“[American slavery is] hard history because it’s difficult to imagine the kind of inhumanity that leads one to enslave children to make bricks for your comfort and convenience. It’s hard history because it’s hard to talk about the violence of slavery — the beatings, the whippings, the kidnappings, the forced family separations. It’s hard history because it’s hard to teach white supremacy, which is the ideology that justified slavery. So rather than confront hard history, we tend to avoid it. … 

“If we don’t remember the past, we will continue it. We will continue to do the things that created inequality and injustice in the first place. So what we must do is we must disrupt the continuum of hard history.”

— Hasan Kwame Jeffries 

Watch the short video Confronting Hard History (TEDx Talks Ohio State University). 

Efforts to dismantle public education and to erase and alter our country’s history have intensified, making this podcast series on the hard history of the United States even more essential now. 

From Learning for Justice and host Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ph.D., the Teaching Hard History podcast series brings us the crucial history we should have learned through the voices of leading scholars and educators. The series, which includes four seasons that originally aired from 2018 to 2022, begins with the long and brutal legacy of slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Americans’ experiences during the Jim Crow era to the issues we face today.

Join us as we relaunch this podcast series. Each week, we will highlight an episode from the series and include a resource page with key points from the conversation, resources and connections for building learning experiences.

This is American history that we all need to know and that should be taught in schools and in communities.

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