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

 

Return to Episode Listing 

Resources

• Learning for Justice, Exploring Diversity and Stereotypes in Film
• Learning for Justice, Examining Multiple Perspectives in Film
• Teaching Hard History, Episode 8: Film and the History of Slavery (podcast)

Ron Briley

• All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History
• The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films
• The Baseball Film in Postwar America
• LA Progressive (articles)

Transcript

Movie advertisement: (singing)

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: I’m Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is a bonus episode of Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. This special series is 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 our previous episode we spoke with Ron Briley about using film to teach slavery in the classroom.

Ron Briley: Students do notice the connections between the two films, and many times leads us into discussion of how the memory of slavery is molded in the American mind.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: In this bonus episode, Ron provides a great list of additional films and documentaries that you can use with your students. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Ron Briley: Previously, we discussed teaching American slavery using films such as Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, Amistad and Glory to be incorporated into the history classroom to teach about American slavery. Today, I’d like to talk about additional films one might bring into the classroom to teach slavery.

There are a number of choices, both documentary and feature films. So, I would like to briefly talk about a few of these films that teachers might consider using. First maybe we should look at documentaries. It’s very important for teachers to realize that documentaries are not simply facts. They are representations of facts and that documentaries have a point of view which they’re trying to drive home. So, students need to be very careful when presented with documentaries and ask some of the same questions of documentaries that they ask of feature films. So, I think that’s very important that students must realize that documentaries are also subjective and not simply objective.

I think there have been a couple of excellent ones produced by PBS that we might talk about for just a minute. One of those is the Ken Burns Civil War series from 1993. Now most of that series deals with Civil War battles and it’s very well done. I think for our purposes, we might want to consider the first episode which focuses on slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a causation that is widely accepted by American historians, however, again in the general culture this is not really the case. When you often ask Americans about the cause of the Civil War, you’ll have discussions of economics, and especially of state’s rights. I think this particular episode is very good in the classroom for making a strong case to students that indeed slavery is first and foremost in the causation of the Civil War.

Something I’ve also done in the classroom sometimes is used some of the secessionist documents and look at the wording of those, and again you will see how prominent a role slavery plays in this, and reinforces the case made by Burns. Although it is interesting this remains a very hot subject for some students and sure to provoke some discussion in the classroom. But again, I think this first episode of Burns’ is really excellent for looking at the central role played by slavery in causing the Civil War. We’d really encourage teachers to use it in the classroom.

Another PBS production, which is less well known is from 2005, entitled Slavery and the Making of America. It’s a four-part documentary by a film maker Dante Joseph James, and the series uses, again, a lot of documentary techniques but also uses reenactments of various episodes in the history of slavery, and I think these reenactments tend to make this series more popular with students.

Especially of interest is episode one, “The Downward Spiral,” which does a good job developing the origins of American slavery, as well as slave resistance. I think this particular episode is especially good for looking at the role of Bacon’s Rebellion in which you had poor whites and blacks coming together to oppose the aristocracy in colonial Virginia and how efforts were made with slave codes to separate poor blacks and whites.

I think this is really a crucial issue to be discussed and certainly has repercussions down to the present that can be discussed and addressed in the classroom. I’ve also found it useful to use episode three, “Seeds of Destruction,” which is excellent on abolitionism, a very important topic to get into the classroom, in terms of reform movements, encouraging student activism, and of course, this episode also deals with the Civil War.

I think this particular documentary is also good because of the supplementary materials available, for example, WPA [Works Project Administration] slave interviews are available on the website and there’s a very strong companion volume by James Oliver Horton and Louis E. Horton. This did not do as well as the Burns documentary in terms of ratings, but I think in terms of the classroom, it’s a very useful teaching tool in terms of using documentaries.

Other films which teachers might consider using in the classroom, one of course is the 1977 television series, Roots. This is very long one, one could really not bring in the whole series, and in some ways it is dated, and the book on which it is based by Alex Haley does indeed have some problems, as far as historical accuracy, nevertheless, Roots is a very important source, because this television series in 1977, which looked at slavery from a black perspective, addressed largely to a white audience, had incredible ratings, and really did begin to change the perception of some Americans about slavery. I think looking at the history of Kunta Kinte and his family is very useful.

I think that something else comes out in the television series and that is the perspective of a black female slave, and here you have to consider the story of his daughter, Kizzy Reynolds in the series. I think that is a topic which is often rather ignored and that is black women in slavery. Enslaved black women. I think that’s very important that students take a look at.

Here, you might also look at the 1998 film, Beloved, which was based on the 1987 novel by Toni Morrison starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Jonathan Demme. Again, this is a good source because you’re looking at the degree of sexual exploitation within American slavery, a topic that many would wish to ignore, but I think in terms of understanding slavery, I think the exploitation of black women by white masters as Winthrop Jordan talked about in his book, White Over Black, is something that needs to be discussed.

I would encourage teachers to think about using Beloved in the classroom.

Another film that you might use is another Seven Spielberg film. We’ve talked before about Amistad, but also one must look at his Abraham Lincoln from 2012. A great film, a simply marvelous performance by Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role for which he won an Oscar. But again, there is some problems with this production. The film concentrates upon how Lincoln sought to manage and manipulate Congress to obtain ratification of the 13th amendment and end slavery. The film is very strong on that topic.

However, there’s very little in the way of black agency in the film, and in fact, there are not very many black people in the film. This is primarily a film about whites and their efforts to end slavery. So, I think the film is very good, but I think there are also some limitations the film and if one uses Lincoln, one has to look at some of the broader issues as well and perhaps again think of Glory and the role of black agency with the 54th Massachusetts regiment.

Let’s also, perhaps, look at some more recent films dealing with slavery. One of those is 12 years of Slave, in 2013. Directed by British director Steve McQueen, not to be confused with the American actor, and the film won best picture. It’s based upon the 1853 slave narrative by Solomon Northup who was a free black in the north who was kidnapped in the north and taken into the south and spent 12 years as a slave before being freed and writing this powerful memoir, which also students might read for use in the classroom.

The film itself has a great deal of violence, it has a great deal of sexuality. I’m sure that some school districts would have trouble with using the film in the classroom, but slavery was a brutal institution, and it’s hard to talk about slavery without including some of that brutality. So thus, I think the film is a very strong one.

Less graphic, and if you really can’t use 12 Years of Slave in the classroom, you might look at the 1984 PBS production Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, in which a film historian Robert Brent Toplin plays a key role in producing, and that film raises many of the same themes but in a less graphic fashion in terms of sexuality and brutality. That would be a possibility to use as well. 12 Years of Slave did very well with the Oscars but not as well with the box office.

Another film that’s worth looking at and considering for the classroom but very controversial is the 2016 version, Birth of a Nation. This particular film concentrates on the 1831 slave revolt in Virginia led by Nat Turner in which 60 whites perished and hundreds of enslaved people were murdered in retaliation, the vast majority of them having nothing whatsoever to do with the revolt.

This again is a very graphic film which depicts the brutality of slavery and also the brutality of a revolt against that institution. However, this film failed again at the box office. It had been a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival. Many people anticipated this film would do quite well at the box office, but one of the things that happened had to do with the film’s director, Nate Parker, and actually star as well, and that dealt with allegations of sexual misconduct by Parker, an accusation of assault from earlier in his career, in which the woman who made the accusations ended up committing suicide. When this came to light, there was much less support for Parker’s film. Nevertheless, I think the film and some clips from it still could be useful in the classroom. Also, there’s several good books on Nat Turner that one might bring into the classroom here as well including the book by Steven Oates entitled The Fires of Jubilee, Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion.

Another recent film from 2016 as well is entitled The Free State of Jones. This is another film which did not do well at the box office, at all. Big name cast, starring Matthew McConaughey, directed by Gary Ross, and based on a very interesting true story which is not well known, and concerns poor southern whites in Mississippi led by a man named Newton Knight played by McConaughey who rebelled against the Confederacy and Southern Planters. Knight and his followers were poor southern whites who did not own slaves. They resented very much Southern Confederate conscription laws which allowed exemptions for slave owners, and therefore they rebelled against being drafted and becoming cannon fodder in the war. In fact, ended up with a secessionist free state of Jones.

The film also is strong in that it depicts the reconstruction era in a very positive fashion. It does show Jones and Newton Knight in a positive way, a positive fashion, providing a biracial coalition, and in fact, Knight also remarried a black woman and had a biracial family. It’s a very interesting film, yet it did not do well at the box office at all. Here, I think it raises the question of do people want to see films about American slavery? It’s a difficult topic, it’s a controversial topic, many people would rather not talk about it. Thus, I think all the more important about including it in the classroom.

So certainly, you get a lot of challenges teaching film, especially about American slavery, but I think it’s interesting to look in conclusion at the current popularity of the film, Black Panther, based upon a comic book hero. I think that this film gives you an alternative vision of what we’re looking at often in the films about American slavery. What if you had not had the transatlantic slave trade? What if you had not had European Colonialism in Africa? What might have developed? When you see the African nation in Black Panther with all its advancements and possibilities, you see almost a counterfactual alternative history presented, and I think in many ways in teaching about American slavery, it would be good to bring in some of the themes from Black Panther that probably the majority of your students would have seen in the theater. I think bring that in and I think that could be a very useful contribution.

So, what I’ve tried to do here is give an overview of some other films one might bring into the history classroom. Again, a very challenging topic. Many of these films are difficult, but the topic of slavery is difficult and we must not ignore it. We must not hide behind Confederate statues and assume that slavery never existed. I think as a society we have to confront slavery and its legacy in our land. Therefore, I think these films, incorporating them into the classroom will help provide that. It’s a challenge, but a challenge well worth accepting and one that I have found quite rewarding.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Ron Briley is a film historian who recently retired from Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico after teaching history for 37 years. He was also an adjunct professor of history at the University of New Mexico, Valencia campus for 20 years. Mr. Briley is the author of five books and numerous articles on the intersection of history, politics, and film. 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 feature a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials which are available at LearningForJustice.org.

These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units, and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Learning for Justice is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find those online at LearningForJustice.org.

Thanks to Mr. Briley for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shay Shackleford with production assistance from Tori Marlan and Megan Kamerick at KUNM Public Radio. 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 take a minute to review us in iTunes. We always appreciate the feedback. I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and your host for Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• Ken Burns, The Civil War
• PBS, Slavery and the Making of America
• ABC, Roots (1977 TV miniseries)
• Jonathan Demme, Beloved (1998 film)
• Steven Spielberg, Lincoln (film)
• 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
• PBS, Solomon Northup's Odyssey (TV movie)
• Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation (2016 film)
• Steven Oates, The Fires of Jubilee, Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion
• Gary Ross, The Free State of Jones (film)
• Ryan Coogler, Black Panther (film)

 

Return to Episode Listing 

Resources

• Learning for Justice: Text, James Baldwin: Art, Sexuality and Civil Rights
• Teaching Hard History: Text Library, The Underground Railroad (1871)

Steven Thurston Olive

• Secondary and Higher Education, Salem State University
• Twitter

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Get it right. That’s what Beverly Robertson, the Executive Director of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, told us at the start of the Museum’s five-year $27 million renovation. You are here to tell the story of the African American freedom struggle from slavery to the present. Make sure you get it right. Everyone on the exhibit redesign team took her charge to heart.

The National Civil Rights Museum is located at the Lorraine Motel where civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968. So, it is more than just a place where history is told or even just a place where history happened. It’s hallowed ground, a sacred space that draws a quarter of a million visitors annually. So the design team’s responsibility to get it right, to tell the historical truth, was a responsibility to everyone who would ever walk through the museum’s doors.

As the lead historian for the renovation, I was often asked to explain design decisions usually to the Board of Directors. The questions were simple enough, as were the answers. I will never forget though, the time I was asked to respond to a major donor’s concern that the new exhibits just didn’t give him that same uplifting, feel-good spirit that he had with the old exhibits. I remember thinking, “Lord have mercy, this dude,” and I remember saying, “If he wants to be happy, tell him to go to Disney World.” I mean, our charge wasn’t to make people happy, it was to get the history right, and that’s exactly what we did. We didn’t sanitize slavery, we rendered visible the horrors of the Middle Passage and the auction block and made plain to see the culture of black resistance. We didn’t perpetuate the myth that segregation was some kind of minor inconvenience. We made it abundantly clear that Jim Crow was designed to degrade and humiliate black people for the purpose of controlling their labor, and we didn’t freeze Dr. King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, dreaming about how his children might be judged. We explained how he organized to end poverty and died in Memphis fighting alongside sanitation workers, because he believed that all labor had dignity.

The civil rights movement is like American slavery. It’s hard history. It’s hard to think about, it’s hard to discuss, it’s hard to teach, and it’s hard to learn, but it’s also essential history. It’s essential that we study it and talk about it, to understand the past and to make sense of the present. So, despite how uncomfortable hard history makes us, whether we’re dealing with slavery or civil rights, we have no choice but to get it right.

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

Okay, so how do we teach hard history? Throughout this series we suggest methods for doing just that, and in this episode, we’re going to explore ways to create an environment that is conducive to teaching and learning about slavery. Steven Thurston Oliver is a professor of education who trains teachers how to teach sensitive topics. He’s going to share with us some of the practical classroom strategies that he has developed over the years. I’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Steven Thurston: I teach at Salem State University in the department of secondary and higher education, specifically within our teacher preparation program, so, working with students that aspire to be teachers. And I’m often asked, even by people who are currently working as teachers in middle school and high school, how they should go about bringing up a subject like slavery with their students, in particular if it’s a multicultural classroom. I find that many teachers feel ill-equipped to handle these discussions and, unfortunately, engage in what can only be described as an act of avoidance: doing everything possible to talk around the issue, not wanting to bring up the fact that this happened. This discomfort that so many feel in being forthright and honest about the ways in which the United States has in times fallen short of its ideals, I find, is rooted in fear, and I find that the only way to deal with this is to address these issues head-on.

Teachers are so fearful about bringing up these issues in this current era that could be described as having a heightened sensitivity around issues of race, and so many teachers have witnessed where one mistake can end a career, so they’re wise to be cautious. But the unintended consequence here is that teachers are so immobilized by this fear that they end up not addressing these issues at all for fear that they’ll create extreme discomfort for themselves and for their students.

Again, in classrooms where you have students who are coming from diverse backgrounds, and if the teacher happens to be white, the fear that they’re going to stir up racial and ethnic tensions and perhaps even give students new language to use against each other. And many teachers, in particular white teachers, can be fearful of making mistakes that could somehow implicate them as being racist, or at the very least, unprepared to facilitate difficult dialogues.

So again, the only way to deal with fear is to address it head-on. One of my mentors, or at least I wish he had been an actual mentor of mine, someone whose work I draw on a lot, James Baldwin, always used to say that the only way to get through life is to understand all of the worst things about it, and that has always stayed with me.

Another story that I sometimes share with students is a story of a Buddhist monk, and if you can imagine a Buddhist monk sitting still, meditating, very peaceful and serene, and he happens to look up and he sees that there’s a wild animal just charging directly at him, and then I’ll ask students, what do you think the Buddhist monk did when he looked up and saw this wild, ferocious animal charging at him? Invariably, they’ll laugh and say, “Well, he probably got up and ran away,” or yelled for help, or figured this was the end, and they’re always surprised when I say, “No, what the Buddhist monk did, in fact, was he got up and ran directly at this animal that was charging at him.” And then I’ll ask students “What do you think the animal did?” and in turn they’re surprised when I say, “Well, the animal actually cowered away in fear.” And this becomes an analogy I find very useful, that oftentimes at things that we’re afraid of, when we face them head-on, when we run directly at those things and we’re intentional about grappling with them, those things tend to fade and aren’t as ferocious as they initially appeared.

So for us as educators, the essential goal here is to cultivate in our students, and in fact ourselves, the ability to stay in the conversation and to avoid the temptation to water down, to avoid, or to just run away altogether. This is critically important because the very discomfort that we’re seeking to avoid, and perhaps shield our students from, can in fact be a powerful catalyst for growth and transformation. So, increasing the capacity to stay in the conversation is so important.

I also have found that it’s important to invite students to be part of imagining a better reality and that this is a real gift that educators can offer. We have to tell our students the truth. We’re not doing our students any favors by not addressing things that have occurred. And after we tell students the truth, we have to create a safe space for students to process the truth, and lastly, we have to provide clear examples of how they can become part of history by making things better for everyone.

The reality is that students are already contemplating these issues. They’ve already thought about issues of race. If you’re a fan of hip-hop, you know that it’s in almost every song that’s out there. The students have already heard all of the racial slurs and insults, but what I find is that students often don’t have a good understanding of where those slurs have come from or why particular words are so loaded. So I spend some time unpacking with them, “What is the history of these words? What is the history of the ‘N’ word?” Get into conversations and dialogue with them about, “Well, should we just ban this word altogether? Maybe make it so that nobody is able to use it in society.” It’s really interesting to hear how students relate to that set of questions, and it really has always shown me that we don’t give students enough credit for things that they’re grappling with and thinking about. So, we don’t have to be fearful of introducing students to a lot of these topics, but I would argue that school needs to be a place that allows students to make sense of what they’re hearing, and that that’s our responsibility as educators.

Some strategies that I found are really helpful for teachers who are grappling with how to address these issues or engaging in the process that I’m describing of sitting with the discomfort, staying in a conversation, not avoiding these sets of issues—that it’s very helpful to form learning communities with other educators who are also doing the same work. It’s often helpful to share strategies and stories about what did and didn’t work in classrooms with people who are like-minded. I find that that’s really powerful.

Team-teaching also is critically important for these kinds of dialogues. It’s often very helpful to have an extra set of eyes on these issues, and in particular, where it’s a class that has students from various backgrounds. If possible, if you are able to team-teach with somebody who holds a different racial and ethnic identity than the one that you hold, then that’s really powerful for students and gives them places of safety to be able to put their ideas out into the space.

One thing that I found very helpful also, particularly when teaching about slavery, is to use slave narratives. With students, I love to use the actual audio recordings, and now there’s such a rich body of interviews that were done in the 30’s and 40’s with individuals who were still living at that time who had actually been slaves. And now with the technology, they’ve been able to clean up those recordings so they sound crystal-clear, as if you’re listening to someone ... This could’ve just been recorded yesterday, and they may sound like people that you know. I think it’s so powerful for students to actually sit and hear the voices of people that were enslaved.

And I’m being intentional about using a word like “enslaved” versus “slaves,” because I think that students have heard enough of this that there’s almost a disconnect. They don’t connect with the fact that these were people. They imagine this is something that happened a long, long time ago, and when you hear these slave narratives, really brings home the human cost of slavery. This was not the totality of who they were. These were human beings with thoughts and feelings and intellect.

One of the narratives I use frequently is an interview done with a gentleman by the name of Fountain Hughes, and he just very matter-of-factly is telling his story, his memory, of having been a slave, of being a young boy, having been enslaved, and says, you know, “Yeah, we were sold. Bought and sold the way you might sell cows or horses,” and really details what a difficult struggle it was being a slave. In his narration, he says, “We didn’t know anything because we were never allowed to look at a book.” That is so powerful and really brings home for students the fact that these were human beings, that if those who were enslaved were ignorant, that was not something innate to them, or a product of biology, that this was something that was done to them by withholding the opportunity to become educated. The impact of withholding an education from individuals.

He also talks about what happened when slavery ended and the ways in which people really had nowhere to go, were just sort of put out like wild cattle, he says, and even that some people, after slavery ended, commented that they actually had it better before, when they were enslaved. There’s this really powerful moment where the interviewer asks him, at one point he’s asked, “Which was better? Being a slave or being free?”, and he says, “No, no, if I even thought for a moment that there was any possibility that I would ever be a slave again, I would just go out and get a gun and end it right away, because you’re nothing but a dog,” he says, “Nothing but a dog.” The moral authority of someone like a Fountain Hughes just hangs in the room and is such a powerful catalyst for transformation with the students that I work with.

Another powerful tool that I often use, again back to the work of James Baldwin, I often use this, readily available on YouTube, famous debate that James Baldwin did with William Buckley in the UK in the mid-1960’s. He does a wonderful job of laying out the case of when people talk about the original sin of the United States. He talks about ... And a lot of students, they’ve never heard of James Baldwin before, he’s a very dynamic character, very animated in his delivery, coming out of that rhetorical tradition of the black church, and at one point he sort of lays it out there that, quite literally he says, “I picked the cotton and I carried it to market under somebody else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.” And then lays out the case that the United States could not have become as wealthy as it did in the period of time that it did had it not had access to all of this labor. That’s something else that I think that students don’t really think about in terms of the historical and cultural continuum that we find ourselves in.

So in addition to these strategies or examples that teachers might use, it’s really important that we create spaces for students to make sense of everything that we’re telling them, because if we don’t do that, if we don’t make space for students to make sense of what they’re hearing, then we find that students will just become defensive and they’ll shut down. We have to be clear in saying the reason to have these conversations, the reason to sit with the realities of what happened, is that we can be certain as a society that these things never happen again. And so that we as educators, again, can think about how we can position ourselves to be part of continuing to make the society better.

I find that one way that helps me to create safe space as an educator, and in particular for myself … I’m an African-American man. The majority of the students that I work with, especially those who are wanting to be teachers, are white students, mostly young women, and I’m aware of the fact that I may be the first black professor they’ve ever had. We kind of come into this scenario with them at times, having to make sense of who I am, and I’ve always used something that people refer to as “Teacher as Text,” sharing my own stories. I often lay out for them examples to illustrate, from a generational sense, how close we still are to the legacy of slavery.

So, for example, I’ll lay out the year that I was born, 1968, followed by the year my father was born, 1931. His father, my grandfather, 1905, and his father right as slavery was ending in the U.S. It’s interesting, I find ... I’ll ask students, “When do you think slavery ended in the United States?”, and I’ll get a wide range of answers, everything from the 1700’s to the 1930’s. So again, it’s very important to fill in the gaps in students’ knowledge in terms of where we are in that historical and cultural continuum. But in sharing those stories I’m able to illustrate the ways in which, even though we’re living in 2017, that we’re really talking about the span of three or four human lifetimes, so it becomes easier for them to make sense of how these issues, how we’re still living with the imprint and legacy of these issues in the present time.

Back to this idea of why it’s important to create space. We have to deal head-on, we’re talking about dealing with fear head-on. We also have to deal with this issue of guilt, and I find that this is particularly a struggle for white students. I can remember teaching my course, “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” having a student at the end of the class saying how much they enjoyed it and that, at first, they were fearful that the course was going to be the “White people are bad” course, and we had a good laugh about that. But there’s a lot of truth that was kind of in that joke, so I deal with the issue of guilt head-on, because I understand that it’s a real thing that students are grappling with. And I find that one thing that’s helpful, particularly for white students, is to lay out for them this idea that we didn’t do this. All of us sitting in a particular classroom, we didn’t do this, we’ve inherited this mess that we find ourselves in: racism, sexism, homophobia in all the institutional forms. Institutionalized forms of all those “isms.” We’ve all been born into this sort of catastrophe, so I don’t want students to expend a lot of energy feeling guilty for societal dynamics that they didn’t have a direct hand in creating.

But what follows that very quickly is this notion that all of us, although we didn’t create these dynamics, we now have a responsibility and an opportunity to consider the ways in which we might be upholding some of these systems of oppression, how we might be benefiting from some of these dynamics, and most importantly, how we can be part of undoing these systems of oppression. I think that laying it out that way helps students wrap their minds around it.

I also don’t present it as something that white people need to do only. So, for myself as a person of color, again back to the idea of “Teacher as Text,” I’m often saying to students that I am a person of color, but I have my own biases and assumptions that I continually need to interrogate and make sense of. I have my own sets of work to do. So, it becomes a dynamic of saying “I’m going to do my work, you’re going to do your work, and let’s be in conversation with each other about how this work is going.” I find that not prioritizing whiteness in this way opens up a dynamic to say that we’re all in this together.

As I was mentioning earlier, there’s a huge fear that people have now that they’re going to say something or do something that will cause someone to say that they’re racist, and again, being immobilized by that fear such that we don’t do anything at all. I am often laying out this idea that I have found very helpful, which is to say that human beings are porous, meaning that we absorb all these messages from the larger society. So human beings are porous, so whatever things we find in society, if there’s racism in society we’re going to find racism in our institutions. If there’s sexism in the society we’re going to find those things in our institutions, and we can go down the line. But specifically around issues of racism, if there’s racism in the society, we’re going to find those things within our institutions (so, schools), and if we’re really doing the work of being introspective and interrogating our own stances and biases, if these things exist in the society, we’re going to find those things within ourselves.

So, for me it becomes less an issue of pointing out all the ways in which an individual may or may not be racist—for me that’s not the issue—the issue is when we find racism within ourselves, what do we do with that? For most of us, to get those things out of ourselves requires a fair amount of scrubbing, and I would argue that having these dialogues and addressing these fears head-on and these challenging topics is part of that kind of scrubbing process to get these negative messages out of ourselves.

I think it’s important that, again, that we invite students and we encourage them to become part of making the society better, and we have to give them examples of individuals that have done that throughout time. So when teaching about slavery, it’s often important to talk about abolitionist movements and point out the fact that there have always been people of all races in the country who have been against the institution of slavery and have worked very hard to end it, telling the history. I’m currently living in Massachusetts, and there are many examples of places that were stops on the Underground Railroad, and those are important for students to hear so that they can think about the ways in which people have been part of making society better and how they might continue in this legacy doing something similar.

Many educators miss out on that critical point, because if we don’t give students examples of how they can be part of changing the society, and if all we do is lay on them this heavy story of everything that’s happened in the U.S., then they’re just going to shut down or they might become defensive. I have found in doing this work that if you introduce all these ideas to a student that hasn’t ever thought about these things before, and if you’re going to shatter their perceptions in that way, sometimes the reaction that you get is actually anger. Again, if there’s nowhere for this energy to go, sometimes that can be the unintended consequence.

One of the examples that I always use, or using as an analogy, is this children’s story of Humpty Dumpty, which now that I’m an adult I realize is a horrible story that we tell to children. So Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, someone pushes Humpty Dumpty off the wall, I suppose, and he shatters into a million pieces. And oftentimes when we’re having students confront these difficult topics, we’re taking their worldviews, their perceptions, and we’re shattering them into these million pieces. But we can’t stop there. We have to be willing to get down on the ground with them and help them put all of these pieces back together and to build something new, to be able to see a way forward. If we’re not going to be willing to do the work of getting down on the ground with students and helping them do this, then in some ways it might be better not to go there at all.

One thing that’s been interesting me of late is this broader field of contemplative pedagogy, anything that requires students to be introspective, to think deeply, to sit with their thoughts and emotions, I find is very useful when working with students around a topic as challenging as slavery. Anything that takes students in that direction I find is very helpful, and in particular contemplative writing. So earlier when I was talking about using Baldwin, either James Baldwin’s writings or some of the things that are available on YouTube, I find it’s very helpful to have students just look at a short video clip and then be able to write about their thoughts, their reactions to what they’ve just heard. I’m often saying to students, “Don’t overthink it. I just want you to get words out on the page,” and in doing this, I find that even the students who are very reluctant to talk in class, when I provide these opportunities for students just to get their thoughts out there, we find that even the most quiet students, in fact, have oceans within them. And then once they’ve had a chance to do some contemplative writing, then I can have them in small groups and talk with each other about what they’ve written and to notice the similarities and differences that exist in different points of view.

This also lets me as a teacher get to know where students are at, where there might be some misunderstandings, and lets me know where I might have some more work to do. I’m always saying to students that the classroom has to be a place where we can make mistakes, that I would rather have students make mistakes in the context of our classroom than to have them go out in their career and make a mistake or say something that may be inappropriate or not appreciated.

I guess maybe a final thing I would say is important for educators is to be really clear about your intention as to why you’re having students look at a topic like slavery, something that will undoubtedly evoke so many charged emotions for all students, regardless of their backgrounds. So, if you’re going to take students there, and if you’re going to evoke all these feelings and all this discomfort, which I’ve argued is necessary for growth, if you’re going to do that, you have to be really clear and intentional about why. What’s the reason for doing this? To be able to say we’re spending time thinking about this, and history is important so that we can be sure that these things never happen again.

This is a particularly important question I get asked a lot, particularly by white teachers that are working with students of color, really important, this clarity of intention. I can remember very clearly being in the third or fourth grade and being very, very uncomfortable when topics of slavery came up and watching teachers of mine read through some of the historical texts or literature, thinking about things like Huck Finn, things that were riddled with all of these racial slurs, and reading them with energy. I can remember sitting there and wondering, well, what is this person doing? Are they talking about how bad this was? Are they talking about it as like, these were the ‘good ole days’? I remember having conversations with other students, other black students in particular, and we knew the professors for whom we were like, “I think they may be enjoying that particular chapter a bit too much.” I know it sounds bad to put it in those terms, but I’m saying that to hopefully be clear that students are sitting with the question of “Who are you? What does this topic mean to you? Why are you introducing this?” And that’s why I want teachers right out of the bat to be very clear about their intention in bringing this up and where they stand. It’ll go a long way towards engendering trust and creating a classroom environment where the relationships are strong enough to be able to hold such a challenging conversation.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you ten easy steps for working effectively with students from diverse backgrounds. I can’t give you a toolkit of things you can use in your classroom tomorrow. I wish we could get rid of the word “toolkit” altogether from our vocabulary as educators—that the only way to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds, from multicultural backgrounds, is to become more multicultural yourselves.

I’m reminded of, years ago, going out to give a presentation at a school district that was struggling with issues of disproportionality and being asked a question by an audience member, who happened to be a white woman, and she was interested in knowing more about African-American culture and wanted to know how she could learn more about it. So, I started listings for her, books and things that she could read that would help fill in the gaps in her knowledge, and I tapped into the reaction that comes up from time to time, which was anger. She said, “You mean if I want to learn more about this, I have to go out and read a,” just fill in the expletive, “book?” I’ve become, over the years, kind of used to the idea that what seemed to me to be straightforward ideas might evoke this kind of reaction, but to say, yes, when it comes to this you have to do the work, which means yes, you have to read and you have to read more, and this idea that none of us will ever arrive. There’s always going to be something more, something more nuanced to understand.

So, what I’m really gearing for with educators is not this idea of becoming culturally competent, which suggests a final point, but simply to remain open and willing to engage across differences and to lean into things rather than back away from them. I think it’s really powerful and really important.

One analogy that I often give that I think helps teachers when thinking about this notion of a learning curve, or the learning curve that all of us as individuals might be on, is something that I gleaned from something that actors do when they have to play a part that’s very different than who they actually are as individuals, and it’s almost an act of trying to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes or situations. So for myself, I might say, for example, that I am not a woman. But if I were a woman, these would be the sets of issues I would be concerned about, these would be the things that would rise to the surface as being most salient and most important. And when I find gaps in my knowledge, then I commit myself to doing my own work to fill in those gaps. For a lot of us, we may need to say, you know what, I am not African American, but if I were … let’s sit with that … If I were, well, these would be the issues and concerns, these would be the things that would be most salient. And when I find the gaps in my knowledge, I do the work to fill in those gaps.

What I find, unfortunately, is that a lot of people, they can acknowledge that there are gaps in their knowledge, but they’re not willing to do the work to fill in those gaps. There aren’t enough periods of professional development in the world that teachers could experience to do this work. We have to engage in it and to see it as sort of a lifelong press and a lifelong journey. I think that if we can do that and if we can position ourselves with our students to say, “Look, I’m on this journey, I am still in the process of learning,” there are times ... At the end of every class I’ll say to students, “If there are things that you enjoyed about this class, I’m glad. And if I did anything wrong, I hope you will forgive me,” and that just goes a long way and helps them see that if we’re still on a journey and we’re still learning, we still make mistakes, it opens up space for them to make space and begin their journeys as well. Again, it’s this idea of, if we’re going to grapple with an issue as charged as slavery, then we have to create the environment and the relationships that are strong enough to hold that topic. So, I just want to encourage everybody, we can do this.

So I think all these ideas about increasing one’s capacity to stay in the conversation, to grapple with these hard truths, or as I’ve heard others describe, what it means to be able to sit down in the middle of the whole catastrophe and understand that we’re all sort of in this together.

I think it’s important in doing this work that, as educators, that we’re gentle with ourselves and with others. Again, this idea that we never arrive, there’s always something more to learn that we’re going to make mistakes, that if we do make a mistake, if someone is offended somehow or put off by something that we say, that we apologize, that we learn from that and that we don’t make that mistake again. I really want to encourage us, as educators, to be okay with the messiness of it. I think that if we can do that and model that willingness to engage, and in some cases, even that vulnerability with our students, then we make it okay for them to do that, too. If we think of it in terms of, this is a situation that we’ve inherited, that we’ve been born into, but now we’ve got this amazing opportunity to make things better and that it’s going to require all of us, with all of our perspectives and all of our unique offerings and gifts, to make a change—that if we can do that, then I think it pulls students in in ways that don’t happen otherwise. So, I want to encourage everybody to lean into it, tell students the truth, create those safe spaces.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Steven Thurston Oliver is an associate professor of secondary and higher education at Salem State University. His research explores how issues of race, class, gender and sexual orientation impact access to educational opportunity and life outcomes.

Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance, with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They’re the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery. In each episode, we’re featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We’ve also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials available at Tolerance.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of America slavery. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find those resources online at Tolerance.org.

Thanks to Dr. Oliver for sharing his insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford with production assistance from Tori Marlin and Gregory Dann at Rockpile Studios. Our theme song is “Kerr’s Negro Jig” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series.

If you like what we’re going, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a minute to review and rate us on iTunes. We appreciate the feedback, and it helps us get more visibility among potential listeners.

I’m Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and your host. You’ve been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

• National Civil Rights Museum, Education and Interpretation
• Museum of the African Diaspora, Fountain Hughes
• Learning for Justice, Straight Talk about the “N” Word
• YouTube, James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)
   

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