How history textbooks reflect America's refusal to count with slavery

Four hundred years ago, a group of about 20 Africans were captured in the interior of Africa, presumably near Angola, and forcibly transported on a slave ship to another country. heading to the Americas. After tumultuous months at sea, they landed in the first British colony in North America – Jamestown, Virginia – at the end of August 1619.

Hazen's US Elementary History: A Story and a Lesson, a popular textbook for young readers of the early twentieth century, took up the story of the first black Virginians there.

"The settlers bought them," says the 1903 text, "… and found them so useful for growing tobacco that others were imported and that slavery became a part of our history".

His nude course outline included only two easy-to-understand facts for the year 1619: the introduction of Africans – with an illustration of two half-naked blacks standing on a beach in front of a pontiff hacker and a crowd and the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first official legislative organ of the American colonies.

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But the story of Jamestown and slavery is not so simple. Although the landing of 1619 is not the first arrival of Africans in the Americas, it is part of the history of colonial America, black America, the world slave trade and ultimately the founding of our country. Thus, the way in which textbooks have summarized this story – a history characterized by an insufficient documentary record and often from the point of view of European settlers and white Americans – is important.

"The textbooks are supposed to teach us a set of common facts about who we are as Americans … and what stories are essential to our democracy," said Alana D. Murray, Maryland High School Principal. and author of The development of the alternative program Black, 1890-1940: countering the master narrative.

As textbooks show – omissions, blatant errors and specious interpretations, especially with regard to racial issues – not everyone appreciates the benefits of citizenship or is not sufficiently shaken in historical stories. This is even the case with the textbooks used today – 400 years after the arrival of Africans in 1619, more than 150 years after emancipation – the stories being more focused on the compassion of slaves than on the cruelty of slaves .

Textbooks have long remained a battleground where the humanity and status of black Americans have been challenged. Pedagogy has always been above all political.

Fast facts to black inferiority: how slavery has been historically described in textbooks

Hazen's textbook described Jamestown and his role in the development of American slavery as an inevitable question of labor demand and economic pragmatism, a common argument in American school materials at the turn of the twentieth century.

Still, it was only a school of thought. After the end of slavery in this country, many textbooks focused on the South promoted an approach to Lost Cause in Jamestown and slavery in the broad sense, describing the institution as part of a natural order. White southerners created ideologically Stories that aspired to Good Ole Days, where whites were at the top of the hierarchy and faithful African Americans. In this racist revisionism, they did not have to count with the new black citizen, the elector or the legislator as nominal equals.

A bit typical of this distorted story was The story of a child in North Carolina, around 1916, which also focused on the profitability of slavery and erased the violence. From this point of view, the slaves were happy and the slave owners of the South were at best reluctant masters.

According to the book, the slaves "had all the freedom they seemed to want and were privileged to visit other plantations when they chose to do so. All that was required of them was to be in place when the work time came. At the time of the holidays, they were almost as free as their masters. In addition, "most North Carolina actually opposed slavery and were in favor of progressive emancipation. Slavery already existed, however, without their fault. They had slaves and had to manage as best as possible the problem of knowing what to do with them.

In addition, the book argued that abolitionists – never such an important voting group – were responsible for the election of Abraham Lincoln and that their indeterminate violence made the South "indignant".

Some writers in the North have tried what they saw as a more nuanced approach to revising children's history books in the light of emancipation. And that included the way they talked about the arrival of this slave ship in Virginia and people on board.

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Take the example of CAmerican Progress Stories in Children, published in 1886. The northern white writer, Henrietta Christian Wright, known for his popular stories of fairies and magic, described this day in August 1619 as a time when the meadows along the James River were "beautiful with 'summer' – an African captive.

However, Wright also imagined eyes that "seemed exhausted from the portholes of the ship" and saw a new landscape that seemed "only sad and desolate, a land of exile and death". She alternated between seeing through their eyes and being the omniscient narrator looking at them from above. She called on the European powers to make Africa the "great hunting ground" and to take advantage of the internal struggles on the continent. Yet the looting that was dragging Africans "like idiots on the other side of the Atlantic" was "all because the white man chose to use his greatest intelligence to oppress instead of bonding with them.

Wright did not skimp on moralizing slavery as a diabolical and inappropriate enterprise for an allegedly Christian country, but she also did not see Africans as Europeans. His portrayal of the inferiority of blacks reflected a common belief among white Americans, even some former abolitionists. Stories like his explain how generations of white Americans think of their black compatriots and, according to a growing number of black educators, the way black Americans who read such textbooks think about themselves .

Black voices enter the textbook industry after the civil war – but barely disturb

The benevolent racism that has infected textbooks has also inspired a new generation of writers in history who wanted to inject less prejudice and more precision into educational materials. African Americans, often teachers with little training, began writing textbooks and creating historical reenactments that lasted for centuries with songs, speeches and dances in the decades following the American Civil War.

"You have those big textbooks that were in the schools, but they have nothing to do with what the blacks write. The black and black history textbooks had a totally different view of citizenship [in the late 1800s to mid-1900s]"Said Murray.

She was interested in how blacks wrote their own story when her graduate studies in the humanities failed to mention the father of what became Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson . Shocked by this blatant omission, Murray began his search and found women like Dorothy Guinn, director of the YWCA, who co-wrote Out of the dark (1924), a show in which the spectators and their interpreters of high school made a theatrical tour through the slave trade in Africa, reconstruction and contemporary moments.

A character named Chronicler talks about Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Sojourner Truth. She is assisted by music numbers such as "Go Down, Moses," Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems, and muse-like characters called the Children of Genius, who represent music, literature, science, and music. ;art. These are his Greek choirs, there to enlighten with information well placed.

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The zeal of correcting and contradicting other people's accounts of Black history motivated people like Edward A. Johnson of North Carolina, a black lawyer who published his own textbook, A School History of the Black Race in America from 1619 to 1819 in 1890.

In his preface, he narrated his eleven years of teaching and observing "omission and commission from white writers, most of whom seem to have written exclusively for children whites, and carefully left out the numerous meritorious acts of the negro. … But what should the little colored child feel when he finished the assigned course in the history of the United States and found no credit word, not a word of favorable comment, even for a alone among the millions of his ancestors who lived nearly three centuries of his country's history!

Leila Amos Pendleton, a former teacher in Washington, DC, expressed similar sentiments in her speech. A narrative of the Negro. Dating from 1912, he preceded Woodson's pioneer in 1933 The bad education of the negro, who denounced the failure of the American education system to teach an exact history of the black.

Pendleton reformulated the arrival of these early Virginians from Africa to Jamestown, placing it in a diasporic context that dealt with African civilizations (an oxymoron, according to many white writers), the African presence in Mexico, slavery in Muslim countries and the systematic exploitation of indigenous peoples. in the colonies.

She also made a direct emotional appeal to black children: "IMAGE, dear children, a small group of frightened and sad strangers, heart aching for the house and for the loved ones from whom they were torn off …. The beginning of the seventeenth century belongs to the dark ages of world history, at the time when men had not yet understood that every human creature has the right to be free and that it is the solemn duty of every man and every race to help true freedom all other men and all other races. "

LaGarrett King, a professor and founding director of The Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri, said it was difficult to know how widely used these texts were. . He can say that Johnson was used in a Raleigh, North Carolina, High School. Murray, Maryland's director and specialist, pointed out that Pendleton was announced in NAACP magazine The Crisis and that she probably had an unusual advantage: her husband owned the publisher who had produced her book.

But their explicitly political versions of history, which told a dark past that was more than slavery and sometimes had its share of romance, could not dislodge decades – actually centuries – of white supremacy by the manuals. This would not prevent the spread of such ideologies in American schools even in recent decades.

From the civil rights movement to today, textbooks leave much to be desired

Even at the height of the civil rights movement and beyond, textbooks still failed to capture the reality of what slaves endured in their perspective. "In the greatest number of textbooks, the life of slaves is described as a not too unpleasant condition; in fact, he has often been described as having been rather kind in the beauty of the relationship between the owner and the slaves, "wrote graduate student James O. Lewis. whose dissertation on black representations in textbooks in 1960 influenced the NAACP's efforts to reorganize racist textbooks.

Lewis also concluded that didactic materials quickly equated blackness with slavery, especially for writings on Jamestown. He noted that all the textbooks in his sample included the arrival of the first Africans to Jamestown and, although he observed a variety of descriptions in the book descriptions, the majority insisted that slavery had begun. with them in the Jamestown colony.

Lewis, however, supported the opinion of a minority of these textbooks that these involuntary migrants were contract servants, a debate that continues today. In 1619, when Africans arrived, Virginia did not have a legal framework for slavery in the colony, but it was passed over successive decades to cement slavery as a family. Hereditary racial institution.

King said that, overall, textbooks did not clearly communicate the nuances, questions, and debates about the status of Africans in early Virginia. And that's part of a larger existential problem.

"The way we teach black K-12 history is either oppression or liberation," he said. "The majority of teachers know that 1619 is a year when we represent the first Africans [to come to British North America] on what would become American soil. But what's missing is what happened next. Then, in terms of black history, we simply go to slavery. Many textbooks will now center them at once [slaves or indentured servants]but our understanding of slavery is very vague. Our manuals say that they were sold for property, but they could have been under contract and sold for goods, until their terms [of their labor contracts] were up. "

But few K-12 instructors know enough about the debate about the status of Africans to be able to sort out what's what, and many agree that the textbooks they use are ineffective. A report published in 2018 by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "Teaching a Hard History: American Slavery," found that more than half of the teachers (58%) surveyed were not satisfied of their textbooks and nearly 40% said that their state little or no support for the teaching of slavery.

King added that there was also the question of what teachers themselves had learned in the textbooks that they read as students, because "we have regularly seen blatant references and racist blacks until the 70s. The birth of Black Studies programs and the "new" social history, the popularity of Alex Haley Roots, and civil rights activism helped to introduce changes in programs. The NAACP, for example, had a textbook committee that oversaw the way textbooks described Black communities and their history. But sometimes, groups such as the Confederate Veterans of America, which issued a 1932 report denouncing one of the manuals that Jamestown would be portrayed as a messy regulation that did not compare well to the first colonies of New England.

Even though most textbooks are no longer openly racist, this does not mean that pedagogy has changed enough. Over the past decade, school districts across the country have been criticized for their way of teaching slavery, including the incorporation of references to slavery in mathematical equations.

In 2012, an elementary school in Atlanta asked the following question: "If Frederick was undergoing two beatings a day, how many times was he beaten in a week? Two weeks? And last year, parents in San Antonio, Texas, complained of a history duty to ask Grade 8 students to list the positive and negative aspects of slavery. It turns out that the activity was directly related to a textbook used by the school for about 10 years. Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States argues that not all slave owners were cruel: "a few [slaves] never felt the whiplash, "and" many may not have been terribly unhappy with their fate, for they knew no other. "

Not surprisingly, according to the SPLC report, only 8% of high school students surveyed know that slavery is the main cause of the American Civil War, 12% understand that slavery is important to the economy of the United States. North and only 22% the constitution benefited the slave owners.

Textbooks remain a reflection of the political climate

Textbooks have long been part of cultural wars, King said. In the late 1990s, researcher Leah Wasburn analyzed the portrayal of slavery in American history textbooks used in Indiana, and she explained how the religious right influenced textbooks in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, there were more conservative references to how Christianity had enslaved the slave, as well as the traditional family rhetoric that said the wives of the slave owners (who assumed that women were not the owners of slaves) took care of slaves in a maternal manner. .

King explained, "It boils down to money and politics. One of the strategies of conservative politicians is to take control of school boards, where textbook policies have been adopted. The seats of these councils are often named, and large states – those who can generate large sales from publishing houses and who can ask school systems to purchase particular textbooks – have a great deal to say about the content that is in the hands of the spirits.

Texas, for example, has carved a reputation for inserting into its school books dubious information and interpretations about the creation, evolution and evolution of Slavery of the country. In one case, Moses – himself a Ten Commandments – was among the founding fathers and slaves were referred to as immigrant workers in the caption of a student reported by a student in 2015. It is about 39, a problem that transcends the state of Lone Star. like a New York Review Books The analysis of the state's state program preparation indicates in this epigram: "What's happening in Texas does not stay in Texas in textbooks."

However, the outcry has caused some changes: late 2018, Texas The public school board decided to change school curricula to put slavery at the forefront of the civil war, while previously giving priority to sectionalism and state rights; these changes should come into effect this school year for middle and high school students.

But despite the desire of many Americans to see history as a straight line of progress – and this applies to the country's American chronology and American textbooks – King envisions a future of hard work.

There are still few authors of textbooks in color. By grade 12, "over 80% of students [public elementary and secondary] the teachers are white, "said King. "The program is still Eurocentric, despite the cosmetic diversity. We have quantitatively improved the diversification of the study program, without however improving it qualitatively. This is because much of Black history is defined only by contact with European and American whites, he says.

He suggests an intentional, evidence-based reframing – which complicates the assumptions that the reasons why blacks motivated their actions were the same as those of whites. For example, instead of showing that black Americans fighting on both sides of the American Revolution are mere proof of patriotism (black Americans are constantly required to prove their loyalty in history and contemporary politics), he emphasizes that blacks were promised freedom, directly or indirectly. indirectly, if they took up arms.

Nevertheless, he explains that there are more good resources for teachers to learn and use today. This includes materials that are not corrected texts, such as the recent New York Times 1619 project; Teaching Tolerance's "Teaching Hard History" series, which features multiple episodes on slavery and presents accomplished scholars, has recently updated the content devoted to teaching K-to-Grade 5 students; and online reading lists on various topics related to race, such as the Ferguson program.

For his part, Murray says that as a former teacher and now a director, she is still working on creating another alternative gun.

"There is always a group of teachers who will teach the program. But in every department, a teacher is engaged in high-level discussions about creating a curriculum that matters to his students. For them, it is not enough to know how many facts they must memorize; for example, to include the history of LGBTQ people. "

To move forward, she says educators must continue to draw intellectual offspring like Leila Amos Pendleton, whom she calls "dream weavers and writers, people who were in front of children who taught them and wrote for them." imagining for them and for us. "