TEACING TEACHING

1 TEACHING . HARD history . american SLAVERY. II SOU T H E R N P OV E RT Y L AW C E NT E R // T E AC H I NG H A R D H I STORY // A ME R I CA N S L AV ERY. TEACHING Hard history american SL AVERY. 2 0 18 S O U T H E R N P OV E R T Y L AW C E N T E R. history is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history . james baldwin, black english: a dishonest argument . 2 SOU T H E R N P OV E RT Y L AW C E NT E R // T E AC H I NG H A R D H I STORY // A ME R I CA N S L AV ERY. CONTENTS. Preface 5. Introduction 7. Executive Summary 9.

2 PART ONE | HOW SLAVERY IS TAUGHT TODAY 12. Key Concepts 16. Table 1 Data Organized by Key Concepts 19. PART TWO | WHY WE MUST CHANGE 20. PART THREE | HOW WE INVESTIGATED THE ISSUE 22. Table 2 High School Senior Survey Responses Summary 24. Table 3 Reported Teacher Practices 26. Table 4 Teacher comfort and support measures 29. Table 5 Textbooks Analyzed 36. Rhode Island's Revisionist history 38. PART FOUR | CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 40. Appendix 1 | Advisory Board Members and Affiliations 42. Appendix 2 | Student Survey Questions 42.

3 Appendix 3 | Textbook Rubric 45. Appendix 4 | Teacher Survey 46. Endnotes 47. Acknowledgments 48. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. the constitution of the united states 4 SOU T H E R N P OV E RT Y L AW C E NT E R // T E AC H I NG H A R D H I STORY // A ME R I CA N S L AV ERY.

4 Preface H A S A N K WA M E J E F F R I E S. Slavery is hard history . It is hard to compre- In the Preamble to the Constitution, the hend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard Founding Fathers enumerated the lofty goals to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is of their radical experiment in democracy; racial hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy justice, however, was not included in that list. that justified it. And it is hard to learn about Instead, they embedded protections for slav- those who abided it. ery and the transatlantic slave trade into the We the people have a deep-seated aversion founding document, guaranteeing inequality to hard history because we are uncomfortable for generations to come.

5 To achieve the noble with the implications it raises about the past aims of the nation's architects, we the people as well as the present. have to eliminate racial injustice in the pres- We the people would much rather have the ent. But we cannot do that until we come to Disney version of history , in which villains are terms with racial injustice in our past, begin- easily spotted, suffering never lasts long, heroes ning with slavery. invariably prevail and life always gets better. It is often said that slavery was our coun- We prefer to pick and choose what aspects of try's original sin, but it is much more than that.

6 The past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning that Slavery is our country's origin. It was respon- which makes us uneasy. We enjoy thinking sible for the growth of the american colonies, about Thomas Jefferson proclaiming, All men transforming them from far-flung, forgotten are created equal. But we are deeply troubled outposts of the British Empire to glimmering by the prospect of the enslaved woman Sally jewels in the crown of England. And slavery was Hemings, who bore him six children, declar- a driving power behind the new nation's ter- ing, Me too.

7 Ritorial expansion and industrial maturation, Literary performer and educator Regie making the United States a powerful force in Gibson had the truth of it when he said, Our the Americas and beyond. problem as Americans is we actually hate his- Slavery was also our country's Achilles heel, tory. What we love is nostalgia.. responsible for its near undoing. When the But our antipathy for hard history is only southern states seceded, they did so expressly partly responsible for this sentimental longing to preserve slavery. So wholly dependent were for a fictitious past.

8 It is also propelled by polit- white Southerners on the institution that they ical considerations. In the late 19th and early took up arms against their own to keep African 20th centuries, white Southerners looking to Americans in bondage. They simply could not bolster white supremacy and justify Jim Crow allow a world in which they did not have abso- reimagined the Confederacy as a defender of lute authority to control black labor and to democracy and protector of white womanhood. regulate black behavior. To perpetuate this falsehood, they littered the The central role that slavery played in the country with monuments to the Lost Cause.

9 Development of the United States is beyond Our preference for nostalgia and for a history dispute. And yet, we the people do not like to that never happened is not without conse- talk about slavery, or even think about it, much quence. We miseducate students because of it. less teach it or learn it. The implications of Although we teach them that slavery happened, doing so unnerve us. If the cornerstone of the we fail to provide the detail or historical context Confederacy was slavery, then what does that they need to make sense of its origin, evolu- say about those who revere the people who took tion, demise and legacy.

10 And in some cases, we up arms to keep African Americans in chains? minimize slavery's significance so much that If James Madison, the principal architect of the we render its impact on people and on the Constitution, could hold people in bondage his nation inconsequential. As a result, students entire life, refusing to free a single soul even lack a basic knowledge and understanding of upon his death, then what does that say about the institution, evidenced most glaringly by our nation's founders? About our nation itself? their widespread inability to identify slavery TO LE RAN RG/H AR DH I STORY 5.