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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Transcript

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.

Resources and Readings

• Learning for Justice, Black History Month: Teaching the Complete History
• Learning for Justice, What Is White Privilege, Really?
• Learning for Justice, Black Oppression and Resistance
   

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My people! This is your host, Hasan Kwame Jeffries.

For several months we’ve been talking about ways to better educate students about the history of American slavery—and we’ve said a whole lot. But now it’s time for us over here to be quiet and to listen to you! Teachers and educators, what new ideas, suggestions or techniques have you tried since listening to podcast? And what happened? How did your students react and respond? Did the experience raise new questions for you? These are the sorts of things we’re interested in.

So, we want you to send us your questions and stories. You can email them to lfjpodcasts@splcenter.org. Seriously, send us your stuff—tell us what you’ve been doing. That email address, again, is lfjpodcasts@splcenter.org. We’re going to answer as many of your questions as possible in an upcoming episode of Teaching Hard History. 

Remember, back in Episode 5, the exchange I shared with a middle school educator who was wrestling with how to teach American slavery? Her frank and honest inquiry, and my response, is the kind of exchange we hope to have with you.

The message began: “Good Morning Mr. Jeffries…”

Izzy Anderson: “Good morning, Mr. Jeffries. I am a school librarian in the Arkansas Delta. In addition to being a librarian, I also teach a small gifted and talented literacy class, which is made up primarily of black sixth grade boys. My students do not get a full year of social studies at my school, so I’m modifying my curriculum to teach black history to my students this month, and probably for the rest of the year. I am starting with slavery, so I’ve been listening to your podcast for ideas.”

“I am a white educator, and I’m concerned about teaching history in a way that is honest and true but avoids traumatizing my young students. My students live in an area of the country that, in many ways, is still experiencing the reality of Jim Crow. I think it’s really important for them to understand their own history, but I don’t want to do an information dump on them without also caring for their hearts. I’d appreciate any suggestions you might have. Izzy Anderson.”

“I have nine boys and one girl in this class. I was going to do a quick overview of black history, but I realized that my kids don’t really know anything about slavery, and they also don’t have a concept of a timeline. They don’t understand the distance between Martin Luther King and slavery, or how long slavery had been around. They just didn’t know anything about it, so I was, ‘Oh, we have to stop here,’ because slavery is understanding the black experience, and their experience in the world as black people that live in the deep South.”

“Black people whose grandparents, and great-great-grandparents didn’t leave during the great migration after slavery. They’re the ancestors of the people who stayed here, and so I was like, I feel like they really need to understand slavery and that experience in order to understand where they came from. I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m not the person that should be teaching them about where they came from. I’m not the person who should be teaching them about this trauma, but I’m the only person that’s here who’s going to do it, so I have to figure out how to do it right.’”

“My concern was that they were just going to be like, ‘This is horrible, and it makes me feel really bad, and I feel really bad about this,” because obviously conversations about slavery, and being like, “Your ancestors were slaves, your ancestors were abused and murdered for a really long time, and mine weren’t.’ It’s a really hard conversation to have, and I was really worried—okay, if I’m gonna lay this out on the table for them, am I going to traumatize them? Am I going to give them all this horrible information, and they’re going to hear about all this horrible stuff, and all this rape and stuff as sixth graders, and then they’re just going to have nightmares, and it’s going to be horrible, and I’m going to get angry calls from parents because their kids can’t sleep?

“Should I whitewash it a little bit? Should I sanitize it a little bit for them, because they’re young, but still have the knowledge that nobody else may ever teach them about this again, and that sanitized version of it may be all that they learn about it? Should I just put it out on the table, and assume, or hope, that it’s something that they can cope with? I feel like I need to talk to somebody who actually knows about this, and so that’s where I ended up finding this podcast, and then reaching out.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I knew exactly where Ms. Anderson was coming from, both as an educator, and as an African American who had mostly white teachers in elementary and high school. I appreciated her candor and concern, as well as her commitment to teach more than what was required. So, I messaged her back: “Hi Izzy, thank you very much for your thoughtful note. I suggest beginning the conversation in the present by explaining to your kids that you have to look to the past to understand current times. That will help get them interested, and don’t avoid talking about the harshness and brutality of slavery. No one who watches television is unaware of violence, but it needs to be explained that slavery was so brutal because black people were constantly resisting in every way imaginable.”

“Explain to them how central slavery was to American growth, and you can’t emphasize enough that there is real pride to be found in this history, the pride of surviving a horribly unjust system, the pride of knowing their ancestors resisted, the pride of knowing that black people were right in their insistence that slavery was wrong, and the pride of knowing that the enslaved never gave up hope—they never surrendered their humanity. Be clear with them, too, about what was right and wrong, about who showed true strength and courage, and they’ll get it. It’s not going to be easy, as they will have a range of reactions and emotions, but affirm those feelings. Tell them, ‘Yes, this makes me mad too,’ and always redirect them toward drawing inspiration from the enslaved who endured, who fought, who survived despite all odds. Good luck.” 

Izzy Anderson: “And that really gave me a direction to go in. I’m going to focus on resistance movements. I’m going to focus on the development of culture in the face of people who really didn’t want slaves to develop culture. Not to avoid those really, really tough topics—that our kids are exposed to violence and things in their real lives, and in media all the time. For us to assume that they can’t handle it is probably not giving them enough credit, and that I can tell them about these things as long as I frame it in the context of resistance, in the context of survival. Of being like, okay, yes, black people endured this, but they also survived it, and thrived, and created a culture and resisted all the time.”

“If I teach it to them, all these things to them, in that context, then it’s going to be really powerful for them. That’s the direction that I’ve taken it. Once I really dove in and started to have these really scary conversations with kids, and telling them about these really scary things, they handled it much better than I thought that they were going to. They expressed that they were really happy to know this, and they took out of it what I had hoped that they could take out of it, which is this anger, but it’s a righteous anger.”

“I think looking at the people who change the world, there are often people that have righteous anger. I think if I can engender that, or help kids develop that anger—because there’s a lot of things now that they should be angry about—if that anger can be formed in a base of history and understanding of the world, then I hope that kids can go out, and my kids can go out and be advocates. That anger that I see in them is the right kind of anger. It’s what I wanted, and it’s what I want to continue to develop as I keep talking to them about these things.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Two days later I received another message from Ms. Anderson, an update on what had been going on in her class.

Izzy Anderson: “Thank you so much for such a long and thoughtful message. Since I’ve read it, I’ve been really leaning into letting students express their emotions as we read and learn.”

“What I didn’t expect is the amount of anger they are expressing. They’re angry, wondering, ‘Why haven’t I learned this before?’ and I think the anger is righteous. My job now is to help them express it constructively.” 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: “And that’s the thing,” I wrote back, “Your students’ reaction, their righteous anger, is consistent with the reaction of my students in college, both black and white. When they are exposed to the truth in a thoughtful and honest way, they get pissed off, but not at the truth teller, but rather at those who withheld the truth from them. Now you have to capitalize on that anger,” I said. “Use it as motivation for them to learn more about what others aren’t going to teach them. I promise, you will be the teacher who they will remember because you told them what others wouldn’t. Peace, Hasan.”

What I love about hearing Izzy’s question and story again is how much we can learn from each other’s experiences in the classroom. Because we all want to do a better job of teaching the hard history of American slavery. 

So, email those questions and stories to lfjpodcasts@splcenter.org. We’re looking forward to reading them.

I’m Dr. 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, Preserving a More Honest History
• Learning for Justice, The White House: A Slave's View

Christian Cotz

• James Madison’s Montpelier
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Price Thomas

• LinkedIn

Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes

• Associate Dean, African-American Affairs, University of Virginia
• Montpelier, African-American Descendants Project
• LinkedIn

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I have always been fascinated by historic sites. Mesmerized by the thought of standing in the very same place where history happened. As a kid growing up in New York, I enjoyed field trips to places that commemorated the American Revolution in nearby Massachusetts, even more than I did getaways to Great Adventure Amusement Park in neighboring New Jersey. History, of course, happens everywhere, but pivotal moments in history happen only in specific places, and only a handful of those places have been preserved. So, a year or so ago, when I was invited to be a part of small, focused think tank about race, and the legacy of American slavery at Montpelier, the Virginia estate of James Madison, the nation’s fourth president, I immediately said yes.

James Madison was the father of the United States Constitution. He was also an enslaver. He held more than 100 people in bondage at his plantation, and never freed a single soul. Not even upon his death. So, while the historian in me, as well as the kid in me, was enthusiastic and eager about being a part of this dialogue at Madison’s home, the African American in me, the brother in me, had serious reservations.

As a descendant of enslaved African Americans, I hold no affection for those who kept my people in bondage, nor fondness for the forced labor camps where they toiled. This is a part of that double consciousness that DuBois talked about: the inescapable way black people see America, because of the harsh way America treats black people. These thoughts are not easily set aside, which is part of the cost of being black and woke, so I carry these thoughts with me to the think tank.

The Montpelier workshop took place on a weekend in January 2017, and since I was already scheduled to deliver a MLK Day address in College Park, Maryland, that Friday, I decided just to drive the two hours to Montpelier. It turned out to be a relaxing ride. My lecture on making Dr. King matter again had been very well received, so I was in good spirits. And the traffic gods shined favor on me, getting me in and out of D.C. ahead of the rush-hour crush. Montpelier is tucked away in the rolling hills of the central Virginia countryside; the restored mansion, Madison’s home, sits on high ground, offering sweeping views of hundreds of acres of verdant fields, and lush old-growth forest. Far from the hustle and bustle of urban life, Montpelier’s remoteness and natural beauty is calming. But as I drew near, I felt a real uneasiness. This was, after all, a site of black enslavement. I remember thinking as the mansion first came into my view, “Bruh, you need to keep on driving, and go home.” But once again, historical curiosity got the best of me, so I pressed on.

I pulled up just in time for a behind-the-scenes tour of Montpelier’s exhibition on slavery, called “The Mere Distinction of Colour,” which was then still six months away from opening to the public. Christian Cotz, Montpelier’s director of education and visitor engagement, who led the tour, explained in vivid detail the exhibit’s purpose, themes and features, making clear that they were crafting a narrative that recog nized black humanity, that celebrated black resilience and resistance, that acknowledged the yawning gulf between Madison’s beliefs and behaviors, and explained the importance of slavery to the nation’s founding.

The staff’s commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about American slavery, and engagement with the descendants of Montpelier’s enslaved community, was refreshing to see, and it eased my anxiety considerably. But that night, all of my spidey senses were working overtime. Somehow, I had overlooked the fact that we were actually all staying on-site. In well-appointed farmhouses, but still, on-site. On a former slave plantation, in the middle of rural Virginia. I kid you not, that night, I made sure my door was securely locked. I hadn’t seen the movie Get Out yet, but I was ready to bounce at the first sight and sound of white weirdness. No, I didn’t ask for any tea, thank you very much.

But, morning came, as it always does, and I was still free, so I set about the task at hand—working with the other scholars and filmmakers to develop ideas for a film treatment on the legacies of slavery. It was a thoughtful, thought-provoking, productive and engaging full day of work. One that eventually gave rise to a fantastic film short that is featured in the permanent exhibition that connects America’s past to America’s present in a soul-stirring way.

James Madison’s Montpelier explores American slavery at a historic site, exactly the way it ought to be done: accurately and honestly. And although I do not consider Madison’s home a personal pilgrimage site, as do many of the white visitors who journey there to pay homage to the father of the Constitution— you see, it’s that whole double-consciousness thing again—I do very much consider it the place to go, the historic site to visit to see, to feel and to understand, the depth and breadth of American slavery, and the experiences of enslaved African Americans.

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 navi gating those challenges, so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history, and legacy, of American slavery.

In June 2017, the Montpelier Foundation unveiled an exhibition called “The Mere Distinction of Colour,” that examines the great American paradox of slavery and freedom. In this special episode, I talk with three people who helped develop the exhibit and promote it. We discuss the genesis of the project, and the kinds of educational programs they have created for integrating slavery, and its legacy, into the story of the founding of America and the drafting of the Constitution. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

I am really excited to welcome to the Teaching Hard History: American Slavery podcast, three special guests with connections to James Madison’s Montpelier in central Virginia. We have Christian Cotz, who is the director of education and visitor engagement at James Madison’s Montpelier; Mr. Price Thomas, who is the director of marketing and communications at Montpelier; and Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes, who is an associate professor of social studies education and associate dean in the office of African-Amer ican affairs at the University of Virginia. She has been involved in the African-American Descendants Project at Montpelier as an educational consultant. Thanks so much for taking the time out to share some thoughts and observations with the podcast.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Delighted to be here.

Christian Cotz: Yeah, man, we’re excited.

Price Thomas: Absolutely.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Christian, let me begin with you. Could you share with us just a little bit of the historical background of James Madison, and the history of Montpelier?

Christian Cotz: Sure. Montpelier is a plantation about 30 miles north of Charlottesville, Virginia. Today it’s 2,650 acres; in Madison’s time, it was well over 5,000. It contains lots of open fields and wooded lots. It was first built by Madison’s parents in 1765. The plantation itself was started by his grandparents in the 1720s. Madison was born in 1751, he attends Princeton in the late 1760s-early 1770s, and then gets involved in the American Revolution on the political end of things. He becomes the champion of religious freedom in Virginia, passes Jefferson’s statute for religious freedom, pushes that through the state legislature. He becomes the father of the Constitution in 1787, the architect of the Bill of Rights, helps Hamilton write The Federalist Papers, getting ratification in New York for the Constitution, and then makes a campaign promise when he’s running as representative in the house, to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, and thereby gets Virginia’s vote for ratification.

He will be Secretary of State for Thomas Jefferson and the fourth president of the United States, from 1808 to 1817, and then spends his retirement years here at Montpelier from 1817 until he dies in 1836. He’s married to Dolley Madison for 42 years; they have a great relationship. They never have any children, but Dolley had a child from her first marriage named Payne Todd who will grow up here. Madison will abhor slavery his entire life, he writes about it all the time, from the time he’s a young man in college, until the time he dies—and yet he’ll be a slave owner his entire life and will never free a single individual. And he’ll own well over 100.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: When did Montpelier become a visitor site? A site where people from around the country, and around the world, could actually come and explore the life and legacy of James Madison?

Christian Cotz: Montpelier is unique amongst founding fathers’ homes because Montpelier was a private residence until 1984, so we’re very young as far as presidential sites go, and historic house museums go. We opened as a museum in 1987, but there really wasn’t much of a museum here then—it was just a great big open house without much furniture in it. It wasn’t until we completed the architectural restoration in 2008, that the house really transformed, and let visitors really envision the president’s home.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Price, if I could bring you into the conversation a little bit, could you share with us what the overall mission of James Madison’s Montpelier is today?

Price Thomas: Yeah, our mission is really to connect the past to the present using the institutional knowledge that we have, which is the Constitution and the lens of the Constitution, and how that fits and weaves into the American founding era, and how that era has influenced our American DNA and a lot of what we’re contending with in modern times. What we don’t want to be is a period piece, or a period site, right? We don’t want to explore history for history’s sake; we want to explore it for the sake of relevance and to help contextualize the life that we’re all living today.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: How has the mission—connecting the past to the present—changed and evolved since Montpelier came online as a public site?

Price Thomas: I think the beauty of a site like this is that history is additive. And I think it’s important for sites like ours to be agile, and to also be forward-thinking. The present is obviously not always the present, right, because that’s a moving target, so it’s been extremely important over the past two or three years to do all the work that we’ve done around slavery, around difficult history, and around our continued descendant en gagement. That has been a project that has been very important to Montpelier for the last 19 or 20 years. Being able to connect, again, to the present as a time period, but also to the people, and to the stories, and to the voices of those who have the lived experiences, who have the connections to the site and the history, is vitally important to accurate, authentic and holistic interpretation.

Christian Cotz: If I can just add to that: Madison has always been at the forefront of our interpretation. I’ve been here for almost 20 years now, and as the house has been restored, more of Madison and his world has become visible. But as we’ve restored the Madison house, we’ve recognized that we needed to also restore the landscape, and the lives of the enslaved community that lived here. There were a half dozen Madisons that lived here over the course of 150 years, but there were over 300 enslaved people here. So, over the last two decades, we’ve slowly been rebuilding that landscape as well, starting with the Gilmore cabin back in 2005, then moving into the south-yard area in 2008, ’09, ’10. We restored the segregated train depot in 2011, and then we did the final restoration of the south yard just in these last few years.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: So, it really has been additive, Price, as you were saying. One of the things that has been missing from so many of the historic sites, presidential sites, that deal with slavery, that has needed to be added, and in cluded, and interpreted, has been the history of the enslaved people who were a part of these households.

Dr. Grimes, if I could ask you this, what have you seen? Could you share with us just some general observations about this sort of marginalized history of enslaved people at these historic sites—Montpelier, Mount Vernon, Monticello—if you will?

Patrice Preston Grimes: Sure. For the majority of the presidential sites—quite frankly all of them until very recently—it was one story. It was the narrative of the privileged, it was the narrative of the people who owned the land, who bought the slaves. Because that history was so intertwined with the founding fathers, there was a narrative that was told that supported, glorified, rationalized, many of the things that occurred throughout our history. The challenge of that is, when there’s a dominant narrative, it can be very difficult for people who have other voices and other stories and other perspectives that are just as valid, and just as real, and empirically have been proven to exist, to have a voice.

What I think has made Montpelier so unique is that while some may see its journey evolving on this path as being relatively new, compared to Mount Vernon, or Monticello, for example, that’s the very thing that has really enabled the voice of descendants and people in community to be heard and to come to the fore. Another thing, too, that I think really influenced Montpelier evolving in the way that it did was the fact that the lands and the grounds were held by very few people over generations, and so within the Orange County, Virginia, communities, you have descendants who are still living in the area. You have ties that the community has had. Christian mentioned, specifically, Rebecca Gilmore Coleman. She was the granddaughter of George Gilmore, who was enslaved. When he was free, he purchased the land across the road from Montpelier, and the fact that she’s still living in this community, and she has descendants in this community, was a really big impetus for people to say, “We want to see a more physical representation and interpretation.”

Then, finally, I think there’s something about the land itself, and because of the tremendous archeological work, versus historical documentation that’s done at many sites, literally the earth and the ground tell the story. Because, you know, we know so often from a Eurocentric standpoint, if it hasn’t been written, people would say it didn’t happen. We’re not only relying, now, on historical archives, letters, diaries, things of that sort, that people have left, we literally are using the earth that’s being excavated to find the places and spaces where people lived, and worked and co-habited.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christian, Dr. Grimes just noted that the recapturing and retelling the story of the enslaved who are part of the history of Montpelier, who make Montpelier go, and who make it possible, that it’s been necessary to grab different threads, different—sort of historical threads, evidentiary threads, that can be woven together to create a tapestry that re-creates, replicates to a certain extent, the history of their lives. One of those, certainly, is archeology. Could you say a little bit about the archeological work that is going on at Montpelier?

Christian Cotz: Dr. Matt Reeves is the director of archeology here, and he’s had a great public archeology program going for almost two decades. Matt and I started in the spring of 2000, and one of the first things that Matt did was really open up Montpelier to be a place where other people could come and learn about archeology. He didn’t want to be a scientist hiding in a bubble, or behind the scenes. He wanted other people to understand what archeology was, and what it was capable of, and that it was more than just digging in the soil and examining artifacts. Over the last couple years, he’s developed a program where not only field school students from universities, but the public at large, can come and participate in archeological digs, learn how to be an archeologist. Go through lectures and seminars, and understand the history, and spend time digging in the units, finding artifacts, washing artifacts, cataloging artifacts.

He’s also created programs where people are learning how to rebuild the structures that were here, historically, that they’re finding the architectural evidence of. They dig in the ground, they find the evidence of the building, and then people can come and actually learn how to timber frame or build a log cabin and rebuild the structure. As these programs have grown and developed, Matt’s also been at the forefront of engaging with the descendant community, and by that, I mean the descendants of the enslaved community here. People in that community have come in and participated in the archeological digs, and in the rebuilding programs. You have the descendants of people who were enslaved here unearthing artifacts that were last held, potentially, by their ancestors, and then rebuilding their ancestor’s homes so that they can be an educational venue for visitors to Montpelier to learn through.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I tell you, that really is amazing, and that really does not only make the past come alive, it makes that connection, that Price that you were talking about, between the past and the present. In a way, it sort of shrinks time, by having folk who have blood ties to that land, to that place, to that soil, be a part of the retrieval process. Christian, if I could ask you, could you say a little bit about how the engagement with the descendant community began?

Christian Cotz: Well, it started back in 1999, when Rebecca Gilmore Coleman came knocking on the front door of Montpelier. Literally. She talked with our director at the time, and said, “Hey, do you know what that fallen-down log cabin is over there, across the street from the main gate?” And, at the time, Montpelier was pretty new—10 years old as a historic site. There were 160 structures on the 2,600 acres, and really the only ones that we were really concerned with were the mansion and the temple, at the time. Both Madison structures. The other 158 structures were various buildings that were built over the 19th and 20th centuries by different owners of Montpelier, as far as we knew. So, we didn’t know what that falling-down structure tucked in the woods across from the main gate was, and she informed us that it was the home of her great- grandfather, who was enslaved in Montpelier, who built that house after emancipation. Her father was born in that house, and she thought it would be a good idea if Montpelier restored it, so that we could tell the story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

We agreed with her, and we thought it would be a good idea, too, and we announced the restoration in 2000, or 2001, and it took a few years to get the job done because it had very limited funding, but we opened the Gilmore Cabin in 2005. Over the years, Rebecca’s really opened doors for Montpelier into the African-American community in Orange, and elsewhere. As we met new people and learned new stories, we were able to come to a completely new, fuller and different understanding of the enslaved community and their experiences here at Montpelier. Those relationships grew, and we met more and more people, and more and more people got involved, and people began to come on Matt’s archeology programs, and on the rebuilding programs, and people came to descendant reunions.

Patrice Preston Grimes: I think it’s really important to note: Nothing happens this way without vision and without leadership. The thing that made Montpelier, and the people, different at the time—was they were willing not to dig into and retain a master narrative. Everything was not secondary to the master narrative about James Madison, and that when Rebecca Gilmore Coleman was able to articulate her ownership, and her legacy, and her representation as one of many people, there were people on the other side of that table who were open to listening. I think that’s really, really key. So, from the very beginning, descendants who were skeptical, who maybe had never paid attention and driven by that rundown cabin and didn’t know, as well, were much more open to engaging because they thought they had a chance to be heard. I think that’s really important. And, for many years, there was that distinction; we call it Town-Gown, we call it, you know, in universities, just in terms of plantation, community.

This is not to say that the relationships with the African-American community, and people within the Montpelier Foundation, have always been good, have always been rosy. Quite the contrary. For many people, for many generations, Montpelier and Orange County was the place where black people worked. They didn’t even see it as being a historical site. So, it definitely took some openness and a frame of mind on both parts to begin to have these difficult conversations, to see what could come from it. And then having the physical entity of the cabin, I think, was so important because again, we tend to be people who will believe more of what we can see, and touch, and feel, as opposed to what we’re told.

Once people in the community realized “No, there is something very concrete here that we can look at, that gives us a sense of ownership.” Not in the traditional sense that Madison had, but we have a stake in the game. These are lands that we definitely helped to create, to fuel the economy, and lifestyle, and so on, that happened in the community. I think that was a key turning point, and that was when people from the community were willing to come through the gates of Montpelier, as people from Montpelier became much more willing, then, to work with the Orange County African-American Historical Society; of which I was a board member for four years, in those early years, when we were trying to bring people to the table to have these discussions before we could even do a lot of the planning.

Christian Cotz: If I could just say a little bit more about that, I mean, people have come to be part of the descendant community through just a multitude of ways. Patrice, you started out interacting with us by bringing your students here, didn’t you?

Patrice Preston Grimes: Yes, yes. I teach classes in social studies education at the University of Virginia, and I came to Orange County for a black history program that was in the community, and I met Rebecca Gilmore Coleman, and anyone who’s met her knows that she’s really dynamic, and as soon as she was telling me about Montpelier, I realized it was a place where I had to bring my students. So, every semester for several years, I brought a group of students to Montpelier, and I’m literally able to teach a certain form of history that spans three centuries, from the mansion to the Gilmore cabin to the train station that was repurposed and done, and I can’t think of anywhere in the United States where I’ve taught where I can give students an arc of history in the same way. Not only over the course of time but also the multiple perspectives.

I’ve got 20- and 21-year-old students who want to be social studies teachers, in elementary and high schools, who seem to be pretty knowledgeable about the content, but whenever they see the cabin, when ever they see the train station that has the “white” and “colored” signs vividly outside with the artifacts inside, they’ve written some phenomenal blogs and essays on how it’s really begun to change their thinking about their own sense of knowing, and how they teach students.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: What I’m hearing is that the key, really, to engaging the descendant community is building relationships that are mutual, that are two-way. In other words, it’s not just a give or a take, but it’s a give and a take. It’s respecting people’s histories, and people’s experiences, including fraught and tense contemporary experiences with place. Price, I’m wondering if you could say a little bit about how you go about, how Montpelier has gone about, developing and cultivating relationships based on trust and mutual respect with the descendant community?

Price Thomas: Part of it comes from a clarity of mission, and you know, another part of it comes from honesty. When we talk about our American DNA, when we talk about the evolution of this country, it’s not really rainbows and sunshine. And black history is not hardly, in any case, rainbows and sunshine for a lot of people. And for a lot of these descendants, this is a real, lived experience for them. They remember those stories passed down from their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents, which is extremely important to us. The other thing, I think, is an openness to more than just what we can find in the historical record. A large portion of our descendant community doesn’t come with DNA evidence, or documentary evidence for a multitude of reasons—but that doesn’t devalue their stories; that doesn’t devalue their oral histories, or the impact that this history has on them and their families. For a lot of the folks that come through, it’s merely a connection to the history, a connection to our mission, a connection to our work.

Part of the reason that we have such an active and engaging descendant community is that we are excited and respectful, and overwhelmingly appreciative that they’re willing to share those stories with us. A lot of that’s tough to talk about. It’s tough to rehash, and sometimes uncomfortable, but this is sort of the courage, and the wisdom, that filters through them from their side, has really helped us to be more open, to be more honest and has shaped our interpretation over the past 15 years here at the site.

Patrice Preston Grimes: If I could tag onto that, one of the things that I’ve heard Kat Imhoff, the president, say: “You don’t have to spit into a test tube for us to check your DNA for you to be engaged with Montpelier.” There are people who are engaged who are biological descendants; there are people who are engaged because they may have lived in this area all their lives, but not necessarily know their ancestry. There are people who realized they may have just cultural connections to the experience of enslaved Africans coming to Virginia, you know, right down the road, you know, in Jamestown, in 1619. I think it’s an openness, and a welcome spirit, that Montpelier has had to just to learn, to learn the different stories, to learn the different perspectives. And honestly to be able to say, “We don’t know.” It’s an empowering, so to speak, that comes from mutual respect of being willing to listen, and also being willing to take the hits when decisions are made, when things are done, and people within the descendant community go, “You know, you might want to think about that.”

But, when you think that it’s genuine in terms of people asking, and people understand that I don’t have the same kind of understandings that you do, and let us sit at the table and see if we can mutually engage where we have similarities, but also respecting those differences. As you know, we’ve been in different settings where there have been some tough conversations, and some things have been thrown out, and people have had to have some pretty thick skin, and, yet, I think it’s the courageous kind of conversations that we’ve been able to begin here on a smaller scale, that we could use a lot more of in society today, in other realms, in terms of people who may seem to be different, but we find that we have much more in common, in some ways, than we think we do.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Dr. Grimes, I wonder to what extent the absence of a white, organized descendant community of James Madison, that has been deeply invested in perpetuating that master narrative that you have talked about, creates space for the participation, inclusion, incorporation of an African-American descendant community?

Patrice Preston Grimes: Oh, I definitely think it’s made all the difference in the world, that not having, as I refer to, that dominant narrative with descendants, who, for their own reasons, were invested in the story, and the history, and the culture of being retold in certain ways.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Obviously, James and Dolley Madison don’t have any biological children, so you don’t have a white descendant community like you have at Monticello with (Thomas) Jefferson, or Mount Vernon with George Washington.

Patrice Preston Grimes: There was a space that was there, and, I guess, good fortune for the African-American community that it was a space that was waiting to be filled. And because, again, people within the community were willing to have their story told, I don’t think descendants ever looked at it in terms of an either/or, or a counter-narrative; it was just our story. And the fact that there wasn’t another story that had to constantly be challenged, or to have the debates going back and forth. I think it’s definitely helped the … I don’t want to say the speed in which things have happened, because, you know, that’s a very relative term. But when you look at where Montpelier was in 2005 when I came to Virginia, for example, and look at what we’ve accomplished over this period of time, there’s still much more to be done, and yet when you look at where other historical sites are still in time and space, I think we have been able to do some things that we might not have been able to do otherwise.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: You mention this idea of our story, African Americans, descendants of the enslaved community at Montpelier, wanting to share their story, wanting to share our story. Collective story of the experience of being enslaved, but then also the experience of fighting slavery, transitioning to freedom and giving meaning to freedom. Christian, Montpelier very easily could have said, “That’s great—we’re so happy to hear your stories, and thank you very much.” And moved right on. But Montpelier didn’t do that; you didn’t do that. In fact, you wound up creating an entire exhibit, “The Mere Distinction of Color,” that really explored this part of the Madison household, if you will, of this community of Montpelier that just wasn’t white with a few black folks sprinkled around, but that had black folks central to the entire Montpelier experience. Could you give us an overview of, first, how the exhibit came about, and the thinking behind it, and then also sort of what could visitors expect to see when they come to see the exhibit?

Christian Cotz: Montpelier’s been open to telling the other side of the story, I think, for as long as I can remember. We’ve always valued the African-American experience—and the African-American journey here, and because of Madison, and because of his connection with the Constitution, you have this sort of arc of citizenship that you can track, here, through the historic sites. Patrice was talking about this a little bit. We have sites here going back to the 1720s and ’30s of enslavement, all the way through the 20th century. There was a Civil War camp here; the Confederate army camped here over the winter between Gettysburg and Wilderness, and so there are these archeological remains of Confederate sites. And then you have the Reconstruction era, George Gilmore cabin, that’s built right on top of that Confederate encampment, and then you have the 1910 segregated train depot, talking about Jim Crow and the segregation era.

So, we’ve had, for a long time, we’ve had this story of the arc of citizenship, and really the descendant community is the part of the story that brings it to the present day, because if you have the segregation leading into the civil rights era, and then the descendant community is the present tense. Over the last several years—the exhibit project that you’re talking about started in 2015, just a year before that, we had had a meeting with the descendant community, and we brought them in for a three-day weekend. Patrice, remember this? Where we talked about interpretation.

Patrice Preston Grimes: I do. And I think it’s no coincidence, as I sit here and think, that if any site were to be the site for this, it would be Montpelier because of Madison being the father of the Constitution. And what immediately came up in that meeting was just the contradiction. How can someone who has written these precepts that we’ve had for 200-plus years, done that, and still been the slaveholder? And I think these questions, which are more in academic circles—and we’re hearing more about them now—were not even on people’s lips 10, 15 years ago. And so, again, with a strong educational program at Montpelier related to the Constitution, and having Constitutional scholars, and educators, and people coming from all over the world to learn, it really seems that now had to be the time to continue to do that work and move forward. You can’t not include the role of the African folks who were here and did that.

Again, I look at the arc of, you know, with the Obama presidency, you know, for the eight years, how that is overlaid with this. There were some things, I think, that were very unique that kind of came together to make more and more people realize “No, this is my country. The stories need to be told. The history needs to be uncovered.” It’s very much interwoven, and we’re never going to move forward if we don’t acknowledge, and teach, and deal with what has happened in the past. Because if we don’t, we continue to be stuck, and we never will be able to move ahead.

Christian Cotz: I think that really came out in that meeting that we had in 2014 when the descendant community came and we spent three days examining the different kinds of interpretation we do about African-American history at Montpelier at the time. We walked through every different program that we offer; we spent a whole day doing that, and we brought in outside scholars from the new Museum of African-American History and Culture, which hadn’t opened yet, but they had a staff, and a few people came down to give talks and tell us what was going on in the world of African-American interpretation around the world. And then we spent a whole day asking the community, “What would you like to see us do? What else needs to be here? What aren’t we doing?” And of course, the big resounding thing that came back was that we had to put the African-American presence, the enslaved presence, back on the landscape. We couldn’t allow visitors to leave here without realizing that there were over 100 people enslaved here at any one time.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And I think that that was a key ah-ha moment in the room because I think so often museums and historical sites think of themselves as being local, and they think and work from the inside out. And I think because of the way everything was evolving, we realized that Montpelier, and the experiences that we were having, were perhaps not unique, but they were an example of a larger world. And so then, to have scholars and people come in, and give us a sense of the diaspora, and how that then played into the Americas, and how Montpelier was an example of that, at that moment, I think, everyone looked at one another and we realized that what we were doing was so much bigger, even than recounting the stories of the enslaved families and people who were here. But, it truly was a representation of the experiences of many people—even if they had never physically been connected, or been to, Montpelier. So that’s when the potential of an exhibit became very exciting because we just hadn’t seen anywhere where a national site was willing to make the international and worldwide connection of enslaved people and slavery, bringing it through the present day. In addition to the personal connection, and the personal stories that people had.

That’s why I think “The Mere Distinction of Color” has become an exhibit that people really want to see because it tells the two stories simultaneously. They exist in tandem. It’s not an “either/or”; It clearly brings out the personal stories of people, and how their lives were affected, but it also places those people in a bigger societal institutional realm, which we as a society very often don’t want to do because we don’t want to look at the structures that create the inequality. It’s much easier to talk about the individual stories.

Christian Cotz: Yeah, and that’s—exactly what Patrice is talking about is exactly what came out of our next meeting with the descendant community advisory council, right? Which is after we had created a rough conceptual plan of the exhibit, we shared it with a group of about 30 people and let them tear it to pieces, and that was a hard day.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Yeah.

Christian Cotz: What came out of that meeting, and meetings before as well, was that, as the home of the father of the Constitution, we needed to own the fact that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery in about a half dozen different ways, and our guy is the guy who created that thing. So, we needed to own that and unpack that for people. We needed to help them explore how slavery fit into the economy of the young nation, and for Madison in particular, how it fit into the ideology of the young nation. Our exhibit does that. It looks at economy. It looks at ideology. It unpacks the ways that the Constitution protected the institution of slavery.

But, then, we also needed to own the fact that because the Constitution protected slavery, even though the Constitution also ended slavery in 1865, there are repercussions to that institution. Right? There are reverberations. There’s a legacy of that institution that we live with every day in our society. We needed to own that, and unpack that for people, and to put it out there. Which I think is probably one of the most provocative parts of our exhibit. We made about a 12-minute-long video piece, that’s a multiscreen video experience, that looks at the legacy of slavery and takes it right up to the present day, which is something that a lot of museums heretofore have not been willing to do. But our leadership went there, and I’m glad they did. We’ve won a couple of national awards for that piece in particular.

Patrice Preston Grimes: It’s much easier to keep people frozen in time because then you don’t have to be inclusive.

Christian Cotz: Right.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And you can just continue to do what you’ve always done, and there’s people who will be receptive to that. But, if you’re really about being more inclusive, telling a more complete history, engaging people in ways that they have not been engaged before, and more importantly, trying to make these past-to-present connections so we can move forward, and not stay on rewind, I think that’s another way that Montpelier is showing other museums and educators and people in the area that it’s possible. And as Christian alluded to, it’s not easy work. We definitely did have to have a facilitator, and we had to take some breaks, but people were still willing to come back to the table. Again, because we shared the common vision of wanting that story to be as representative as it could be in today’s time. And that again is another thing that I think makes it different from other sites.

Christian Cotz: Yeah, and another way that past-present connection works, the connecting of the dots, is part of the exhibit talks about the national story of slavery, as we just discussed, but the other part of the exhibit looks at the lived experience of slavery here at Montpelier. So many museums have talked about slavery before, but most museums focus on the daily work, the poor living conditions and the hard work that the enslaved had to do, or go through.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Or there may be one or two people who are identified in the narrative, and they become the focal point, or the example, and you know, that’s one of the issues that I do have with some sites in this area—that you can talk about one person, but completely forget about all of the people, in many realms, who made that life possible, and that their lives were not only the day-to-day existence, but just the resilience, the strength. Just so many characteristics and features which we talk about in other realms, but have never been intertwined in telling those narratives as well.

Christian Cotz: Yeah, you know, in most museums, you either have the celebrity enslaved person, or you treat all of the enslaved as a monolithic group that all share the same experience. I think when we study slavery, we think about this monolith, right, of 12 million people who are enslaved all have the same experience, and it’s easy for that experience to be diluted that way because you’re spreading it out over 12 million peo ple. But, when you start to think about slavery happening to one person at a time, when you think about the enslaved grandmother, or the enslaved 6-year-old, or the enslaved father who loses his child, then it becomes more heartfelt. It’s harder to process that. Which is probably why a lot of museums have steered away from that: because it’s not a happy museum experience—it’s a painful museum experience. But we wanted people to empathize with the lives of the enslaved, so we designed one whole part of the exhibit to really be more of an emotional exploration of slavery than an academic one.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And it’s very well done, in that it helps you understand the familial relationships, and that when people are being bought and sold, people are literally being severed from their families involuntarily. Perhaps never to be seen again. And just the emotional toll that that takes on people, and yet, we still rise. So, I think, again, the exhibit, because of the way in which it was designed, captures both of those.

Another area that we haven’t mentioned yet that’s on the property is the African-American Slave Cemetery. Again, as remains are uncovered throughout the site, there’s a specific and very deliberate effort to memorialize, to commemorate, those sites—to mark them. When Juneteenth celebration occurs this year, co-sponsored with community organizations, one of the very first things that’s done in any major program like that is that there’s a libation ceremony or some sort of commemoration that is done to honor the ancestors who were a part of that. There are other historical sites where the remains have not been treated, or cared for, as considerately. It’s things of that sort that I think say things to people when they come on the site without a guide, or without a specific direction: the way in which the care has been taken to honor those things that are an important part of the community.

Christian Cotz: I think, too, your point about the ancestors and the descendant community is important, and it’s something we took advantage of in the exhibit, because we thought, “Why tell this story through an institutional voice, or through an academic voice, when we have this wonderful community of descendants here?” So, for many parts of the exhibit, the narrative is told through the voices of the descendants. You have descendants telling their ancestors’ story.

Patrice Preston Grimes: I think, even if I’m not a descendant from Montpelier, because of my experience as a black American, I can come and I can have a connection, and I can relate, and it can perhaps give me an understanding. And that’s what I think an important contribution is of what is happening here. And that as new family members are discovered, as new artifacts are discovered, as various things are happening, there’s an elasticity, or a flexibility of what is here, so those things can be incorporated, as opposed to something being very stagnant, or static, and having to wait until someone else donates money to build a building, to then put things inside a building. So, there are multiple spaces and parts of the way this is designed that make it much more flexible. It’s constantly a work in progress. Never would I think that Montpelier would be finished. I mean, it’s only as far as the next discovery. Whether it’s archeological, whether it’s familial, whether it’s through historical records, whether it’s through the academic work that’s being done in the constitutional village. Again, there are many inroads, and many ways that people can contribute, and I think that makes it important, too.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m so glad you touched upon the way in which the exhibition personalizes the enslaved experience. Christian, I remember when you were taking a group of us through for the first time, one of the first things you said was, “This isn’t a re-enactment of the daily toils of an enslaved woman in a kitchen. That’s not what we’re after. We’re about, certainly, explaining the hardship of the labor, and how labor was a part of the daily life, but that work in the kitchen was not the sum total of the experience of an enslaved person. That they lived full lives, that they had rich lives. That it was multigenerational. And, in a way, that slavery is not something as an institution.” This really comes across throughout the entire exhibit, that is just local. Dr. Grimes, as you were pointing out, this isn’t just a central Virginia, or Orange County story, or just a Montpelier story. This really is a national story, and in many ways, an international story.

I like that. If our listeners get to this episode, and they’ve listened to 1–11, then everything that they have been listening to, slavery and the Constitution, slavery and the Supreme Court, slavery and the Northern economy and those connections, the wonderful exhibit on trade, and the trade routes that were in and out of Montpelier, all of that is really brought out in very physical ways, represented in the exhibit. I think that’s really a part of the power of what you have created.

Patrice Preston Grimes: I realize, too, that because I have been involved with the descendant community for over 10 years, my lens is more focused than others, and yet, in bringing students here, in my own personal experiences, in talking with colleagues, I don’t have a sense, when I leave Montpelier, of being heavy. I’ve been to certain exhibits where I leave, and there’s a sense of either depression, or I feel downtrodden, or I feel pessimistic. On the contrary, whenever I come to Montpelier and I leave, there’s always a sense of resilience. There’s always a sense of uplift. There’s always a sense that getting that more complete story gives me a sense of ownership, it gives me a sense of pride—but it also makes me want to act. It makes me want to do. It’s not just enough to come here and say, “Oh, this is nice.” It really brings it to today in terms of “How can I take all of this that’s here, and how can I continue to push it and move it forward?”

It is physically beautiful. I mean, I tell people that this part of central Virginia is one of the most beautiful places that I’ve ever visited. And I’ve been fortunate to be in many. Just the awe of all of that. And yet, as one of the descendants at Montpelier told some students in my class, “You see the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it looks beautiful, and yet you have to remember that for the people who were enslaved, that mountain was a barrier. They weren’t thinking about what was beyond that for the westward expansion. It was a barrier that they were never able to cross.” So, there are all these dichotomies that are just constantly going on when you’re here. I leave here just so much more stimulated. It’s reflective, but yet I also want to put things into action, as well.

Christian Cotz: I think that notion of action is really important to comment on because I think that’s what differentiates Montpelier’s work from other historic sites, is that a lot of plantation homes have tracked the descendants of enslaved people, but for the most part, those other sites have looked at them as, almost like a scientific set of data. They want to know who’s descended from whom, and where those people live.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Or a social club.

Christian Cotz: Yeah, to some extent, that’s exclusive.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Christian Cotz: But, for the most part, other sites have not tried to turn the descendant community into stakeholders, right?

Patrice Preston Grimes: And I think that’s the big difference. It’s the descendant community, and also people within the broader community as well because there were people within Orange, Virginia, who were a part of making Montpelier happen. There was the enslaved community, and yet there were the tradespeople and farmers, and other people, as well. And so, it was a very interactive group of people at that time, and so there are no clear lines that are drawn in terms of “You’re a descendant, but you’re not.” You know? “You were involved to this extent, but you weren’t.” Again, I think that’s the case where, not having the baggage, I’ll say, of having the dominant family, or the descendants, not having a narrative that you want to protect, or maintain for various reasons. That was freeing, in many ways, to kind of take that and turn it on its head, to give Montpelier... What could have been a liability, or people could have said, “You’re too young. You don’t have all these things; you don’t have the depth.” That really did become an advantage to say, “And with that, then, we are open to taking this where it goes.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Mm-hmm. The point of walking through the exhibit, and coming out on the other side, and not feeling, Dr. Grimes, as you had pointed out, depressed and down, but, rather, hopeful, is a point that we have been trying to emphasize with this podcast. That if you teach, and talk about, and tell, the history of American slavery accurately, and honestly—meaning that you recognize and restore the humanity of enslaved peo ple—that that is still a hard history, slavery will always be hard to talk about and teach, but it is very much a hopeful history for the very reason that you talked about. The resilience of a people to endure the worst that man had to offer, and still retain their humanity, and build upon that over the generations. Price, I’m wondering if you could share some of the reactions to the exhibit. It’s been open for, coming up on a year now. Reactions from the public, just visitors coming through, but then also from professionals—professional historians, public history organizations, other museums, other historic sites and the like.

Price Thomas: You’ve got a little bit of everything, to be honest. I mean, from all of our colleges, the reception has been almost exclusively praiseworthy. I mean, the work that Christian and the team did putting it together, that the research group did, with the foundation, and Matt, Kat and the descendant community, and I mean, it really was the work of many hands, and it was exciting to see that all coalesce and come to fruition in a couple of physical spaces. So, the museum community has been “over the moon.” We’ve had people out here to tour it, and they’ve all loved it, and they’ve said how wonderful and brave—I think part of what’s interesting is that, you know, in talking to the folks around here, you know, we never really saw it as that. We just saw it as the right thing to do. You know? It is validating, right? But at the end of the day, we did what we did because it was right, and we have a responsibility when interacting with the public to tell an honest and complete story.

But, you know, obviously receiving applause from your peers is also great. Obviously, we won a couple of awards recently for some of the multimedia pieces. The public has been overwhelmingly positive as well, but I think part of the interest is that this exhibition was meant to have people feel some kind of way when they left, right? I think that it’s meant to be emotional, to a degree, and it’s meant to challenge people, and it’s meant to be unique and to offer everyone who comes through there something a little bit different. We’ve had tears, we’ve had anger, we’ve had curiosity. We’ve had people who want to have deeper discussions. That spans age, ethnicity, background, right?

It’s been really interesting to interact with folks as they come out, or to sort of walk around and watch how people are interacting with the different pieces or the quotes and comments that they leave in some of the ports where you can actually write and leave things there.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And yet, I think part of what’s interesting, too, is kind of the lens that people are coming in because we can navigate through places and spaces that we choose, and so it would still be possible, in some respects, if someone came and they wanted a more 1950s textbook history of Madison, to go to the house, to look at certain exhibits and so on, and you cannot physically skirt the exhibit, which I think is a brilliance of Montpelier—that you may try to avoid it in some ways, you know, you may have a guide that may emphasize one thing over another—but it’s the physical presence of the exhibit that’s here that’s just undeniable. And yet, I have had students who’ve come, and I’ve gotten comments from them where they weren’t necessarily ready for what they were going to hear, and they were expecting a more generalist perspective, and so when they did hear the descendants talk about the enslaved community, and see certain things, it was disturbing. These are 20- and 21-year-old students at the University of Virginia who are thought to be well versed and have studied.

I have observed even younger students, and I think the word “disturbed” is accurate because they then wrote essays and blogs about it. And yet, I’ve had the benefit of engaging with those students over time, and invariably, given three months, or six months, or definitely no more than an academic year, I’ve had a couple students come back and go, “You know, I think I’m going to go to Montpelier again.” I can’t think of too many college students, for all the things that they could do, that might say they’re going to visit a historical site on their own time, you know, before they graduate. I think it’s most profound because it’s making people think. And if people may not be ready to do that, they still have to see what they see, and that in and of itself is enough to begin to move people in a way that they might not have been moved otherwise.

Price Thomas: Yeah, and then there’s an element, like Patrice said, an element of confrontation to it. In all places in our lives, we self-select as much as we want to, and as much as we can, but there is an element of coming here where you are faced head-on with a part of this history. The depth with which you choose to interact with that, right, is up to you. We hope you’ll come and experience it in its fullest form, but whether or not you do that, it is a part of the landscape; it is a part of the vernacular. It is a large part of our mission and what we want to do. And that is, bring that forward to the public.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And part of the restoration that’s really been important, is that it’s happening throughout the grounds, and throughout the area. Fifteen years ago, if you drove into Montpelier, you wouldn’t have seen the cabins where the enslaved people lived next to the house. You cannot miss it. You physically drive down a long view, and you can see them there, and yet that’s not the only place where they are. Because, you know, I’ve been to some other historical houses in parts of the South, and you’ll see the cabins close to the front of the house where the people who worked in the house are, but there’s never any mention of any people who worked in the field, or did any other duties.

One thing that I think is represented and important here is that as you walk through the grounds of Montpelier, there are various sites that are noted throughout the grounds of where the presence of the lives of those folk were. I think there’s subtle things like that, but I think they’re very important distinctions that are made, in terms of having that presence be around people as soon as they set sight on the grounds.

Christian Cotz: I think it’s that cognitive dissonance that we were after, right? I mean, when you said, “challenge people,” and I think that that’s one of the things that we wanted to do, is challenge people’s perspectives—or perceptions, I should say—of their history. Everybody wants to remember the rosy version and not the real version. For us to challenge those perceptions, and make people stop, and reconsider, and think, and start a conversation on the way home, or come back three months later, is exactly what we were hoping for.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And, so, I think this kind of segues, in some ways, into just the educational part, which I’ve been involved. Not only was there the physical restoration, and not only has there been the exhibits, but also the work that’s been done at Montpelier with the docents, with the people conducting tours. With the people that Matt Reeves has worked with in-depth with the archeology. The language in which people are using, as facts are verified, as new archeological discoveries occur, how that is interwoven into the narrative. That there is an effort made that it’s a more inclusive narrative for anyone who comes with any particular group. It’s not an à la carte where you kind of pick and choose what you include and what you don’t. Because at the end of the day, it’s that teaching that occurs, and the follow-up from that, that then gets the story beyond Montpelier, in addition [to] the technology that can really make a difference and have that transfer from generation to generation.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s a great point, and I’m glad you brought it up because one of the things that I think many of our listeners would be interested in are ways to incorporate something like historic sites like Montpelier into a curriculum—whether it’s through a physical visit, or from a distance virtually. Dr. Grimes, do you have any thoughts about the best ways to incorporate into curriculum historic sites such as Madison’s Montpelier?

Patrice Preston Grimes: Yeah. As a matter of fact, every semester that I’ve taught my social studies course to students who are going into their field for their initial teaching positions, I’ve incorporated what I call the field trip, or the road trip. I think for professors, for educators, it has to be deliberate, it has to be specific—it can’t be “the food, folks and fun.” It really has to be grounded in terms of helping people understand this is a part of the narrative and the content that’s really important. For my fellow educators out there, I would recommend planning the trip, and for many semesters, I would do it with students. The last two semesters, I have not been able to have them physically be together; they’ve gone on their own. I’m getting feedback from that to see the differences between a group experience versus an individual experience. But yet, it must be scaffolded, and it must be built into what you’re doing. Sites like Montpelier become an exemplar. They’re a case study for how we can teach social issues using historical sites. How we can teach history—I know with the Learning for Justice work, this has been done, teaching the hard history. What better way to have an example that people can see this, either by physically visiting the site, or this is where we benefit from technology, where you can do this in a virtual sort of way.

Again, when students can do the inquiry, and they have the evidence that they can look at themselves, it’s not me telling them what happened, it’s them having the tools to be able to discover, and inquire, to examine the documents, to ask the questions. For them to tussle with it, and them to then get the insights that come from it. I mean, that’s really authentic learning in that way. The feedback that I’ve gotten from my student-teachers in the field is, they’ve taken classes from as young as fifth grade, all the way to 11th grade, and brought them here. One of the reasons they were able to come was having had that experience in their own preservice teaching and training. It made it easier for them to think about considering doing it when they’re in the field, particularly at a time when sometimes funds in school districts have limited the degree the students can travel and do field trips and things like that outside of school.

Then finally, the curriculum. It really is important that we have the proper curriculum. Having the work that Learning for Justice has done, having workshops with teachers to specifically engage with that mate rial, all of it works together, and yet the curriculum is important because many people will never be able to come to this site, and yet, with that material, and with technology, they can still engage their students in a way to make it relevant and important.

Christian Cotz: I think, too, when you think about primary sources that students interact with, so often, it’s the master narrative, right? It’s the dominant narrative, and the primary sources you see are the Constitution, the Declaration. You don’t see, maybe it’s a letter between Madison and Jefferson, but it’s certainly not a let ter between Madison’s enslaved field worker and his wife, or between Paul Jennings, Madison’s enslaved manservant, and Dolley, who’s requesting time away from Dolley because his own wife is dying, and he wants to be at her side. And those sorts of primary sources open your eyes to the other side of history.

Patrice Preston Grimes: They do. Particularly for elementary students, just the concreteness of it all—that if they can’t come to Montpelier, they can look online and they can see, these are the tools that people used, these are the nails that were made that built the buildings that are here. Again, that tactile sense for younger children is so important, and that’s an initial connection that they don’t forget, so when they get into other places and spaces, they can make connections that way, too.

Price Thomas: And there’s also this relevance and context side of it, which, I think when it comes to schools and education, it’s vitally important. We talk about how we were all acculturated. Obviously, we have Patrice from working at UVA; Christian, who’s an alumnus at JMU; myself at William and Mary, and we sort of forget the bubbles in which we live and influence our views of the world. I think that understanding history, and understanding why two black dudes can’t sit in Starbucks, but a white girl can carry an AR-15 on a college campus—why is that the way it is? Why do those things matter? I think part of the way we educate kids now, it’s so content-focused. Do you know names? Do you know dates? But we can talk more about the how and the why, and why these things manifest themselves the way that they do, and what’s the historical context for a lot of the modern issues that we’re dealing with today that are popping up in the news, and that really hit our area of Virginia a year ago. Again, starting to put all of these pieces together, you know, has become very important to us.

Christian Cotz: You should talk about the Let ’Em Shine program and the tandem programs that we put together because that’s a whole different kind of education that we turn this exhibit that’s primarily about the past to the present day.

Price Thomas: Yeah. We had the opportunity to run two programs earlier this year for the Albemarle County Public Schools, and for a local private school, and we did exactly that. It was a combined effort site wide—and also some great friends of ours from various sites, and also some of our exhibition fabricators—where we were able to bring students out here to have those more in-depth, a little more esoteric conversations, about how history maps to today, and trying to bring it forth for this younger generation. How is it relevant to 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds today? How do we use history to have modern conversations? Do we under stand how slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow influences a lot of the issues we see today when we talk about the achievement gap or wage discrimination or mass incarceration? All these things matter, and all these things are connected. I think an important part of being a cultural institution in our evolution, to be able to engage the public on a more real level, is to be able to talk about these things. To talk about, and to deconstruct, what white privilege means. Why don’t people understand what that means? How do we branch that out across history? How do we talk to people in a very realistic way about that? Again, always grounded in what we know, and what we have. Which is history, and which is this Constitutional framework of America.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: That’s a great way to sort of wrap it up and bring us to the present, connecting—Price, as you had mentioned earlier—the past to the present, and keeping in mind this idea of the power of a place like Montpelier because of the work that it’s doing as a site where authentic history—I really like that term, authentic learning—can take place. I think that’s really powerful, and what we want to get at in the end. That’s the kinds of experiences, both in the classroom, and taking the classroom outside of the school building—outside of the schoolhouse, the college, the high school, the middle school—where that kind of learning that is most impactful and powerful can take place.

Christian, one last question: Where do we go from here? Where does Montpelier go from here? Where does the exhibit go from here? Dr. Grimes had pointed out that, and I think she’s absolutely right, this isn’t, it’s not a static exhibit; as new material, new interpretation, literally, as the archival work, as building reconstruction takes place, new interpretations, new descendants become a part of the conversation, this history is still evolving and being told in a way. I just wonder, where do you envision? Where do you see Montpelier going from here?

Christian Cotz: Well, I think, like so much of my experience at Montpelier, it’s sort of “We’ll figure it out as we go,” and then do a good job at getting there. A couple of things have shaken out recently that are really interesting and surprising and were not foreseen. One, this past February we hosted an event that we called the National Summit on Teaching Slavery, through which we invited academics and other museum profes sionals, and descendants from plantations all across the South to come join us at Montpelier—there were 50 people in total—to talk about the best practices that museums can engage in when they engage descen dant communities. We talked about different practices and research, and relationship building, and relationship maintaining. And education. And interpretation. What are the best ways to go about doing this?

Out of those 50 people, we had stories of success, we had stories of failure, mistakes. We had people who hadn’t done any of it before, people who were there to learn. We had voices, again, from the descendant community, and from the academic side of things. That was a really useful three-day weekend, and the results will be published, hopefully, in the near future, in a small pamphlet that we’re putting together that will be sort of a rubric for other sites to follow. Sort of a guidebook. Because when Montpelier engaged in this work, it hadn’t been written about in the academy. There was no scholarships that said, “This is what you should do if you’re going about this kind of work.” It was really sort of groundbreaking.

Patrice Preston Grimes: And probably good that it hadn’t because it then helped it be from the bottom- up. It helped it germinate and take the life that it took. Because in the academy, if somebody gives you the blueprint, people tend to follow that. I think, again, it was good that that did not exist because we didn’t have any limits. There were no boundaries on where we would take it, and what we could do. And also, too—I was fortunate to be at that session, and there are varying academic viewpoints as well. There are people who think that the envelope needs to be pushed much farther and much harder. There are people who are looking on a global level. There are people who want the local interpretations to go deeper. I think it was important for all of us to see that there is no one way; that there’s a range in which this is being done, and trying to find the places and the spaces that would be inclusive of all of that. I think that was important for us to see, too.

Christian Cotz: And then, the other thing that’s come up is we opened the exhibit last June, and literally two months later, we had the events of August 12th happen in Charlottesville, right down the road. I mean, most of the people who work at Montpelier live in and around Charlottesville. It’s our urban center. It’s our home city.

Patrice Preston Grimes: For me, I had the Klan literally march two blocks from my house in Charlottesville, and so to have done all that work last summer, and then to have experienced the violent riots in Charlottesville within a matter of a couple months, it was quite a year.

Christian Cotz: And since then, we’ve had teachers, and we’ve had leaders of nonprofits and leaders of museums, differ ent corporate groups, come to us and say, “We want to do something with our class, our group, our staff, about race and identity.” Most of the people who are calling us don’t know what they want to do—they just know that we have this exhibit, and they want to come and use the exhibit as a vehicle to talk with their group, their community, about all of this stuff that’s going on. We’ve had to respond to that in the best way we can, but we’re historians. We’re really good at talking about stuff that’s happened up to about, I don’t know, 30, 40, 50 years ago. But, get us to start talking about current events and it gets a lot more challenging. It’s not what we’re trained to do. That’s one of the things that we’re doing now: we’re going through some facilitated dialogue training with our staff, and trying to get people geared up to talk to our visitors about how the history of slavery really does have a legacy that’s very present in our society today, and how we come to terms with that. And what we can do about it.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: All right. I don’t know how y’all feel about that, but I thought that was fantastic.

Christian Cotz: Good.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christian Cotz, Price Thomas, Dr. Patrice Grimes, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your insights and your experiences with how to tell this hard history of American slavery accurately, honestly and effectively. Thank you so much.

Christian Cotz: Thank you.

Price Thomas: Thanks, man.

Patrice Preston Grimes: Thank you, our pleasure.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christian Cotz is the director of education and visitor engagement at James Madison’s Montpelier. Price Thomas is the director of marketing and communications. And Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes has been involved in the African-American Descendants Project at Montpelier as an educational consultant. She is an associate professor of social studies education and an associate dean in the office of African-American Affairs at the University of Virginia.

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 valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we’re featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials, which are available at LearningForJustice.org. These materials include over 100 prima ry sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find these online at LearningForJustice.org.

Thanks to Mr. Cotz, Mr. Thomas and Patrice Preston Grimes for sharing their insights and experiences with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford, with production assistance from Tori Marlan, and Kendall Madigan at James Madison’s Montpelier. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Car olina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series. Additional music is by Chris Zebriski.

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

• Montpelier, The Mere Distinction of Colour (exhibit)
• The White House, James Madison
• Congress.gov Resources, The Federalist Papers
• White House Historical Association, Dolley Madison
• George Washington, Mount Vernon
• Thomas Jefferson, Monticello
• Montpelier, One Person at a Time (Rebecca Gilmore Coleman)
• Montpelier, Archeology (Dr. Matt Reeves)
• AfroVirginia, Gilmore Cabin - Montpelier
• Orange County African-American Historical Society
• Smithsonian, National Museum of African-American History and Culture
• Historical Marker Database, Montpelier Slave Cemetery
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,What Is Juneteenth?
• Montpelier, The Life of Paul Jennings
• Montpelier, Let 'Em Shine

 

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