsters are, you know, these mythical things. They’re hard to stop. You know, we will—some people are like, “Oh well, Hitler was a monster.” No. He was a man, you know? You know, these slave masters, they weren’t monsters. They were people. 

And so it was this attempt to get kids to see that these were people that did these things. Monsters are difficult. They’re… monsters hide and are terrifying and are unbeatable. People can be changed and people can be stopped.

Tamara Spears: So it sounds like you’re getting into, you know, the big concepts that you want them to take away. Would you say that those are the concepts you want them to take away from the overall study of it?

Jordan Lanfair: I think there are always a few. One of the things that was really cool to do this year was read To Kill a Mockingbird and go see Marshall. And I think the big takeaway for that was, the law is supposed to be… you’re supposed to be equal before the law, but people aren’t. You have to fight. That was the big takeaway, right? We got to read—for my seventh-graders, we read Number the Stars and The Diary of Anne Frank. And then we looked at the pyramid of hate from the Anti-Defamation League, and they outlined the ways that you get to genocide, right? There are these steps that every oppressive regime has followed, and it ends in genocide and mass murder.

And so my students looked at that, and then unprompted they looked—they just went, “That’s what happens to black people,” you know? It’s—you know, it starts with, like, name-calling and things like that. And then it works its way up to violence against property, violence against people and, you know, then it ends in murder and genocide. And they recognize that. And so that was a big takeaway, you know, being able to utilize the Pyramid of Hate to understand what happens if we don’t stop these behaviors early. So I think, depending on what I’m working with and on, I have different takeaways. But I do want them to be able to see how we are informed by history and their roles and responsibilities in shaping the future.

But what about you? Kind of like, when you look at your units, you know, or when you look at kind of what you worked on, what do you want them to see or know?

Tamara Spears: Well, I would say when I’m—I guess because I did say in the beginning, you know, it’s interwoven within whatever time period we’re in, but my overall takeaways for slavery itself is that it’s the foundation of this country. Not just for racial beliefs and the way we, you know, are socially segregated, I guess you can say, but also for the economic growth of the country. And I probably wouldn’t be too far off if I said Europe and the world at that time, it really was central to the development of growth.

Being in New York, I also focused the kids on, “What was New York’s role in this? What was the complicity? Why were we profiting so much off of something that we claim was only happening in the South?” And you know, those two things I really try to help them see. And the last thing I also want to focus on is the resistance. A lot of times they’re like, “Oh,” you know, “all of this was happening to them, and they didn’t do anything about it.” And we have to talk about the ways in which people resist. And when we go through each of our units and, like, say, when we get to World War II, because you did mention the Holocaust, and people will say, “Well why didn’t they just, you know… when they were in the camp, why didn’t they just overthrow the soldiers?” And it’s that same concept. What are the different ways that people can resist in the situation that they are in? What are the active ways? What are the passive ways? What are the ways they still hold on to being human? And that in itself can be a resistance.

So, I really focus on foundational for America, not only racially but economically, and the resistance that people had. And then I tie it all together with the idea of individual racism, as well as systematic. And how do we start to see things move from this is my individual thought to this is the institution of slavery. This is the legacy of the institution of slavery. So really, I guess that would be four concepts I try to get the kids to really see.

In my curriculum, slavery starts with the Middle Passage. It goes into the Civil War. And the New York curriculum, which is Passport to Social Studies, they do a pretty good job with slavery being the cause of Civil War. But I felt like something was missing. And then the incident with Trayvon Martin happened, and the way that I teach, you know, I start with current events and I go backwards. And that really messed with my head, and I said, “Well, how can I get these kids to see that the things that are happening today are legacies of the things that happened in the past, specifically slavery and the creation of race as we see it today, and white supremacy, and all of those things?” How can I get the kids to see that this is just not something that sprang up with Trayvon Martin or even Rodney King or Emmett Till?” Like, these things go way, way back.

So the Trayvon Martin murder was the point where I said, “For this next curriculum I really need to delve deep for these students—and for myself—to really look into the legacy of slavery, and how come it’s not something that we talk about much.” And this idea of race and white supremacy, and how did it build?

Jordan Lanfair: I think I’m similar in that, on some guttural level, there was something about Trayvon Martin’s murder that I think every black person kind of remembers how we felt. And it’s in part because you got to hear the 9-1-1 call. Like, I remember that. And I think we also remember where we were when we heard, you know, not guilty. We heard no indictment. When we—and so something about having to have those conversations really made me start thinking about—I was uncomfortable to have it, honestly. You know, I think now it’s so much easier to be as unapologetically black as we want to be, but it was hard. It was hard thinking about our history and trying to get other people to appreciate and understand. It was hard to—at least in my heart—try and get other people to grapple with their own history, and their—their family’s history, and their family’s role in the enslavement of black people and the persecution of Native people.

And it’s grown over the years. And the thing is, it never quite looks the same every year. There are always some things that I try and hit. So, I always try and hit Columbus started the slave trade. Columbus Day shouldn’t be celebrated. Juneteenth is a real holiday, and we enjoy ourselves and have fun, but we need to be critical of our country because if we actually love it, we’re gonna be critical of it. And that’s a lesson I got from Kaepernick too, you know? I think that was the—the major push for me, that my job as a teacher—because I’m not—I’m just not one for going to rallies. That’s me. Like, I have anxiety and big issues. And so I sat with someone once and was like, “I feel like I’m not doing the movement justice because I don’t go to these things because, you know, I have a friggin’ panic attack.” Like, “Well, what are you doing?” Like, “I’m teaching.” Like, “Well, what are you teaching?” And that was my challenge.

You know, why are they kneeling for the national anthem? Okay, well here’s why. Do you think we should sing the national anthem? Do you know that there’s a verse in it that, you know, mentions slavery? Okay, how do you feel about it now? Why are they doing this? Challenging those perceptions through education, through the resources we bring in, through the deep conversations and perspective, that’s kind of my part of the movement. And so that’s what got me into it and past my—my discomfort was realizing that, like, this is my lane. This is what I do. This is what I’m good at. This is what I enjoy doing. And so here’s how I serve the movement at large.

Tamara Spears: I like how you bring that up about, you know, being part of the movement. After what happened in Ferguson—Mike Brown—I was up on Twitter, like, night after night after night, losing sleep, crying, all these things, trying to follow along with the people on the ground. And then, you know, in New York we had, like—like you said—a rally, protest. And I went to it, and I was like, “Well, can I really afford to put my body on the line when I need to get in that classroom and work with the 60-odd minds that I need to help shape?” So, like you said, teaching for me is my path to being in the movement.

Jordan Lanfair: Mm-hmm.

Tamara Spears: I can’t necessarily go out to every rally or, you know, go to D.C. when they’re doing something, or even go to a place like Ferguson. But I can work with the kids. And when you talk about Kaepernick, you know, there was—there’s an issue when the, you know, when they come on and we got to say the pledge and kids are looking at me and I’m like, “You know, you don’t have to stand if that’s something you don’t feel like you have to do.” And then you have another teacher that says, “Well, you better stand.”

And then when we study in social studies—when we read, say, for instance, Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and those connections that they can make, and then you look at veterans’ tweets on Twitter. What are the veterans themselves saying about the issue? To me, that all leads back into, how do we use the curriculum to be current with the students? So that they can see that this is just not something you study and you leave in school. Like, you’re not going to leave what you learned about slavery in school. You’re going to use it to your advantage to know what is going on today.

Jordan Lanfair: Yeah.

Tamara Spears: I think for me, like you just said, that’s—that’s two of the reasons that I got into really focusing on—heavily on—how do we teach slavery? So, doing that work, Trayvon Martin and, you know, all the things that came after that, was really what was the impetus for me.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: This is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. I’m your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries. Teaching Tolerance recently launched another podcast called Queer America, about how to teach LGBTQ history in your classroom. It’s hosted by professors Leila Rupp and John D’Emilio. You can find our sister podcast Queer America in iTunes, or visit tolerance.org/podcasts. Once again, here are Jordan and Tamara.

Tamara Spears: So, I think you were talking a little about how it has evolved over time.

Jordan Lanfair: Over time, I think one of the big things that we kind of lock on to is the sense of community. That’s one of the things that I like to talk about. There is some camaraderie in survival. And there is this thread that brings us all together because we have survived and because we continue to survive. And that is to be admired. That’s to be cherished. You know, we still, of course, we’re living through the effects, like you said, of slavery. And so you know, when we look at the violence in Chicago, we… we take it from both a personal place because, you know, my brother was killed in Chicago, you know? And that’s always going to be a thing to me. So we look at it from a personal place. You know, many of my students have lost people. But we also look at it from a “How did we get here? Like, where is the violence happening? Where isn’t it happening? Where are, you know, a lot of our reports of police brutality? Where aren’t they? Why do you think that is? What does that mean for us?”

Tamara Spears: For me, that’s one of the things that has evolved over time: helping the kids see the connections. My first teaching year, I basically did a really good job of letting the kids know slavery was the cause of the Civil War, and that was pretty much as good as it got. Now I feel like I’m much more methodic and intentional about where I start and where I go. What’s the ending? What is the goal? And how did we get here?

Like you say, you know, about the violence in Chicago, a lot of people are like, “Oh, you see? It’s black-on-black crime.” But we never talk about why, and what is happening with the institutions there, with the closing of schools and the building of this huge police academy, and just thinking of those things and, like you said, how does it actually affect the people there?

Jordan Lanfair: When we talk about the Great Migration, when people left the South, Chicago was one of the black meccas. The running joke is: Do you know how much our ancestors had to hate racism to come to Chicago? Like, it gets negative 12 degrees. That’s what they wanted. That—that was preferable to life in the South.

But that always lets us talk about, you know, the Great Migration because a lot of my kids have families that are still in Arkansas and Mississippi and, you know, Kentucky. We’re like, “Well you know, you do realize that there was this time when everyone just kind of went north?” And they went to Harlem, and they went to Chicago, and that drastically altered how the South looks and how the North looks. And, you know, what’s going on. But that also lets me teach about the Southern Strategy.

And so one of the really cool things that I’ve been able to do is use 13th—Ava DuVernay’s documentary.

Tamara Spears: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Lanfair: To kind of talk about, you know, black depictions and media, and what is the 13th Amendment and, you know, how does it feed into the prison-industrial complex? But it lets us have those conversations because we talk about the 14th Amendment and, you know, voting rights bills and what makes a citizen, and how it all still kind of had to end on this abolishment of slavery, and how we were ill-prepared as a country to kind of handle that.

Tamara Spears: My great-grandfather was a sharecropper in Denmark, South Carolina. He made his way, as they say, on the midnight train to New York, and became a janitor. After about a year, he was able to bring up his wife, my great-grandmother, as well as my grandmother and eight other children. Seven of their own, and my great-grandmother’s nephews and niece. Previous to him coming up, his sisters came up. And so as you can see, it’s that whole idea of the Great Migration. And I tell the kids, you know, “to me that’s fascinating that my great-grandfather was able to get away from being a sharecropper, come up to New York, work as a janitor, then bring up a whole family with basically ten people.” And they lived in the little janitor’s quarters. They were on East 10th Street, I believe.

And then after that, a couple of years, they were able to buy a house. They were the first black family out in Crown Heights. And what happened was the white flight. After they saw black faces arriving, a lot of the white families disappeared and it became a mostly black people block. And to me that’s—that’s very fascinating. I tell the kids: “We look down on certain people and the jobs that they do, or the reasons they come over, or how did they get here? But this is the movement of people. This is the story of America—of people coming here to make a better way.” And I interweave that story and have pictures—I show them the pictures and they’re like, “What? That’s crazy!” And they’re always fascinated in just how our individual stories are part of the American story, are part of the black American story. 

This is part of an oral history. And I ask them to go back, ask your family, you know, find out how did you get to New York? What generation New York are you? Like, I tell the kids I’m only second-generation New York because of this story. And a lot of kids also come from the Caribbean, and they tell their stories about how they got here, and how their family worked night and day, and then they became where we are today. So interweaving that story of the Jim Crow era, the Great Migration, my grandfather was in the Korean War. So making sure that they can see I see myself in history. So then, how can you see yourself in history? How about you, Jordan?

Jordan Lanfair: Okay, listen, there are a lot of great Dad stories, but this is not my best Dad story. So, my daughter is half white. And so, once when we went to Florida I didn’t put sunblock on her. I’m like, “I don’t need sunblock,” and then I walked off. Because I don’t. Because I have a lovely melanated complexion, but my daughter’s a bit lighter. And she burned just a little. I’m like, “Okay.” It was this entry point that was big for me to think about. She’s gonna not be white enough to be white. And for some people, she’s not gonna be black enough to be black. And so she inhabits this completely different world that I have no clue about. And so it really made me start thinking about, you know, my family. And my mom is 53. And so I was like, I started doing the math. I’m like, “Oh wow!” Like yes, schools were integrated but, you know, they weren’t happy about it. They—they were still fighting it. But she has older siblings. I’m like, “Oh, they went—they definitely went to segregated schools.”

And my grandma died and she was 80. I’m like—and I remember her telling me like, “Oh yeah. You know, your grandpa came home one day and he just said, ‘We got to go.’” And that was from Little Rock, Arkansas, in, like, the early 1920s, or—well 1930s-ish. I’m like, “Huh. Okay.’ And so I messaged my mom once. I’m like, “So great-grandma would have been a sharecropper.” She’s like, “I believe so. And if I’m not 100 percent on great-grandma, great-great-grandma would have either been a sharecropper or a slave, just because of how the years worked out.” I’m like, “Wow. Here I have this daughter who inhabits this completely different world. I have this mom who inhabits this completely different world. This grandmother, this aunt, this uncle—all black, living in the same country, but navigating spaces differently, navigating what it means in this world in such different ways.”

For me, my daughter—you know, the great love of my life, she’s gonna have this incredible duality within her. So, really, every day honestly makes me reflect on, how am I fitting in this world? Because I’m not going to inhabit the same world she does, and I don’t the same one that my mom does and all this. So it’s this constant conversation about, like, who am I, and who is she going to be, who am I preparing her to be? And because my daughter goes everywhere with me, I mean, she comes into my classes. And these are conversations that I kind of have openly when I worked with Latino students. One of the big things for them was, “I don’t speak Spanish. My parents do. Like, my parents are from Mexico or somewhere else.” And that’s different for us. Like that’s hard for me to walk in this world and, you know, then they talk about their past experiences.

Tamara Spears: You just reminded me of something when you were saying about the integrated schools. So, when I was in college, we had—I took an oral history class and we had an assignment, you know, pick a topic, interview people. And I was interviewing my mom and my dad about busing. And they had some very interesting stories about being bused out of their neighborhood to a neighbor—another neighborhood where they would be chased with bats and made sure they get on the bus at the right time, because if you miss the bus, you know, who knows what might happen to you?

And so even that current history can be reflected, even though it’s not directly slavery. And just a word about oral history, or even any kind of project that we would give our kids or teachers would give their kids relating or pertaining to slavery, you know, not—not saying, you know, “Go back to your family and find out who was a slave.” That may not be the right way to go about some type of oral history project.

Jordan Lanfair: No.

Tamara Spears: But making sure that, if you do an oral history project, keeping it within a topic that all of the kids could explore. And then if those type of stories do come out, then hey, even better. But not focusing on, you know, “find out if your ancestor was a slave” type of thing.

Jordan Lanfair: Yeah. You know, just going and directly asking about traumatic events or America’s shame—not things that I would recommend for people. But I think one of the cool things that—it’s always great to do with oral history—and sometimes I just make it homework—is just go ask about a moment that was important to someone in your family, you know? Like, it’s those moments that you can, on your own, you can go look at the context, right? Like, sometimes when my aunts or uncles or, like, my grandma would talk about, “What I remember that we used to be able to walk home from school, and then we’d go have lunch at home, and then we’d go back to school.” And they would, you know, be able to describe the neighborhood and all this. And, you know, that’s her great moment. And me being able to be critical, I go back and look at the time frame and I look at the school and I look at the neighborhood, and it was like, “Yeah, you could do that because you lived in a segregated neighborhood. Like, there was redlining around there.” But that doesn’t necessarily matter when you’re just thinking about these moments sometimes.

And so I think, like, one of the great access points we have as teachers and as people in—in gathering oral history but just in having great conversations—is looking back and thinking about moments that are important. And then we can put the context to them later. But to get that firsthand account—and with context, with time, I’m able to add those layers, but my entry point is still this person. And so I think these conversations are always interesting, especially when we have them with family members but like, “Well, what do you remember from school?” It’s like, “Oh well, what it—like, what did you study? What was the neighborhood like?” And then getting to add those layers on. That—that’s always interesting for me.

Tamara Spears: Which is to me, I guess, a good segue, you know, what advice would you give teachers considering expanding their curriculum regarding slavery, or Jim Crow era? But specifically slavery, what advice would you give them?

Jordan Lanfair: Hmm. I mean I think it’s twofold, wouldn’t you? Like, because we… we serve different clienteles. Or maybe I’m wrong in that. But like, we have black people—and specifically black people who are going to teach slavery. And we have—actually three, then. We have white people, and we have non-black people of color who are teaching about slavery. And I think each of those groups has a different kind of responsibility. They have a different entry point, but they also have a different history and experience with America, with black people, with racism. You know, we have different power dynamics in there. And so I think the number one rule is, find your entry point that’s authentic, right?

Like, if my entry point is, you know, I’ve worked with the children of migrant workers, so let’s say that was an entry point. I got a lot of quality work when we mentioned—when we talked about the workers’ rights movement, when we delved into their history, and then showed how it linked with the civil rights movement, and then worked backwards at what was going on, you know? As a black person, I can honestly—I could just head it on, you know? Like, that’s my history, that’s my family, that’s my experience with racism, with institutional and structural racism, with, you know, people asking, can they touch my hair? Can they touch my daughter’s hair? So, I’m able to handle it, you know, especially when I work with black classes, I can just go right at it. I wouldn’t suggest that for some people.

I think white teachers have to take a lot of care, and they need to know their stuff. And I don’t just mean their curriculum, I don’t just mean their dates and their facts. They need to be able to understand what role their privilege and their history has played in the formation of this country. And because of the formation of this country, the oppression of people of color and the continued and systematic murder and oppression of black people. Like, that’s just the reality of it. So you have to have that in mind, and that has to inform your decisions. But I don’t know, maybe I’m seeing it—maybe I’m seeing those three different groups, and that’s not quite how to look at it. What do you have? Like, what would you recommend for people who are, you know, considering teaching slavery, or kind of dipping their toes in the curriculum planning?

Tamara Spears: I think those three groups are pretty distinct, you know? So I would agree that there would be about approximately three different groups of people approaching this. But I think, regardless of the group, you have to learn. You have to spend the time to know the content. A lot of people are like, you know, “Skills, skills, skills.” But not knowing the content, not knowing the content knowledge, will hamper you. Because they say when you’re doing public speaking, one of the ways to be confident is to know what you’re talking about.

Jordan Lanfair: Mm-hmm.

Tamara Spears: And that goes for teaching, too. So I would say, learn, learn, learn, regardless of if you’re white, if you’re black or, you know, some other race that’s not white or black, any of those things. You still have to learn. You still have to know what you’re talking about before you go in. I would say the next thing is, have a plan of knowing how you’re going to deal with your own emotions, whether that be rage, whether that be denial, or whether that be apathy because you feel like you don’t have any skin in the game. You have to be able to deal with, not only your emotions, but the emotions of the kids you will teach. So when you’re having discussions, be mindful of, is the question you’re asking going to just make the class explode? Or is it a question that they can get some academic knowledge out of it? And if it would make sense to have a conversation. So thinking about the way that you frame questions so that there—there’s not like a powder keg and you’re just setting things off and you don’t have a way to bring it back.

So I guess having a safe space is crucial. So starting from day one. If you’re a teacher that likes to have discussions, you would already know that you’ve got to create a safe space. But if it’s something that you’re not used to, if you’re used to just lecturing, then you have to create a safe space if you’re going to have a question—or even not questions. Even if you are a lecturer type of teacher, you still need to create a safe space because what you’re saying is going to impact those students that you teach, regardless of the race that they are.

Also, developing activities that are not just the student listening to what you have to say. Make them think, make them write, make them discuss, put them out there so that they can start developing their own thoughts. There’s a lot of influence nowadays. People are out there saying all types of things and, you know, that whole fake news thing. That idea that you can just say whatever you want to say, and don’t have any facts or base knowledge. Or when people present you with the facts and you say, “Well, there’s alternative facts,” you know? So giving the kids the opportunity to work with facts, work with secondary sources, work with primary sources. Use sources from today. Pull up the latest tweet from such and such person and really dissect what they’re saying. And I guess that—that would be my last thing. Make connections with today so that the kids can really see the relevance.

Jordan Lanfair: Yeah, I mean fake news, but I think without going too deep down the rabbit hole, the thing that I’m very, very adamant about with my students: Those things are dangerous because we have people actively trying to rewrite history. You know, like when we had Texas trying to rewrite textbooks to talk about, like, the happy slaves, or omit slavery completely. That’s dangerous. When we had that computer game that was gamifying a slave’s escape. Those things are dangerous. And so, I think that’s the big thing about what we do and what we have to keep in mind and know and be really preaching to people, is that the stakes are high even when they seem like they aren’t. Like, you may just view it as an activity or a lesson a day or a reading you had and a really cool idea, but when you have someone come out and say that the Ku Klux Klan, “Oh, I thought they were great until I found out they smoked marijuana,”—these are actual quotes—it’s like, if you don’t have the wherewithal, the come—the competency to understand who and what the Ku Klux Klan is and was and what they’ve done, that goes over your head.

If you don’t have the historical context to look at voting blocs and then understand why gerrymandering is a thing, why it’s hurting us, and why voter disenfranchisement is hurting us, why these activists, why you know, Obama’s foundation, why Eric Holder, they’ve come out and spoken on the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. If you don’t teach and understand these things, it’s dangerous for you as a citizen. And I think that’s the—the big push is, at the end of the day where—we aren’t making students, we’re making citizens. They’re students in our class, right? Like, I teach slavery and Jim Crow and I teach, you know, the civil rights era, and I teach these things because they are curriculum now, but they’re lives as well. You know, I taught The Hate U Give this year, which… talk about a book that in an accessible way talks about the legacy of slavery—but it’s because the stakes are so high, right? We’re constantly trying to make better 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, you have to go into this preparation, this—this learning that you’re talking about… 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 ninth- and tenth- grade multicultural literature on Chicago’s South Side. And Tamara Spears teaches social studies to sixth- through eighth-graders in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. Throughout this series, we have featured scholars to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that award-winning collection. 

We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials—which are available at tolerance.org/podcasts. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching the history of American slavery.

Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center—providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at Tolerance.org.

Thanks to Ms. Spears and Mr. Lanfair for sharing their insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford, with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is the project manager. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zabriskie.

I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries—Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.