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For resources on issues related to monuments and memorial landscape see the dedicated column in this padlet

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Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

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Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

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By Clint Smith in The Atlantic (2021)

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The accounts of ordinary people who survived slavery provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

Photograph by Aaron Turner; archival image from Library of Congress

Image above: Portrait of Mollie Williams (Mississippi), taken as part of the Federal Writers' Project This article was published online on February 9, 2021.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. On past visits, I'd always encountered crowds of tourists and school groups, a space bursting with movement and sound. But on this day, the museum was nearly empty. It seemed to echo with all the people who had been there but were no longer. For the few of us inside, social distancing was dictated by blue circles scattered on the floor.

I made my way down to the bottom level, which documents the history of slavery in America. Masks were mandatory, and something about the pieces of cloth covering everyone's mouths seemed to amplify the silence and solemnity of what surrounded us.

I walked past the statue of Thomas Jefferson standing among bricks bearing the names of people he'd enslaved, past a cabin that enslaved people had slept in, and past the stone auction block upon which enslaved people had been sold and separated from their families.

Toward the end of a long corridor was a dimly lit room with sepia-toned photos on the walls. Photos of enslaved people holding their own children, or their enslaver's children. Photos of fresh wounds on the backs of those who'd been beaten. Photos of people bent over fields of cotton that hid their faces.

But what was most striking about the room was the voices running through it. The words of people who had survived slavery were running on a six-minute loop. Their voices floated through the air like ghosts.

"My father was not allowed to see my mother but two nights a week," said a woman in the voice of Mary A. Bell. "Dat was Wednesday and Saturday. So he often came home all bloody from his beatings."

"I had to wok evva day," said a woman in the voice of Elvira Boles. "I'd leave mah baby cryin' in the yard, and I'd be cryin', but I couldn't stay."

"My mudder word in de field," said Harrison Beckett. "Sometimes she come in 9 or 10 'clock at night. She be all wore out an' it be so dark she too tired to cook lots of times, but she hafter git some food so we could eat it. Us all 'round de table like dat was like a feast."

When I'd first encountered these floating voices years before, I was fascinated by how ordinary their stories were. These were not tales of daring escapes like those of Henry "Box" Brown, who in 1849 contorted his body into a wooden crate for 27 hours as it was delivered from the slave state of Virginia to abolitionists in Pennsylvania-mailing himself to freedom. Nor were they the stories of Frederick Douglass, who as a teenager, in 1833, fought his white slave breaker with such force that the man never hit Douglass again. Nor were they the stories of Harriet Jacobs, who, in an attempt to escape the physical and sexual abuses of slavery, hid in an attic for seven years.

From the January 1867 issue: Frederick Douglass's 'An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage'
Brown became a global celebrity who turned his escape routine into a one-man show that traveled throughout the United States and England. Douglass and Jacobs wrote autobiographies that became best sellers, and that today are staples in classrooms around the world. Theirs are the stories I learned as a child, and there's great value in teaching kids stories of resistance, of Black people not being passive recipients of violence. But I remember how, after reading them, I found myself wondering why every enslaved person didn't just escape like these famous figures did. The memory of that thought now fills me with shame.

The stories swirling about the room weren't famous accounts of extraordinary people; rather, they were the words of all-but-forgotten individuals who bore witness to the quotidian brutality of chattel slavery. These stories were the result of the Federal Writers' Project-a New Deal program that was tasked with collecting the oral histories of thousands of Americans. From 1936 to 1938, interviewers from the FWP gathered the firsthand accounts of more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people in at least 17 states. The members of the last generation of people to experience slavery were reaching the end of their lives, and so there was an urgency to record their recollections. In scale and ambition, the project was unlike any that had come before it. The Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives produced tens of thousands of pages of interviews and hundreds of photographs-the largest, and perhaps the most important, archive of testimony from formerly enslaved people in history.

While many of these narratives vividly portray the horror of slavery-of families separated, of backs beaten, of bones crushed-embedded within them are stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek amid towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder. These small moments-the sort that freedom allows us to take for granted-have stayed with me.

When I first came across the narratives, I was confused as to why I had never, not once in my entire education, been made aware of their existence. It was as if this trove of testimony-accounts that might expand, complicate, and deepen my understanding of slavery-had purposefully been kept from view.

For many Black Americans, there is a limit to how far back we can trace our lineage. The sociologist Orlando Patterson calls it natal alienation: the idea that we have been stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify. I have listened to friends discuss the specific village in Italy their ancestors came from, or the specific town in the hills of Scotland. No such precision is possible for Black Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people. Even after our ancestors were forcibly brought to the shores of the New World, few records documented their existence. The first census to include all Black Americans by name was conducted in 1870, five years after slavery ended. Trying to recover our lineage can be a process of chasing history through a cloud of smoke. We search for what often cannot be found. We mourn for all we do not know.

But the descendants of those who were interviewed for the Federal Writers' Project have been given something that has been denied to so many Black Americans: the opportunity to read the words, and possibly see the faces, of people they thought had been lost to history.

Because these narratives are not often taught in school, many people come across them for the first time later in life. Several historians told me that their encounters with these stories had shifted the trajectory of their personal and intellectual lives. Catherine A. Stewart, a historian at Cornell College, in Iowa, and the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project, remembers sitting in the basement of the university library as a graduate student, making her way through reels of microfilm. "I will just never forget this sensation I had of these stories-of these life histories of these individuals, personal stories and experiences of enslavement-just leaping off the page," she said.

For years, the collections had been largely ignored. As Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller note in Remembering Slavery, an edited volume of selected narratives, historians throughout the mid‑20th century came up with a range of reasons not to take them seriously. Some argued that because the people who were interviewed, in the 1930s, had been children when slavery ended, their memories were unreliable. Others claimed that the narratives couldn't be trusted because they weren't an adequate statistical sample: Those who were interviewed represented approximately 2 percent of the formerly enslaved population still alive in 1930.

Perhaps the most insidious reason to dismiss the narratives came from the historian Ulrich B. Phillips, whose conception of slavery as a civilizing institution for the enslaved shaped many Americans' understanding of it in the early-to-mid-20th century. Phillips complained of "Negro bias," believing that Black Americans were "too close" to the subject of slavery and thus unable to be objective about it-a criticism that has been used to undermine Black writing and research on issues of racism since the earliest days of Black life in America.

That view began to change with the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, when historians, intellectuals, and activists came to see slavery as the root cause of racial inequality. Interest in the Federal Writers' Project narratives grew.

The Black Lives Matter movement has further pushed historians to revisit these stories. The past several years-and particularly the months since last summer's racial-justice protests-have prompted many people to question what we've been taught, to see our shared past with new eyes. The FWP narratives afford us the opportunity to understand how slavery shaped this country through the stories of those who survived it.
My mammy Martha an' me we 'longed ter Mister Joshua Long in Martin County, an' my paw, Henry, 'longed ter Squire Ben Sykes in Tyrrell County. Squire Sykes lived in what wus called Gum Neck, an' he owned a hundert slaves or more an' a whole passel of lan'.

Noah Lewis had been doing genealogical research for years, trying to learn as much as possible about his family history, when he discovered that his great-great-grandfather, a man named William Sykes, had been interviewed as part of the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave-narrative collection. He wanted to see the original documents himself, so he traveled from his home in Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., to visit the Library of Congress.

"It was an amazing experience," he told me. "I had never seen photographs of him before ... That was just mind-blowing all by itself."

In the black-and-white photograph of William Sykes that accompanies his narrative, he is 78 years old and facing the camera, his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. He has a white mustache that stretches over his mouth and a long goatee that hangs from his chin. He appears to be furrowing his brow.

"He kind of reminds me of my older brother, Jimmy," Lewis said.

Lewis had read books that detailed the physical and psychological violence of slavery; he had seen photos of enslaved people and understood the brutal conditions in which they worked. But there was something different about reading the narrative of his direct ancestor-someone from his own family who, only a few generations earlier, had been in chains.

In his narrative, William Sykes describes being a child in North Carolina and seeing the soldiers of the Union Army make their way into Confederate territory. Sykes's enslaver, fearful for his own life and worried that the Union soldiers might confiscate his human property, escaped with his enslaved workers into the mountains.

While we wus dar one day, an' while Mr. Jim Moore, de Jedge's daddy am in town de missus axes my cousin Jane ter do de washin'.

Jane says dat she has got ter do her own washin' an dat she'll wash fer de missus termorrer. De missus says "you ain't free yit, I wants you ter know."

"I knows dat I's not but I is 'gwine ter be free' ", Jane says.

De missus ain't said a word den, but late Sadday night Mr. Jim he comes back from town an' she tells him 'bout hit.

Mr. Jim am some mad an' he takes Jane out on Sunday mornin' an' he beats her till de blood runs down her back.

Sykes was a child; the detail of blood running down Jane's back stayed with him the rest of his life.

Lewis said that, like me, he'd grown up with an incomplete understanding of slavery. "As a young child, I remember thinking to myself, You know, hey, if slavery was so bad, why didn't my people fight harder to try to get out of it?  " Jane's story showed that it wasn't so simple.

Lewis himself was born in 1953 on an Army base in Heidelberg, Germany, where his father was stationed. His family returned to the U.S. when he was just 10 months old. When he was 13, they moved to Aldan, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. As far as Lewis knows, his was the first Black family in Aldan, and he says they were not welcomed with open arms.

"A couple days after we moved in, we woke up that morning, and somebody had written on our car windshield i hate niggers." His father came out of the house with a shotgun and yelled loud enough for everyone in the neighborhood to hear: "I don't care if you don't like me, but if you start playing with my property, there will be trouble."

Lewis said that while the FWP narratives can be emotionally difficult to get through, he's also found "a certain joy" in reading them. "This is your relative, and it's them speaking, and it brings them to life. They remind you that they were a person, not a stat, not a little side note, not a little entry in a genealogical chart. They were a real, living, breathing human being. That's what that document kind of really hits you with."

But not everyone feels the way Lewis does. Six years ago, he attended a family reunion in New Jersey and decided to share what he'd discovered. Standing in front of about 30 people in folding chairs in a relative's backyard, Lewis read Sykes's words. Some of those present were old enough to have known Sykes when they were children-and some felt deeply hurt, and embarrassed, by parts of what Sykes was portrayed as having said.

For example, some sections of his narrative implied that life under slavery was good:

I knows dat Mister Long an' Mis' Catherine wus good ter us an' I 'members dat de food an' de clothes wus good an' dat dar wus a heap o' fun on holidays. Most o' de holidays wus celebrated by eatin' candy, drinkin' wine an' brandy. Dar wus a heap o' dancin' ter de music of banjoes an' han' slappin'. We had co'n shuckin's, an' prayer meetin's, an' sociables an' singin's. I went swimmin' in de crick, went wid old Joe Brown, a-possum huntin', an' coon huntin', an' I sometimes went a-fishin'.

Read one way, these sorts of details might be seen as softening the horrors of slavery, making the gruesome nature of the institution more palatable to readers who aren't prepared to come to grips with what this country has done. Read another way, though, they might reveal the humanity of those who were enslaved, and show that despite circumstances predicated on their physical and psychological exploitation, they were still able to laugh, play, celebrate, and find joy.

Other sections of Sykes's account, however, are more difficult to reconcile. Toward the end of the narrative he's depicted as having said:

We ain't wucked none in slavery days ter what we done atter de war, an' I wisht dat de good ole slave days wus back.

Dar's one thing, we ole niggers wus raised right an' de young niggers ain't. Iffen I had my say-so dey'd burn down de nigger schools, gibe dem pickanninies a good spankin' an' put 'em in de patch ter wuck, ain't no nigger got no business wid no edgercation nohow.

After Lewis finished, some of his relatives told him that he shouldn't have read the narrative to them. They felt that Sykes's words reflected poorly on them as a family and on Black people in general. But they didn't just blame Sykes; they blamed the white person who'd interviewed him, who they believe must have manipulated Sykes or changed his words. "A typical example of white people trying to make us look ignorant," they told him.

This issue of manipulation in the interviews is something historians have had to wrestle with. The narratives were rarely verbatim transcriptions. Many interviewers altered their subjects' dialect to make it seem more "authentically" Black. As Catherine Stewart writes in her book, "FWP decisions about how to depict [dialect] on the page reveal more about how the black vernacular was used to represent black identity than about the actual speech patterns of ex-slave informants." And historians have worried that in a violent, segregated society, when white interviewers showed up on a Black person's doorstep, the formerly enslaved might have told the interviewers what they thought they wanted to hear, rather than what had actually happened.

The project did employ some Black interviewers, but the majority were white southerners. Some were the descendants of slaveholders-in certain cases, descendants of the families that had enslaved the very same people they were sent to interview-or members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization known for pushing a narrative of slavery that was sympathetic to the Confederate cause.

When Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a historian at UC Berkeley and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, showed early portions of her book to friends, some questioned why she hadn't changed the language of the interviews. They worried that the narratives portrayed formerly enslaved people as uneducated and illiterate. "There may have been some manipulation," Jones-Rogers told me, and that should be accounted for and taken seriously. Still, she felt that changing the language would risk changing the specific meaning behind how these individuals wanted to tell their story. And it would ignore the fact that, unfortunately, many of them were, by nature of circumstance, uneducated and illiterate-a reflection of the way the insidious legacy of slavery had continued to shape their lives.

Daina Ramey Berry, the chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that there is no source a historian can use that isn't compromised by bias in some way, and the notion that we should ignore the narratives because of their imperfections would mean applying a standard to them that is not applied across the board. "The big excuses that people have as to why they push back against them is that they'll say, 'Well, they're biased,' " she said. "And I'm always like, 'I don't understand why you can read a plantation owner's letters, or his journal-or her journal-and not even question that.' "

Lewis understood his relatives' concerns. Still, he couldn't help but feel disappointed that they didn't appreciate how remarkable it was that this narrative existed at all. For Lewis, it was a piece of history, a piece of them. It was like finding treasure-even if the jewels aren't cut as cleanly as you'd like, they're still worth something.

Lewis's interest in history would ultimately change the course of his life. As he was doing his genealogical research, he went all the way back to the American Revolution, trying to discover whether he had relatives who had been enslaved in the British colonies. He came across the book Black Genealogy, by the historian Charles L. Blockson. There, Lewis encountered the story of a man named Edward "Ned" Hector, a Black soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War, one of thousands of Black people to fight on the side of the Americans. During the Battle of Brandywine, in September 1777, Hector and his regiment were under attack and ordered to abandon their guns and retreat for safety. Hector, however, seized as many abandoned guns as he could, threw them in his wagon, and warded off British soldiers to salvage the only equipment his company had left.

Learning about Hector was transformative for Lewis. He thought this history of Black contributions to the American project should be taught in his children's classrooms-but not just through books or lectures. The history had to be brought to life. It had to be made real. "So I figured it would be a much better way of getting across to the kids about Hector if I came as Hector," he said.

His first presentation was in his daughter's fifth-grade classroom, in a makeshift costume that he still laughs about today. His pants were blue hospital scrubs, with a pair of long white socks pulled over the bottoms of the legs. He wore a yellow linen vest, a souvenir-shop tricornered hat, and a woman's blouse. "It was very bad, extremely bad," he said. Still, the teachers and students loved his presentation, and he was asked to come back again. And again. "After a while, one of the teachers said, 'You got something really good here. Maybe you might want to consider taking this more public, out to other schools and places.' I thought about that. And I said, 'You know, that's not a bad idea.' "

About three years later, Lewis decided to leave his full-time job running an electronics-repair shop so he could dedicate more time to his reenactment work, which he had begun getting paid to do. Since then, he's performed as Ned Hector in classrooms, at memorial sites, and at community festivals and has become a staple of the colonial-reenactment community.

In a video of one performance, he's dressed in a blue wool jacket-typical of those worn by American soldiers during the Revolutionary War-and a matching tricornered hat with a large red feather. In his hands, the musket he holds is not simply a musket, but an instrument that helps him transport the audience back more than two centuries. It becomes a paddle, rising and falling in front of his chest as he tells the story of Black soldiers helping other American troops cross a river during battle. He places it just below his chin as if it were a microphone amplifying his story, or a light meant to illuminate his face in the darkness.

In another video, Lewis stands in front of a school group. "How would you like to have your families, your loved ones, dying for somebody else's freedom, only to be forgotten by them?" He pauses and scans the crowd. "If you are an American, you share in African American history, because these people helped you to be free."

Watching Lewis, I was impressed by how he brought the Revolution to life in ways that my textbooks never had. How he told stories of the role Black people played in the war that I had never heard before. How in school-except for Crispus Attucks's martyrdom during the Boston Massacre-I don't think I had ever been made to consider that Black people were part of the American Revolution at all. It reminded me of how so much of Black history is underreported, misrepresented, or simply lost. How so many stories that would give us a fuller picture of America are known by so few Americans.
The horn to git up blowed 'bout four o'clock and if we didn't fall out right now, the overseer was in after us. He tied us up every which way and whip us, and at night he walk the quarters to keep us from runnin' 'round. On Sunday mornin' the overseer come 'round to each nigger cabin with a big sack of shorts and give us 'nough to make bread for one day. I used to steal some chickens, 'cause we didn't have 'nough to eat, and I don' think I done wrong, 'cause the place was full of 'em.

In the photograph accompanying the interview of Carter J. Johnson, he stands in front of a wooden cabin in the town of Tatum, Texas. He wears denim overalls and a collared shirt. His head is cocked, his brow furrowed. On the porch behind him is a woman in a patterned dress.

Janice Crawford had never seen a photo of her mother's father. When she saw this picture, she told me, it was listed under the name Carter J. Jackson, but Crawford couldn't find a Carter Jackson in the census records for that area. She recognized some of the names he mentioned in his narrative from her genealogical research, and showed the photo to her mother, who immediately recognized her father. Carter J. Jackson was in fact Carter J. Johnson. The interviewer must have made a mistake.

Crawford's mother was born to two unwed parents. They lived nearby, but the man she called Papa, the man she always thought of as her father, was Carter Johnson. Johnson, a deacon in the local church, and his wife, Sally Gray Johnson (whom Crawford called Big Mama, and who is the woman on the porch in the photo), took her in and raised her as their own. Crawford never knew her grandfather-he died nine years before she was born-but his presence was still in the air as she grew up.

Crawford's mother didn't have a photograph of her father, and it meant a great deal to Crawford to be able to give her one. "It was very emotional to me," she said.

She remembers her mother telling her a story, long before she read it in the narrative, about how Johnson and other enslaved people had been forced to walk from Alabama to Texas while guiding their owner's cattle and horses and a flock of turkeys the entire way. She couldn't understand how someone could make other people walk so far, for so long.

In the narrative, Johnson says that his mother, a woman named Charlotte from Tennessee, and his father, a man named Charles from Florida, had each been sold to a man named Parson Rogers and that he'd brought them to Alabama, where Johnson was born.

Johnson says that in 1863-the year President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation-Rogers brought 42 of his enslaved workers to Texas, where the proclamation was not being enforced. There, they continued to be enslaved by Rogers for four years after the war ended.

What Johnson describes was not uncommon. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation, enslavers throughout the Confederacy continued to hold Black people in bondage for the rest of the war. And even after General Robert E. Lee surrendered, on April 9, 1865, effectively signaling that the Confederacy had lost the war, many enslavers in Texas and other states did not share this news with their human property. In the narratives, formerly enslaved people recount how the end of their bondage did not correspond with military edicts or federal legislation. Rather, emancipation was a long, inconsistent process that delayed the moments when people first tasted freedom.

Johnson's narrative opens and closes with stories of separation. Near the beginning he says:

I had seven brothers call Frank and Benjamin and Richardson and Anderson and Miles, Emanuel and Gill, and three sisters call Milanda, Evaline and Sallie, but I don't know if any of 'em are livin' now.

Then, toward the end, he speaks about the last time he saw his mother:

Me and four of her chillen standin' by when mammy's sold for $500.00. Cryin' didn't stop 'em from sellin' our mammy 'way from us.

"The fact that his mother and several of his siblings were sold away, and he was standing there watching this happen," Crawford said, her voice cracking. "That's just-that's just heartbreaking."

I asked Crawford about the first line of Johnson's narrative, a line striking in how direct it is:

If you's wants to know 'bout slavery time, it was Hell.

"Well, you know, it's just kind of gut-wrenching, isn't it?" she said. "It was hell. And that's the word. When my mother saw that word she just kind of jumped. Because she said she'd never heard him curse. And to her, he wasn't talking about heaven and hell, in the way that, you know, a preacher or minister might. And it was jarring to her."

Crawford's genealogical research was driven in part by a desire to trace her biological lineage, because her mother had been adopted. But she also began searching for those who had enslaved her family. In the census records, she found a Rogers who matched her grandfather's description of "Massa Rogers." Then, in a Texas newspaper, she found an article written by one of Rogers's descendants that celebrated the family's local history, despite all that that history included.

"These folks are proud of their heritage," Crawford told me. "Even though it includes the fact that their people enslaved other people."

Crawford wrote to the newspaper, which put her in touch with the article's author. She didn't say that his family had enslaved hers. She simply said that, based on her research, the two families were "connected." But she believes he understood. It was a small town, and the names she mentioned should have made the nature of the connection obvious.

I wondered what Crawford had been hoping to get from these exchanges. Did she want an apology? A relationship? Something else?

She told me she'd been looking for information about her family, trying to recover names of ancestors that had never entered the public record. The man promised to send her some documents from his family members but never did. More important, she added, "I was hoping that they're acknowledging our humanity. And that just like he is interested in and proud of his ancestry, so am I."

"I would like to say that I'm an observer, and that I can be emotionally detached," she said, but "it just brings tears to my eyes, how they were treated." One of the things that left Crawford most unsettled was that the Rogers family back then had claimed to espouse the principles of Christianity. "The people that enslaved my ancestors were ministers, pastors, preachers."

For Crawford, reading Johnson's words was the entry point into an entire world of ex-slave narratives. "They really weren't fed well. They weren't housed well. They were just required to work from sunup to sundown. They were whipped," she told me. "It is horrendous. But still, in all, I feel so blessed to have found that document."

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Because it's a link to our shared history," she said. "We existed. We conquered. We overcame."
My mammy said dat slavery wuz a whole lot wusser 'fore I could 'member. She tol' me how some of de slaves had dere babies in de fiel's lak de cows done, an' she said dat 'fore de babies wuz borned dey tied de mammy down on her face if'en dey had ter whup her ter keep from ruinin' de baby.
L ucy Brown didn't know her age when she was interviewed for the Federal Writers' Project on May 20, 1937, in Durham, North Carolina. She had no birth certificate, no sense of what year she'd come into this world. Brown's testimony is shorter than many of the others, in part because she was so young-perhaps only 6 or 7-as slavery entered its final days.

"I wuz jist a little thing when de war wuz over," she said.

We belonged to John Neal of Person County. I doan know who my pappy wuz, but my mammy wuz named Rosseta an' her mammy's name 'fore her wuz Rosseta. I had one sister named Jenny an' one brother named Ben.

The narrative is a mix of small memories she carried with her from her early childhood and memories that had been passed on to her from her mother.

Gregory Freeland, like both Lewis and Crawford, came across the narrative of his great-great-grandmother while researching his family history. He was raised just outside Durham, where he lived with his mother and his great-grandmother-Lucy's daughter. He found the narrative only after she had died.

When Freeland was a child, his family members would tell stories about their lives, but he wasn't interested in hearing them. "I was sort of ready to get away from that, that slavery thing," he told me. "So I never paid attention. It seemed like schoolwork."

Now he wishes he'd asked his great-grandmother about her life, and her mother's life. He felt grateful for having stumbled onto this narrative, and for how connected it made him feel to a history that he'd previously taken for granted. "This is the link to the past," he said.

Freeland was drafted in 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War. He was stationed in Korea when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and according to Freeland, the Army worked to "keep the temperature down" after King's death so that Black soldiers-who were fighting a war for a country that still didn't afford them basic rights-wouldn't get too upset. The strange dissonance of being sent to the other side of the world to fight for a country that had just killed the leader of your people stayed with Freeland long after he came back to the U.S.

The GI Bill paid for him to go to college, and covered most of graduate school, where he studied political science. For the past 30 years, he's been a professor at California Lutheran University, where he teaches courses on race, politics, and the civil-rights movement-subjects he feels are urgent and necessary for students at this college with a tiny Black population.

He told me he's "trying to keep this history alive, because it's getting further and further away."

The Durham of Freeland's childhood smelled of tobacco. He remembers the ubiquity of chicken noises, mixed with music from people's houses as they sang while they cooked or listened to the radio on the porch. His family grew fruits and vegetables in their yard, and Freeland helped kill the chickens and hogs they raised. "I had to go out and wring the chickens' neck," he told me. "I don't know if you've ever seen it happen, but you grab the chicken by the neck and wring it, wring it, wring it until the body pops off. And when the body pops off, it flops around for a while."

"My students," he said, "they can't fathom that life was like that."

Freeland grew up in the same town where his great-great-grandmother had settled after the Civil War. Known then as Hickstown-named for a white landowner, Hawkins Hicks-the community had begun as an agricultural settlement for the formerly enslaved on the western edge of Durham. Over the course of several decades, it became a self-reliant Black community where the formerly enslaved, their children, and their children's children all lived together. This history is reflected in Lucy Brown's narrative:

I can't tell yo' my age but I will tell yo' dat eber'body what lives in dis block am either my chile or gran'chile. I can't tell yo' prexackly how many dar is o' 'em, but I will tell you dat my younges' chile's baby am fourteen years old, an' dat she's got fourteen youngun's, one a year jist lak I had till I had sixteen.

As nearby Duke University grew, so too did Hickstown, which became known as Crest Street. Residents served as food-service workers, housekeepers, maintenance staff. By the 1970s, the community had more than 200 households, and more than 60 percent of residents worked for the university, according to the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. This included Freeland's mother, who walked every day from the dirt roads surrounding their home to the paved streets near Duke. And though many of the jobs available did not pay much, it was a tight-knit community of people deeply invested in one another, and in the history of the community their ancestors had built.

Crest Street came under threat in the 1970s with the planned expansion of the East-West Expressway, which would slice directly through the center of this century-old Black community. The residents decided to fight the plan. They hired a team of lawyers and filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation, citing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination "under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." In 1980, the U.S. Department of Transportation ruled that the highway project could not move forward as proposed, because it would disproportionately affect Black residents.

Representatives from the North Carolina Department of Transportation and members of the Crest Street community began meeting to see if they could come to an agreement. Crest Street residents invited officials to visit their homes, so that they could see what the construction project would have demolished. Ultimately, a compromise was reached in which the residents would all move to an area that was adjacent to their original neighborhood, keeping the community largely intact.

Listening to Freeland tell this story, I thought about how remarkable it was that in this same place where formerly enslaved people had built a community for themselves after generations of bondage, Black people once again had to defend themselves against a government that was attempting to take away a sort of freedom.

For Freeland, stories of towns like Crest Street, and the activists who kept the community together, are just as essential to document as the stories of his formerly enslaved great-great-grandmother. "I'd like to interview people who lived through the segregationist era," he told me. "And I'd like to interview those people who participated in making change-Black people who are maybe my age, who grew up in this kind of community-before we pass on."

"Who is going to remember," he said, "if nobody's there to tell it?"

Freeland is right. There are other stories of the Black experience that should be collected-and soon. Recently, I've become convinced of the need for a large-scale effort to document the lives of people who lived through America's southern apartheid; who left the land their families had lived on for generations to make the Great Migration to the North and West; who were told they were second-class citizens and then lived to see a person who looked like them ascend to the highest office in the land. Their stories exist in our living rooms, on our front porches, and on the lips of people we know and love. But too many of these stories remain untold, in many cases because no one has asked.

What would a new Federal Writers' Project look like? How could we take the best of what the narratives of the 1930s did and build on them, while avoiding the project's mistakes?

When I raised the idea with the historians I interviewed, their voices lit up with energy as they imagined what such a project might look like.

"Historians would definitely need to be in charge," Stephanie Jones-Rogers told me. Specifically, Black scholars should lead the project. "There's a way in which to not only center the Black experience, but also to privilege Black intellect, Black brilliance," she said. "It would be a project like none we've ever seen."

Daina Ramey Berry thought family members should conduct the interviews. "Almost like a StoryCorps on NPR," she said, "because I think you're going to get a more authentic story about what life was like." Berry thought that even well-intentioned strangers might re-create some of the same dynamics in place in the 1930s. She worried about the implications, again, of having federal workers going into older Black folks' homes and asking them deeply personal questions about what may have been a traumatic time in their lives.

Catherine Stewart believes that there would be important benefits to having such a project led by the federal government: "Funding, first and foremost, at a level other agencies and nonprofit organizations simply don't have." She added that the federal government already has the infrastructure this sort of project would require-in places like the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Library of Congress. The government also has the ability to ensure that the public has access to it.

When I began reading the Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives, I thought about my own grandparents. I thought about my grandfather, and how his grandfather had been born into bondage. About my grandmother, and how the grandparents who raised her had been born just after abolition. About how, in the scope of human history, slavery was just a few moments ago. I thought, too, of everything my grandmother and grandfather have seen-born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida and 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, respectively, and now living through the gravest pandemic in a century and watching their great-grandchildren, my children, grow up over FaceTime.

About a year ago, I decided to interview them. I spoke with them each individually, an audio recorder sitting on the table between us, and listened as they told me stories about their lives that I had never heard. My grandfather and his siblings hid in the back room under a bed while white supremacists rode on horseback through their community to intimidate Black residents. As my grandmother walked to school on the red-dirt roads of northern Florida, white children passing by on school buses would lower their windows and throw food at her and the other Black children. For as much time as I'd spent with them, these were the sorts of stories I hadn't heard before. The sorts of stories that are not always told in large groups at Thanksgiving while you're trying to prevent your toddler from throwing mac and cheese across the room.

My children will, in a few decades, be living in a world in which no one who experienced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 will still be alive. What happens to those people's stories if they are not collected? What happens to our understanding of that history if we have not thoroughly documented it?

Some of this work is already being done-by the Southern Oral History Program and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for instance-but not on a scale commensurate with what the Federal Writers' Project did. That requires financial and political investment. It requires an understanding of how important such a project is.

Imagine if the government were to create a new Federal Writers' Project. One committed to collecting, documenting, and sharing the stories of Black people who lived through Jim Crow, of Japanese Americans who lived through internment, of Holocaust refugees who resettled in America, of veterans who fought in World War II and the Vietnam War. And stories like those of the people in Freeland's great-great-grandmother's town, who fought to keep their community together when the state wanted to split it apart. There are millions of people who experienced extraordinary moments in American history, and who won't be around much longer to tell us about them. Some of these moments are ones we should be proud of, and some should fill us with shame. But we have so much to learn from their stories, and we have a narrowing window of time in which to collect them.

I keep thinking of something Freeland told me, and how his words speak to both the stakes and the possibility of this moment.

"We survived," he said. "And I'm still around."
This article appears in the March 2021 print edition with the headline "We Mourn for All We Do Not Know."

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent and the forthcoming nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed.

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The accounts of ordinary people who survived slavery provide an all-too-rare link to our past. Image above: Portrait of Mollie Williams (Mississippi), taken as part of the Federal Writers' Project This article was published online on February 9, 2021. On a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C.

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Seizing the Moment: Teaching Race and Racism Today

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Seizing the Moment: Teaching Race and Racism Today

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Hasan Kwame Jeffries, keynote session at NCHE  Equity Summit (2020)

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Seizing the Moment: Teaching Race and Racism Today

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"Why must we always talk about race anyway?"

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"Why must we always talk about race anyway?"

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“Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can’t we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied – that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (novel), 2013.

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What we don't know about American slavery hurts us all. From Teaching Tolerance and host Hasan Kwame Jeffries , Teaching Hard History brings us the lessons we should have learned in school through the voices of leading...

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We're saddened by the news of yet another classroom lesson on slavery involving a troubling simulation-but we're not surprised. Our research has shown some common pitfalls when teaching and learning about slavery. In this edition of The Moment, we explain why mock auctions-along with simulations of the Middle Passage-do more harm than good, and we provide resources for teaching this history more effectively.

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Essential questions for elementary and older

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Essential questions for elementary and older

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What does it mean to be free?

How do human beings make choices in difficult circumstances?

How is culture passed down throughout history?

How do traditions and culture help form our identities?

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One woman's quest for freedom in early Washington, D.C.
Link to teacher guide & resources

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November 1815. An enslaved woman named Anna is sold away from her family in Maryland to slave traders, taken to Washington, D.C., and locked in a tavern garret. She is about to be sent to Georgia and separated from her husband and children. Desperate and trapped, she makes a decision that changes everything.

Based on true events, Anna is the story of one woman's quest for freedom and family.

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November 1815. An enslaved woman named Anna is sold away from her family in Maryland to slave traders, taken to Washington, D.C., and locked in a tavern garret. She is about to be sent to Georgia and separated from her husband and children. Desperate and trapped, she makes a decision that changes everything.

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A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of the United States-or how its legacies still influence us today. In an effort to remedy this, we developed a comprehensive guide for teaching and learning this critical topic at all grade levels.

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Most students leave high school without an adequate understanding of the role slavery played in the development of the United States-or how its legacies still influence us today. In an effort to remedy this, we developed a comprehensive guide for teaching and learning this critical topic at all grade levels.

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“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”.

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"Slavery is hard history. It is hard to comprehend the inhumanity that defined it. It is hard to discuss the violence that sustained it. It is hard to teach the ideology of white supremacy that justified it. And it is hard to learn about those who abided it.

We the people have a deep-seated aversion to hard history because we are uncomfortable with the implications it raises about the past as well as the present.”

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Teaching Hard History, Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance Project Report, January 2018, preface.

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Washington Post Series on how slavery has been taught in schools

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"All education takes place on Indigenous lands"

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"All education takes place on Indigenous lands"

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"All education takes place on Indigenous lands. I acknowledge the need for social studies education, and indeed all education, to teach in ways that affirm and sustain the many identities of students and teachers in- and outside our classroom communities."

Sarah B. Shear, PhD, Assistant Professor, Social Studies & Multicultural Education, University of Washington-Bothell

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Why we must confront the painful parts of US history

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Why we must confront the painful parts of US history

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TED Talk by Hasan Kwame Jeffries (2020)

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Why we must confront the painful parts of US history | Hasan Kwame Jeffries

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New Orleans’ Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Address on the Removal of Four Confederate Statues

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New Orleans’ Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Address on the Removal of Four Confederate Statues

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Speech given on Friday, May 19, 2017

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The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way for both good and for ill.

It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see, New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures.

There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum - out of many we are one.

But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America's largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery, of rape, of torture.

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 in Louisiana alone; where the courts enshrined 'separate but equal'; where Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.

So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the question: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame - all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth.

As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them."

...

So, let's start with the facts.

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This "cult" had one goal - through monuments and through other means - to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, these monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America. They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone's lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous Cornerstone speech that the Confederacy's "cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it.

President Obama said, "Consider what this artifact tells us about history ... on a stone where day after day for years, men and women ... bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men."

A piece of stone - one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored.

...

I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes.

Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth-grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it?

Can you look into that young girl's eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?

We all know the answer to these very simple questions.

When you look into this child's eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can't walk away from this truth.

...

To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.

History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans or anyone else to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person's humanity seems perverse and absurd.

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place.

...

And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush's words, "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them."

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say "Wait, not so fast."

But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Wait has almost always meant never."

We can't wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don't change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain.

While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

...

Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

...

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city's history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.

And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people.

In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals.

We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America.

Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way.

It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes.

Instead of revering a four-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

...

So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid: "If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of this nation's humanity."

So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.

As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans' Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said:

"With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

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New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Address on the Removal of Four Confederate Statues

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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TEACHING ABOUT RACE, RACISM AND POLICE VIOLENCE

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TEACHING ABOUT RACE, RACISM AND POLICE VIOLENCE

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Teaching About Race, Racism and Police Violence

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In 2014, the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York City, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and too many others caused waves of nationwide protest and appeals for stronger protections against police brutality. These events—along with the lack of accountability for the police officers wh…

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Collection of resources

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5 Washington Post Essays by Historians

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Elementary

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Middle, high school

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Summary objectives of the Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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Summary objectives of the Framework for Teaching American Slavery

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Elementary, middle, high school
Link to article

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10 Key Concepts and Textbook Evaluation Rubric

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10 Key Concepts and Textbook Evaluation Rubric

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Link to concept videos

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High school

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Learning for Justice webinars offer helpful guidance and great ideas from our experienced teaching and learning specialists and from innovative educators in the Learning for Justice community. Watch these FREE on-demand webinars at your own pace and share them with colleagues!

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Historian Ed Baptist provides context on the creation and enforcement of a U.S. racial binary that endures today, as well as Black resistance as a force for political change. And Aisha White urges educators to ask themselves, "What did you learn about race when you were younger?" before they engage with children. She argues that self-reflection and ongoing education are vital tools to combat the fallacy of ignoring students' racialized experiences.

People from all corners of public life are telling teachers to stop discussions about race and racism in the classroom, but keeping the truth of the world from students simply doesn't work. English teacher Matthew Kay urges educators to create brave spaces instead. He provides examples of classroom strategies for engaging with students at the intersections of race, literature and lived experience. Hint: it involves vulnerability, accountability and quality affirmations.

This season, we're examining the century between the Civil War and the modern civil rights movement to understand how systemic racism and slavery persisted and evolved after emancipation-and how Black Americans still developed strong institutions during this time. Co-hosts Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Bethany Jay discuss how students need to grasp this history to understand injustices many of them face today, from voter suppression to mass incarceration.

In 2015, Coach Steve Bandura loaded the Anderson Monarchs, a Little League baseball team from Philadelphia, onto a 1947 Flxible Clipper Bus for a barnstorming tour back in time. Bandura and the players recount lessons learned while visiting historic civil rights sites, meeting veteran activists and playing baseball along the way. And historian Derrick E. White, co-host of The Black Athlete podcast, explores the intersection of sports and civil rights history.

The civil rights movement offers critical context for understanding the systemic police violence, voter suppression efforts, 'law and order' rhetoric and criminalization of activism we see today. It also helps us understand the strategies activists use to fight these injustices. Historians Shannon King and Nishani Frazier explain how they use 21st-century Black activism to teach the movement's history-and how they use the movement to help students better understand the contemporary Black freedom struggle.

The history of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense can help us understand the transition from civil rights to Black Power and contemporary issues like mass incarceration. From the Ten-Point Platform to survival programs, historian Robyn C. Spencer outlines key aspects of the party's revolutionary ideology, grassroots activism and community service. And historian Jakobi Williams joins to share valuable classroom insights.

Historian Clarence Lang joins us for a conversation about Malcolm X. We discuss his commitment to Black pride and self-determination and his rejection of the white gaze and the myth of American exceptionalism. Learn how teaching about the life and works of Malcolm X can illuminate the universe of possibilities of the civil rights movement-and the diversity of ideology, strategy and political thought within the Black freedom struggle.

In this episode, we talk with movement veteran Courtland Cox about lessons from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and his own development as a young organizer of the Emmett Till generation. We join Karlyn Forner and John B. Gartrell to tour the resources available through SNCC Digital Gateway. And we hear from student organizer Kaia Woodford about the lessons from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that inform her activism today.

Oral histories, historic sites, archives and museums expand students' understanding of the past. They fill in gaps in our textbooks-complementing what's included and capturing what's not. This episode highlights online oral history collections including the Civil Rights History Project. It offers recommendations for students conducting their own oral histories. And it explores resources from the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Teaching civil rights history to young learners creates both opportunities and challenges. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the subsequent Freedom Schools offer important lessons for helping elementary students to understand the civil rights movement. In this episode, we explore community-based strategies and activities for bringing the Black freedom struggle into your classroom.

If you're finding this podcast useful, please support us by taking our 10 question Listener Survey. And stay tuned! More episodes are on the way. In the meantime, if you're looking for ways to talk with students about the relationship between the hard history of white supremacy and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Learning for Justice resources can help you lead student-responsive, historically grounded discussions about the recent violence.

From the hard work of organizing to the reality of everyday life under Jim Crow, films and literature can bring historical context to life for students. In this episode, we recommend several "must use" films, books, poems and plays for teaching the civil rights movement. We also discuss strategies for incorporating these works across the curricula and for turning even problematic texts into grist for meaningful critical discussions.

Everyone thinks they know the story, but the real history of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is even better. This episode details the events that set the stage for Ms. Parks' civil disobedience. You'll meet the leaders and organizations who transformed a moment of activism into a 13-month campaign. And you'll learn about the community that held fast in the face of legal and political attacks, economic coercion, intimidation and violence.

To fully understand the United States today, we have to comprehend the central role that slavery played in our nation's past. That legacy is also the foundation for understanding the civil rights movement and its place within the history of the Black freedom struggle. This episode is a special look back at our first season. It explores and expands on the 10 Key Concepts that ground Learning for Justice's K-12 frameworks for teaching the hard history of American slavery.

You cannot teach the civil rights movement without talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it's critical that students deconstruct the mythology surrounding the movement's most iconic figure to learn about the man, not just the hero. The real Dr. King held beliefs that evolved over time. A complex man, he was part of a much larger movement-one that shaped him as much as he shaped it.

The civil rights movement was never strictly a Southern phenomenon. To better understand the Jim Crow North, we explore discrimination and Black protest in places like Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland and New York. To examine the Black Freedom Movement beyond the South, we examine the Black-led fights to gain access to decent housing, secure quality education and end police brutality in these cities.

Armed resistance and nonviolent direct action co-existed throughout the civil rights era. In this episode, three historians confront some comfortable assumptions about nonviolence and self-defense. Wesley Hogan examines the evolution, value and limitations of nonviolence in the movement. Christopher Strain offers a three-part strategy for rethinking this false dichotomy in the classroom. And Akinyele Umoja offers insights about armed resistance from his research in Mississippi.

Alice Qannik Glenn is the host of Coffee and Quaq and assistant producer of The Forgotten Slavery of our Ancestors. This short, classroom-ready film offers an introduction to the history of Indigenous enslavement on land that is currently the United States. This new resource from Learning for Justice features an extensive group of experts, many of whom will be familiar to listeners from Season 2.

Jim Crow was more than signs and separation. It was a system of terror and violence created to control the labor and regulate the behavior of Black people. In this episode, historian Stephen Berrey unpacks the mechanics of racial oppression, the actions white people took-in and beyond the South-to maintain white supremacy, and the everyday ways Black people fought back. And the directors of the film An Outrage join ELA-teacher Ahmariah Jackson to discuss teaching the racial terror of lynching.

Music chronicles the history of the civil rights struggle: The events, tactics and emotions of the movement are documented in songs of the era. From The Freedom Singers to Sam Cooke, historian Charles L. Hughes explains how your students can use music for both historical insight and evidence in the classroom.

Students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. When it comes to the civil rights movement, we often have to help our students unlearn what they think they know while we're teaching them what actually happened. The people were more complex, the strategies more complicated and the stakes more dangerous than we like to remember. In this episode, historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez demonstrate the value of teaching the movement from the grassroots up.

Teaching the civil rights movement accurately and effectively requires deconstructing the myths and misconceptions around it. Most people are familiar with a very specific version of the movement that exaggerates government support and denies the existence and persistence of racism outside the South. Julian Bond called this the "Master Narrative." It celebrates sanitized icons and downplays grassroots organizing. And it overhypes nonviolence while disparaging self-defense and Black Power. In this episode, we talk with historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez about how to separate fact from fiction in your civil rights teaching.

The systems that enabled and perpetuated African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the U.S. have much in common, and their histories tell us a great deal about the present. Professors Bethany Jay and Steven Oliver join us to talk about connections between the first two seasons and how to teach them, and we preview what's to come in season three.

In this special call-in episode, listeners share their stories and questions from throughout season 2-including teaching remotely, working with families and stakeholders, and incorporating social justice into subjects like math and science. As educators, we're strongest when we support each other. And you'll hear great suggestions from fellow teachers, like these resources we discuss from Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia.

It's time for our first call-in show! We know things are chaotic for you and every other educator right now. We feel it too, so this seems like the perfect time to talk. Pick up the phone and dial 888-59-STORY (888-597-8679). Our lines are open until Sunday night, April 19. Teaching hard history is even harder right now, so let's talk about resources you can use if you're teaching virtually. Ask us your questions; tell us your stories. And let us know how you're doing.

Indian Removal was a brutal and complicated effort that textbooks often simplify. It is also inseparably related to slavery. Enslavers seeking profit drove demand for Indigenous lands, displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. Some of these Indigenous people participated in chattel slavery. Focusing on the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, this episode pulls the lens back to show how Removal and enslavement must be taught together. This story must be told if we're going to understand the full hard history of American enslavement.

The Americas were built on the lands, labor and lives of Indigenous peoples. Despite being erased from history textbooks after the so-called first Thanksgiving, Indigenous peoples did not disappear. Colonial settlers relied on the cooperation, exploitation and forced labor of their Native neighbors to survive and thrive in what became North America. Focusing on New England, historian Margaret Newell introduces us to the Charter Generation of systematically enslaved people across this continent.

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers' Project collected stories from people who had been enslaved. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress is a valuable resource; these oral histories are also problematic. Interpreting these narratives within literary and historical context, students can develop primary source literacy. Historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly outlines unique insights these texts can add to your curriculum.

To better understand the United States' past and present, we need to better understand Indigenous identities-and classrooms play a huge role. This starts with examining what's missing from our social studies, history, civics and government curricula. Throughout this episode, we reference the K-5 Framework for Teaching Hard History as we shed light on key topics like sovereignty, land and erasure.

Educators can no longer ignore our country's history of Indigenous enslavement. Our students need a fuller understanding of the pivotal history of slavery to comprehend the present and develop a vision for our nation's future. In this mid-season recap, we highlight key lessons about this consequential part of American history-along with teaching strategies and resources-through the voices of leading scholars and educators featured so far.

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the forced labor and bondage of Indigenous peoples was integral to the economic and political history of what became the Southwestern United States. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez outlines the significance of silver mining, Indigenous enslavement and resistance in the history of New Mexico and Latin America. We examine how, as white settlers moved west, so-called "free soil" states like California continued to institutionalize coerced labor.
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A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in "The New World." And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas were enslaved through several forms of forced labor and bondage. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez calls this "The Other Slavery," and his work is changing our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade.
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Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. His work has changed conventional wisdom about the institution of slavery in the Atlantic world. Over the next two episodes, host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Reséndez will discuss key turning points in this history-exploring how it expands our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and the lasting legacy of colonialism, which continues to reverberate in our communities. Be sure to join us.
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Each autumn, Thanksgiving brings a disturbing amount of inaccurate information and troubling myths into classrooms across the United States. Most students don't learn much about the history of Native nations-and even less about Indigenous peoples today. Dr. Debbie Reese explains what to look for and what to avoid (or teach with a critical lens) when selecting children's books by and about Indigenous people. She also recommends specific books to counter common misconceptions in your classroom.
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Children's books are often the primary way young students are exposed to the history of American slavery. But many books about slavery sugarcoat oppression. Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas examines what we should consider when it comes to how children's books portray African Americans and Indigenous people, their cultures and the effects of enslavement. She also explains why it's crucial to create "a balance of narratives" when selecting books about marginalized and underrepresented communities.
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For elementary teachers approaching the topic of slavery, it can be tempting to focus only on heroes and avoid explaining oppression. But teachers' omissions speak as loudly as what they choose to include. And what children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education. Dr. Kate Shuster guides us through the new Teaching Hard History K-5 framework from Learning for Justice. We also learn how four elementary teachers are beginning to use it in their classrooms.
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Understanding Indigenous enslavement expands our conception of slavery in what is now the United States. It spread across the entire continent and affected millions of people of different backgrounds. If we define slavery too narrowly, we can fail to see its persistence over time and even its modern-day permutations. Historian Christina Snyder examines the Civil War, Lincoln and emancipation with Indigenous people in mind.
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Millions of Indigenous people lived in North America before European colonial powers invaded. Along with an insatiable desire for free labor, Europeans brought a system of slavery that significantly differed from the historical practices of enslavement among Native nations. Historian Christina Snyder tells the story of what happened when these worlds collided. European concepts of bondage transformed the way Native nations interacted with each other, resulted in the enslavement and death of millions of Indigenous people, and sparked widespread resistance by Native nations.
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The Smithsonian's Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey discuss the importance of learning about Indigenous enslavement. And former Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello explains all of the program's classroom resources available for teaching this history, including a first-of-its-kind K-5 framework.
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We're turning our attention to the enslavement of Indigenous people, spending more time with teachers in the classroom and adding support for K-5 educators. Tune in next week for more advice about teaching the history and long legacy of American slavery.
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Download the transcript for all of season 1 here.

Historian Bethany Jay returns - answering questions from educators across the country. Host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery confront teacher anxieties and counter misconceptions in our season finale.
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From elementary to high school, YA literature can introduce fundamental themes and information about slavery, especially when paired with primary sources. John H. Bickford shows how to capitalize on the strengths and weaknesses of trade books about slavery.
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Using the present to explore the past. Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair suggest a Social Studies unit about Resistance & Kanye West, and a set of English Language Arts lessons examining holidays to understand the legacy of American slavery.
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How it's done. Tamara Spears teaches middle school Social Studies in New York and Jordan Lanfair is a high school English Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Each has been developing additional lessons about slavery for years. They share their experiences.
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Over the next few episodes, we're bringing Season One to a close. Tune in for stories from the classroom, guidance for elementary teachers and language arts classes. And answers to questions from listeners like you.
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Enslavement didn't end with Emancipation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world-and right here in the U.S.-showing educators how to connect the past with the present.
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A listener's question leads to a meaningful moment. And now we want more! Take a listen, then email us to tell us your story about teaching hard history for an upcoming, special episode.
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At James Madison's Montpelier, the legacy of enslaved people isn't silenced-and their descendants have a voice. Christian Cotz, Price Thomas and Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes explain how that happened, and why it's important.
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In the United States, justice was never blind. Historian Paul Finkelman goes beyond legal jargon to illustrate how slavery was entangled with the opinions of the Court-and encoded into the Constitution itself.
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Constitutional historian Paul Finkelman explains the deeply racist bargains the founding fathers struck in order to unify the country under one document and discusses what students need to know about how slavery defined America after the Revolution.
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Film historian Ron Briley returns with more documentary, feature film and miniseries suggestions for history and English instructors. From Ken Burns to Black Panther, this episode offers background and strategies for incorporating pop culture into classroom lessons.
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Film has long shaped our nation's historical memory, for good and bad. Film historian Ron Briley offers ways to responsibly use films in the classroom to reframe the typical narrative of American slavery and Reconstruction.
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Most students leave school thinking enslaved people lived like characters in Gone With the Wind. Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens reveals the remarkable diversity of lived experiences within slavery and explains the gap between what scholars and students know.
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To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.
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Students learning about slavery often ask, "Why didn't enslaved people just run away or revolt?" Lindsay Anne Randall offers a lesson in "Process Drama"-a method teachers can use to answer this question, build empathy and offer perspective.
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In many ways, the U.S. has fallen short of its ideals. How can we explain this to students-particularly in the context of discussing slavery? Professor Steven Thurston Oliver has this advice for teachers: Face your fears.
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Follow the money. Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara explains why American slavery couldn't have existed without a national commercial infrastructure that supported and benefited from the labor of enslaved people.
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Dr. Bethany Jay is back to talk about teaching the end of the Civil War, and how enslaved people's participation in the war helped subvert the institution of slavery.
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What really caused the Civil War? In this episode, Salem State University Professor Bethany Jay offers tips for teaching lesser-known history that clarifies this question and cuts through our cloudy national understanding of the Confederacy.
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What we don't know about American history hurts us all. Teaching Hard History begins with the long and brutal legacy of chattel slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the civil rights movement to the present day.

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Learning For Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance)

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Learning For Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance)

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Latest News

The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 733 active hate groups in the United States last year.

Southern Poverty Law Center monitors hate groups and other extremists throughout the U.S. and exposes their activities to law enforcement agencies, the media and the public.

We know we don't achieve equality and justice through the courts and investigative reporting alone. The future of our great country lies in the hands of today's young people.

We use the courts and other forms of advocacy to win systemic reforms on behalf of victims of bigotry and discrimination.

Your gift will help win justice on behalf of those who have no other champion, expose and fight the hate that thrives in our country, and provide tolerance education materials free of charge to schools across our nation.

Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative

We provide free legal representation to detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings in the Southeast. ​You can help.

Hatewatch monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right.

Friends of the Center support the fight for tolerance and justice with a modest, monthly gift.

Learn more about our current class action cases or find out if you might be a class member.

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Social media has served as our primary platform for community and coalition. With over 21,000 followers on Twitter and over half a million views to our hashtag, we've mobilized the digital community towards concrete action on equity, justice, and anti-racism. Every last Thursday of the month, we host a townhall-style conversation with our participants all over the world. In addition, the hashtag #EduColor has allowed for hundreds of participants to ask questions, provide resources, and answer questions across any number of identity markers.

We pride ourselves on having the difficult conversations while centering the most vulnerable and racially marginalized with a student-centered perspective.

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EduColor - The Organization and the Movement: This Is Our Moment

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Social media has served as our primary platform for community and coalition. With over 21,000 followers on Twitter and over half a million views to our hashtag, we've mobilized the digital community towards concrete action on equity, justice, and anti-racism. Every last Thursday of the month, we host a townhall-style conversation with our participants all over the world.

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SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES: LESSON PLANS, RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES

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SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES: LESSON PLANS, RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES

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Social Justice Issues: Lesson Plans, Resources and Activities

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What are social justice issues, and why are they important for fostering a just society? Explore social justice issues with these free preK-12 resources.

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National Association for Multicultural Education

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National Association for Multicultural Education

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The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) celebrates the triumphant election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the new president and vice president of the United States. People in cities throughout the United States flooded the streets to celebrate the Biden-Harris victory with "Build Back Better" promises to unify the country with compassion and togetherness, a beautiful departure from the rage-filled anti-humane path that Trump established as a sower of division and hate.

NAME also is excited to celebrate the first woman to hold the office of Vice President, on the 100 year anniversary of U.S. white women gaining the right to vote. NAME celebrates Vice President elect Harris, who as a Jamaican and Indian woman, becomes the nation's first woman, first woman of color, and second person of color to be elected to the second highest office of the land. Lost in the blur of the Great Depression is the fact that the first person of color to hold the office of vice president was Charles Curtis, a Native American lawmaker and member of the Kaw Nation, who was elected as President Herbert Hoover's running mate in 1928.

Despite this representational win, almost two weeks after the election a blizzard of unwarranted lawsuits are ongoing, attempting to challenge the outcome of the vote. This continues a long line of historical attempts to invalidate voters. While these voter suppression challenges remain, NAME urges the Trump administration to release the nearly $10 million in funding for staffing, federal office space and other needs to enable a smooth transition and rapid focus on corralling the rapid spread of the coronavirus. Beyond that, NAME urges the incoming administration to undo the damage of executive orders, policies and practices attacking diversity and inclusion training, critical race theory, ethnic studies and multicultural education. The nation needs a secretary of education who understands the needs of the nation and will promote diversity and inclusion as the country becomes a majority-minority population.

In addition, NAME supports the Biden-Harris team getting the United States to rejoin the Paris agreement to tackle climate change. The progressive work that NAME knows has to be done would not be possible if climate change were to continue to ravage the Earth with out-of-control wildfires, terrifying hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and other devastating weather caused by unchecked human consumption of fossil fuels.

The May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the protests and unrests that followed in the U.S. and globally also show that the Biden-Harris team must immediately eliminate the womb-to-tomb racial disparities in policing, housing, education, jobs, health care and other areas in the United States.

The Biden-Harris administration has a tremendous amount of work to do to benefit the country. But NAME knows that the team renews a sense of hope among people in the USA and beyond.

Click here to download and share this document

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National Association for Multicultural Education

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The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) celebrates the triumphant election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the new president and vice president of the United States.

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A collection of multicultural films, photo essays, and articles that “explore cultural, social, and environmental issues with a humanistic lens.”

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D.C. Area Educators For Social Justice is a new initiative launched by Teaching for Change to help build and nurture a network of social justice educators in the D.C. metro area.

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Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted

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Poetry of Defiance: How the Enslaved Resisted

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Elementary, middle, high school
Link to article

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See transcript: https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/texts/the-atlantic-slave-trade-what-too-few-textbooks-told-you-0

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The Atlantic slave trade: What too few textbooks told you - Anthony Hazard

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Link to folder and link to Pulitzer Center's website

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American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

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See how slavery grew in the US over two centuries

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A twist of fate brought the first recorded enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619. We trace the origins of this shameful era of American history.

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Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

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In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience

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In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience

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The face of African America now looks like a New Yorker in Atlanta, a Mississippian in Chicago, a Nigerian in Houston, and a Haitian in Miami.

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O Say Can You See. Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family

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O Say Can You See. Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family

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Stories

Follow and read interactive analysis of the court cases, families, attorneys, and judges. Each story focuses on an historical or legal question raised by these cases, and interweaves all references to people, cases, documents, and family relationships.

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O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family

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Follow and read interactive analysis of the court cases, families, attorneys, and judges. Each story focuses on an historical or legal question raised by these cases, and interweaves all references to people, cases, documents, and family relationships.

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Escaping Slavery, Building Diverse Communities

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Escaping Slavery, Building Diverse Communities

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Stories of the Search for Freedom in the Capital Region since the Civil War.

Created by the Members of History 396 & Professor Chandra Manning, Georgetown University, Fall 2019.

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Escaping Slavery, Building Diverse Communities

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Harness the power of maps to tell stories that matter. ArcGIS StoryMaps has everything you need to create remarkable stories that give your maps meaning.

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White House Historical Association

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Research into the enslaved individuals that built, lived, and worked in the White House is ongoing. If you have information you would like to share, please get in touch with us.

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Fall 2011

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How did slavery shape American ideas about race and racial supremacy?

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How did slavery shape American ideas about race and racial supremacy?

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How did enslaved labor in the South fuel a global economic system during the 19th century?

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How did enslaved labor in the South fuel a global economic system during the 19th century?

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How did the domestic slave trade affect the lives of enslaved people?

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How did the domestic slave trade affect the lives of enslaved people?

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How does enslavement affect the idea of family?

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How does enslavement affect the idea of family?

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What are the limitations of learning about the lives of enslaved people from the accounts of their enslavers?

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What are the limitations of learning about the lives of enslaved people from the accounts of their enslavers?

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How did the practices of enslaved Africans help shape American culture?

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How did the practices of enslaved Africans help shape American culture?

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Why were southern states willing to go to war to protect the institution of slavery?

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Why were southern states willing to go to war to protect the institution of slavery?

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How did enslaved people attempt to have control over their own lives?

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How did enslaved people attempt to have control over their own lives?

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The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved

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The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved

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On June 19, 1865, Logan Stroud, one of the largest slave-owners in east Texas, walked to the front porch of his plantation home, which he called Pleasant Retreat. More than 150 of his enslaved workers gathered around to listen.

He pulled out a dispatch from U.S. Maj. Gen Gorden Granger - General Order Number 3 - issued that very morning in Galveston from the Union Army's Texas headquarters. The Confederacy had officially surrendered in April, but the last holdouts in Texas had fought on until they, too, were defeated. Now that the war was settled, President Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation would become the law of the land, even in the Lone Star State.

"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, 'all slaves are free,' " Stroud began, reading the opening line of Granger's order. "This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves..."

Stroud's family had come to Texas when he was just a boy. They built an empire of more than 11,000 acres - cotton, cattle, corn, wheat, pigs, sheep - and grew wealthy on slave labor. Now he was 51 and all that was over.

Stroud began to weep.

One of his daughters had to take over the reading. "...the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor...."

The details of the day were partly recorded by the Limestone County Historical Commission. And so it was that the Stroud front porch became one of the birthplaces of Juneteenth - when the final group of enslaved people in the United States were informed of the end of the Civil War, of slavery and of the brutal bondage that had defined their lives.

The Library has a photograph and architectural drawings of the house, both made in 1942 by the Historic American Buildings Survey. It's antebellum prosperity long gone, the one-story, wood-frame house looms up out of the flat landscape like an abandoned, Greek-Revival testament to Southern Gothic, a Faulknerian mansion brought to life.

It's one of the thousands of documents, recordings and photographs in the Library's collections that document Juneteenth and the aftermath of slavery by the people who endured it. The Historic Buildings survey also documents the origins of Emancipation Park in Houston, where some of the first and largest Juneteenth celebrations were held. From the survey: "The first description of the park grounds comes from elderly former residents, who describe the park at the turn of the century as being enclosed by a six-foot-high privacy fence and encircled by a racetrack, with the remainder of the property containing two dance floors, a stable, and a beer tavern."

The most extensive collection of stories is in " Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. " It contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts and more than 500 black-and-white portraits of formerly enslaved people.

Some of the most haunting aspects of the stories are the matter-of-fact nature in which they're related, both in interview transcripts and in recordings. Through the crackles and hisses of a 1940 recording in Jasper, Texas, the voice of Billy McCrea shines through, narrating his youth "way back in slavery time."

"Right at the creek there, they take them (runaways) and put them on...a log, lay them down and fasten the and whup them," McCrea tells interviewer Ruby Lomax. "You hear them (runaways) hollering and praying on them logs....Now I see all of that when I was a boy."

McCrae's memories are in " Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories," a collection in the American Folklife Center. These 23 interviews were recorded between 1932 and 1975, and offer fascinating glimpses into a world gone by. (Note before listening: Speakers often recount racial epithets used to describe black people. Also, in an inadvertent window into racial attitudes during the time of the recordings, the interviewers often address their subjects as "uncle.")

Baltimore's Fountain Hughes was a remarkably clear-voiced 101-year-old when he was interviewed in 1949. He was a teenager when the Civil War ended. He remembered it well.

"We were slaves," he says of his youth in Charlottesville, Virginia. "We belonged to people. They'd sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that. Have a auction bench, and they'd put you on, up on the bench and bid on you just same as you bidding on cattle, you know...selling women, selling men."

After the war ended, he said, "We was just turned out like a lot of cattle. You know how they turn cattle out in a pasture? Well, after freedom, you know, colored people didn't have nothing."

This, then, is what was coming to an end on June 19, 1865, on that front porch in Limestone County, Texas. The end of an era and the beginning of the celebrations of Juneteenth.

The new era, though, was not a clean break from the past, not even more than a century later. In 1981, a few black teenagers were celebrating Juneteenth on a small boat in a Limestone County lake. Police came out to arrest them on charges of having a small amount of marijuana. While trying to ferry them to shore, the boat capsized. Three teens drowned. The New York Times reported the results of the subsequent trial on page 30 of the A section, under a roundup of of news items headed, "Around the Nation."

The lead sentence:

"An all-white jury today acquitted three former Limestone County officers in the drownings of three black teenagers who were in custody when a boat capsized on a Texas lake."

That, too, is a story from Limestone County that resonates on Juneteenth 2020.
Subscribe to the blog- it's free! - and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

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The Birth of Juneteenth; Voices of the Enslaved

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On June 19, 1865, Logan Stroud, one of the largest slave-owners in east Texas, walked to the front porch of his plantation home, which he called Pleasant Retreat. More than 150 of his enslaved workers gathered around to listen. He pulled out a dispatch from U.S. Maj.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Juneteenth is a time to gather as a family, reflect on the past and look to the future. Discover ways to celebrate this African American cultural tradition of music, food and freedom.

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Lies My Bookshelf Told Me: Slavery in Children’s Literature

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Lies My Bookshelf Told Me: Slavery in Children’s Literature

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In 2015, people looking for historical children's literature might have found the New York Times review of the newly released title A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat-a review that praised the book's "abundant charms." A few months later, by the time the book appeared on the Times ' list of the "Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2015," more measured appraisals of the book had already begun to make news.

Central to criticism of the text was its portrayal of an enslaved woman and little girl on a South Carolina plantation. The book includes an illustration of enslaved people smiling as they pick blackberries and hiding in a closet to "lick the bowl clean" after serving dessert to their enslavers. One illustration incorporates words into a drawing of the little girl whisking cream: "Beat beat. Beat beat. Beat beat."

Children's books have the power to inspire and uplift. They can transform young readers. And because of this, they can be an ideal way for students to connect with and learn about history. But what do we do when authors misrepresent that history? What do we do when the stories get it wrong?

When and How Stories Fail Us

Authors of children's books about slavery face a fundamental challenge: How do they depict characters who are enslaved-a condition defined by violence, deprivation, family separation and lifelong servitude-within a literary genre known for happy endings?

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, an associate professor in University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, has compiled a database of children's books about slavery. Surveying more than 170 texts, Thomas and her researchers found that these books often misrepresent or even rewrite history-even if the author is well intentioned. And they do so in largely predictable ways.

One common choice, Thomas says, is to temper the lived experiences of enslaved characters. Often, the departure from history is dramatic. A Fine Dessert isn't alone in its representation of #SlaveryWithASmile. Some books go so far as to erase enslaved characters entirely, focusing instead on celebrating white abolitionists or other accomplices.

During a 2018 talk at the Lapidus Center, Thomas discussed the wordless, illustrated children's book Unspoken, A Story From the Underground Railroad. It's about a white girl who assists a fugitive from slavery. This story about the Underground Railroad, Thomas points out, includes no representation of people who were actually enslaved.

But perhaps even more problematic is the question on the book's back cover: "What would you do if you had the chance to help a person find freedom?" Asking readers to identify with white abolitionists rather than black or Native people escaping enslavement, the question is based on the assumption that most of the text's readers will be white. Thomas says these ideas about the audience for children's literature are pervasive throughout publishing.

Perhaps it's this assumption that prevents publishers from recognizing the damage of popular, common stereotypes, like illustrations of smiling enslaved people, working cheerfully. Even when intended to humanize enslaved characters, Thomas says, these images could inadvertently send a troubling message: "that slavery wasn't all that bad."

When enslaved characters do make it into the spotlight, she explains, they're often represented as "heroic or transcendent," triumphing over slavery. Protagonists are fictional characters or real-life figures who escaped bondage, people like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, rather than one of the millions of people who were born and died enslaved.

John H. Bickford, a children's literature scholar at Eastern Illinois University, agrees. He describes this as what some scholars call a pattern of exceptionalism. In his survey of more than 40 children's books, he says, characters escaped or gained freedom "in every book save two."

"This distortion ... cannot be overstated," he wrote in a 2014 article, noting that escaping from enslavement was extremely dangerous and highly uncommon. "There's a huge gap between what historians understand and trade book authors' narratives."

Thomas explains that this focus on freedom can send a dangerous message: "that no matter how traumatic and violent our collective national past might have been, the United States has always been a land of freedom, opportunity and equality under the law for everyone, if they just work hard enough."

Many children's books about slavery, she argues, are less about teaching children our nation's history and more about "absolving the nation for what actually happened." All too often, stories about slavery are framed within a false narrative of continuous racial progress and the enduring American Dream. Reaching for a happy ending, they leave the truth of slavery behind.

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Lies My Bookshelf Told Me: Slavery in Children's Literature

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In 2015, people looking for historical children's literature might have found the New York Times review of the newly released title A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat-a review that praised the book's "abundant charms." A few months later, by the time the book appeared on the Times ' list of the "Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2015," more measured appraisals of the book had already begun to make news.

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EBC-PBS

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Ferris State University, MI

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Current News

Help support the Mission of the Jim Crow Museum to use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice. Donate Today!!!

As a precaution to reduce COVID-19 (coronavirus) exposure, the Jim Crow Museum will be closed beginning March 16, 2020, until further notice. Obviously, we do this with a heavy heart. We will update the general public as information becomes available.

During World War II, the ran a weekly series called the "Double V" campaign. The campaign was an effort of the paper to bring about changes in the United States in regard to race relations. The campaign demanded that African Americans, who were risking their lives in the war, be given full citizenship rights at home. Pittsburgh Courier Read more

Download and share Jim Crow Museum messages. These images utilize the images from the Jim Crow Museum collection.

Dr. David Pilgrim appeared on CNN:America in Crisis with Kate Bolduan on June 12, 2020.

Join the Jim Crow Museum Educator and Collections Database Administrator, Cyndi Tiedt, as she leads visitors through the Jim Crow Museum via an interactive Virtual Tour.
Sign up Today (space is limited).

Tours begin June 9, 2020 and will occur every Tuesday at 1 pm EST.

The staff of the Jim Crow Museum is excited to share with the public a virtual tour of the facility. This tour gives our virtual visitors an opportunity to learn about the museum. View tour

A special thanks to Real Space of Grand Rapids for working with us to create this tool.

Video Spotlight

Tour the Jim Crow museum with founder and curator, Dr. David Pilgrim. Dr. Pilgrim discusses some of the major themes of the Jim Crow Museum. Jim Crow was not just a character or a set of "laws", it was a system that built upon itself to create and sustain a society with a racial hierarchy.

Traveling Exhibits

From Aunt Jemima advertisements to the board game Ghettopoly, American popular culture is replete with racist images. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia features an extensive collection of racist objects that trace the history of the stereotyping of African Americans.

"THEM: Images of Separation," is a traveling exhibition that showcases items from popular culture used to stereotype different groups. The negative imagery -- found on postcards, license plates, games, souvenirs and costumes -- promoted stereotyping against such groups as Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and poor whites, as well as those who are "other" in terms of body type or sexual orientation.

Special Features

The book Haste to Rise: A Remarkable Experience of Black Education during Jim Crow is now available for purchase through PM Press. Get your copy today.

Dr. David Pilgrim new book, Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum is available for purchase through PM Press.

Get your copy today.

The book Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice written by Dr. Pilgrim is also available. Signed copies can also be purchased at the Museum using Check or Money Order for $20.00 tax included.

Dr. David Pilgrim tells the story of how he established the Jim Crow Museum --a unique teaching tool to help people gain a new perspective on racism in America. April 2019

Notable Visits

The battle continues as racial images and items are produced daily. Objects with racist themes are created, produced, and sold weekly in the United States.

Museum Information

The Jim Crow Museum is open and is FREE to the public. The Museum features six exhibit areas -- Who and What is Jim Crow, Jim Crow Violence, Jim Crow and Anti-Black Imagery, Battling Jim Crow Imagery, Attacking Jim Crow Segregation, and Beyond Jim Crow.

The Museum also offers a comprehensive timeline of the African American experience in the United States. The timeline is divided into six sections: Africa Before Slavery, Slavery in America, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights and Post Civil Rights.

The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University strives to become a leader in social activism and in the discussion of race and race relations. This facility will provide increased opportunities for education and research. Please join us as we embark on this mission.

Regular hours are Monday thru Friday 12-5 p.m. Extended hours will be every other weekend from 12-5 as the campus calendar allows. Please consult the calendar. Group tours, please continue to make an appointment. To schedule a tour, please contact the museum at (231) 591-5873 or at[email protected] . Please refer to the calendar of events for availability.

Mission and Objectives of the Jim Crow Museum

The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is to use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote social justice.

The Museum's mission is achieved through the following objectives:

Collect, exhibit and preserve objects and collections related to racial segregation, anti-black caricatures, civil rights, and African American achievement.

Promote the scholarly examination of historical and contemporary expressions of racism.

Serve as a teaching resource for Ferris State University courses which deal, directly or indirectly, with the issues of race and ethnicity.

Serve as an educational resource for scholars and teachers at the state, national and international levels.

Promote racial understanding and healing.

Serve as a resource for civil rights and human rights organizations.

Museum Policy Update
For Children Visitors to the Jim Crow Museum Policy, please see Contact page.
Visitors to the Jim Crow Museum are prohibited from photographing or video recording any portions of the Museum.

Exceptions to this policy can be made at the discretion of Museum staff and might include special events, scholars who have made arrangements in advance of their visits, and credentialed members of the press.

Visitors needing assistance

Visitors with disabilities requiring assistance or accommodation to access any portion of this website may contact the Diversity and Inclusion Office at (231) 591-3946, Educational Counseling & Disabilities Services at (231) 591-3057, or the Office of Equal Opportunity at (231) 591-2152.

Patrons with disabilities may contact the museum with questions regarding access to the museum's physical space and contents. The Museum has a wheelchair which patrons may use during their visit, provided as a courtesy to patrons. We do not provide personal attendants or mobility services, however.

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Jim Crow Museum - Ferris State University

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The Jim Crow Museum is open and is FREE to the public. The Museum features six exhibit areas -- Who and What is Jim Crow, Jim Crow Violence, Jim Crow and Anti-Black Imagery, Battling Jim Crow Imagery, Attacking Jim Crow Segregation, and Beyond Jim Crow.

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Slavery by Another Name. The Re-Enslavement Of Black People In America From The Civil War To World War II

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Slavery by Another Name. The Re-Enslavement Of Black People In America From The Civil War To World War II

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Resources about Douglas Blackmon's book.
NPR podcast "The Untold History of Post-Civil War 'Neoslavery'": https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115
Watch the documentary: https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/slavery-by-another-name/

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Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20 th century.

For most Americans this is entirely new history. Slavery by Another Name gives voice to the largely forgotten victims and perpetrators of forced labor and features their descendants living today.

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Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

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Lutte contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme - Vademecum

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Lutte contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme - Vademecum

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Link to USA Today article

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FORT MONROE, Va. - On a scraggly rock outpost in eastern Virginia 400 years ago, a ship came to Fort Monroe with colonial America's first Africans, forced against their will to land in the New World. That moment inaugurated the racist slavery that set the course of the black experience in this country.

But travel to modern-day Fort Monroe and you'd hardly know it - there's more Confederate and military history than black history. An arch spelled "Jefferson Davis Memorial Park" in large letters, until their recent removal.A museum preserves the Confederate president's prison cell following the Civil War. You can see where future Confederate General Robert E. Lee was stationed as a U.S. lieutenant.

One plaque, erected four years ago, commemorates the arrival of the first Africans.

For decades, many of the country's celebrated historic monuments similarly glossed over the cruel realities of slavery and racism that define American history.

Sites from Virginia to Kansas are now grappling with how to portray the harsh truths of the past, from former presidents' enslavement of other humans, to the violent efforts to spread slavery in "free" states, to the historic presence of hundreds of enslaved people at well-loved tourist attractions.

But those attempts to change how Americans view history have met plenty of pushback: Some people, it seems, prefer a sanitized retelling of America's past.

When Terry Brown took over the national monument at Fort Monroe three years ago, the absence of black history - his history - bothered him. In fact, black history was missing at an awful lot of historic sites.

"We live in a great country, but we are going to be even better when we figure out that the true part of our history involves a number of mixed cultures," said Brown, a National Park Service superintendent.

Brown started a black cultural tour of the site, which will run from July to October every year. He also spearheaded a visitor center in honor of 1619, which is expected to open next year, and is planning a new memorial for the arrival point.

"A great nation," said Brown, "remembers its history and embraces all the complexities of it."

At Colonial Williamsburg, under an hour away from where the first Africans landed, the quaint, Revolutionary War-era town originally portrayed a largely white experience, ignoring that many of its historic residents enslaved black people.

Williamsburg's living history museum now strives to present a realistic image of the lives of enslaved and free blacks in the 18th century. For example, Tab Broyles oversees a three-day program that informs America's teachers about the 18th century black experience and how educators can bring it into the classroom.

"My hope is that people walk away knowing that many different people contributed to who we are as Americans," Broyles said.

The defining characteristic of a day in the program is powerful emotion.

When librarian Doug Mayo opens a book featuring a fold-out design of the hold of an 18th-century slave ship, with captured Africans packed in inhumane conditions, teachers let out audible gasps. Some take a seat or step away.

When a black character interpreter portraying an enslaved maid poignantly asks the room, filled with many teachers of color: "Have you ever given any consideration to what it means to be a slave?" there are few dry eyes.

Stephen Seals plays the role of a black spy working for Americans in the Revolutionary War. When Seals was a child, he never saw anyone in a museum who looked like him.

"I never want a black kid to come here and feel like they have to bow their head because of what their ancestors went through," Seals said. "I want them to be able to look me in the eye and say: 'I'm very proud of what they did, what they all did, in order for me to be able to be here today.'"

Despite its efforts, Williamsburg still has further to go.

Colonial Williamsburg was majority black, Seals said, but the modern reality doesn't reflect that. Currently, roughly 30% of the character reenactors are black, but the site's image as a white space is hard to shake.

But teachers say they've noticed a difference.

"The thought is, 'It's Williamsburg; It's only going to be about white history,'" said Cynthia Georges, a social studies teacher from the Bronx, New York, who is black. "I'm like, 'No, I learned more about Haitian history last year than I had done in my entire life.'" This summer, she came back for a second session.

Few have seen the shifts at Colonial Williamsburg as personally as Gregory Stallings, an elementary school teacher from Richmond, Virginia, who is black. As a child, he visited Williamsburg on a field trip in the 1960s.

"It's amazing to see the African presence that is here right now. When I came before, as a kid, it did not exist," Stallings said. Now, the teacheris writing a 5th-grade curriculum focusing on Virginian heroes.

After viewing the house of Peyton Randolph, the first president of the Continental Congress before his death in 1775, Stallings asked tour guide Edwin Cooke III whether he considered Randolph a hero. While fighting for American independence, Randolph enslaved 27 people - the most in Colonial Williamsburg.

"He's probably a hero for many people," Cooke said, diplomatically. "When you work at a house like this and you're a descendant of Virginia slave-folks that go back to the 1670s, it becomes a skill to try to find positive things to say about Virginia slave owners, who are part of the government that pushed legislation to oppress more African Virginians."

Black guides and interpreters like Cooke and Seals are vital to the future of Williamsburg, Seals said, if the site hopes to thrive in a diversifying nation and educate generations of Americans truthfully.But it's hard to find people willing to play the role of an enslaved person or work at a site promoting American history, which has been so long sanitized.

"It is really difficult to find black interpreters because of the way the history was treated when we were kids," said Seals, who grew up in West Virginia in the 1980s. "We were not taught to be proud of our history, and we should have been."

The crowds are changing too, said Brooklyn social studies teacher Sharon Gayle. Fifteen years ago when she visited briefly, she didn't see any other black people.

"In walking around last year and this year, the number of African-American families that we've seen has really, really increased," Gayle said.

Other national parks are trying to diversify, too.

In nearby Yorktown, the Colonial National Historical Park is launching an archaeology program exploring the life of one of the first enslaved Africans brought to Virginia in 1619. And Eola Dance, chief of resources management, hopes the National Park Service can attract employees of color like her through internship programs that reach out to urban high schools and students at historically black colleges and universities.

Meet Angela: She was the first named African woman in Jamestown

But even amid a push to confront historical atrocities, some sites and museums still avoid giving prominent attention to slavery.

The museum at the Tennesseechildhood home of Andrew Johnson, president from 1865 to 1869, glosses over his role in keeping America segregated and unequal after the Civil War, historians say.

Johnson, then Abraham Lincoln's vice president, freed his eight personal slaves on Aug. 8, 1863, celebrated in the state as Emancipation Day. That was more than seven months after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

Then, as president, Johnson overturned "40 acres and a mule," a Union military order to give formerly enslaved blacks property owned by Confederate landowners. He resisted giving black people the right to vote and allowed Southerners to create the first set of racist codes that led to the oppression of the Jim Crow era.

The website of Johnson's National Park Service site acknowledges these contradictions: "He was a slave owner who was a product of his time, but he was also a man called 'Moses' for the freedom of slaves in Tennessee." But Aaron Astor, an Andrew Johnson expert and Maryville College historian, takes issue with how the museum describes Johnson's legacy.

"No, he called himself Moses! No one called him that!" Astor said. "Johnson was someone who was way over the top in the way he presented himself disingenuously."

Astor said it is vital to tell the entire story of Johnson's life in order to dispel the myth that there was no slavery in Appalachia.

"There's a wider ambivalence of how to deal with the legacies of slavery in a place like Appalachia, where people kind of take pride that they were not the slaveholding South," Astor said. "Yes, that's true, but their hands are not entirely clean. They did have slavery."

Similarly, the fight for the expansion of slavery before the Civil War is central to Midwestern history - but not always advertised.

In Lecompton, Kansas, pro-slavery supporters gathered to write an 1857 constitution that legalized ownership of other humans in the territory, as part of the violent battle known as Bleeding Kansas.

Now, the small town on the Kansas River is a must-see for history buffs. Its marketing labels itself as the "Civil War Birth Place," and more controversially, " Where Slavery Began to Die."

"No one likes to be on the wrong side of history," said Jonathan Earle, a Louisiana State University historian and Bleeding Kansas expert.

Despite its euphemistic slogan, the town is best known for the pro-slavery constitution, Earle said. "It was like a slaveholder's wildest dreams." The document ultimately failed, rejected both by Kansas' voters and the U.S. House of Representatives in 1858.

The questionable slogan,Earle said,references more obscure efforts in the town to invalidate the 1857 document that championed slavery.

Even though the town gives those efforts an outsize role in its branding, Earle said its historic sites accurately explain the horrors of Kansas' pro-slavery movement.

People who want a full view of the brutal, bloody fight for freedom in the Kansas territories, Earle said, should make sure they're taking in multiple perspectives. Earle was involved in the creation of Freedom's Frontier, a National Heritage Area that spans across Missouri and Kansas and includes sites such as Quindaro, an abolitionist town settled by escaped slaves on the Missouri River.

Over the past couple of decades, America's historic monuments have begun to move away from white-washing the past, according to Caroline Janney, a University of Virginia historian who specializes in the public memory of the Civil War.

"There are very few places that I've been to in recent years where I would say it's been sanitized or left out," Janney said of slavery.

Education efforts around slavery and racism are improving in some schools, although slowly and with exception.

Some schools still do a terrible job: Runaway-slave games, sanitized textbooks mar education about slavery

"When you expose schoolchildren to it, then there are more questions, and people come to expect that to be part of the experience when they go to historic sites," Janney said.

Nevertheless, some still resist changes to the white-centric portrayal of American history. When the Jefferson Davis Memorial Arch lettering was taken down at Fort Monroe, the United Daughters of the Confederacy protested, claimed it represented an erasure of Confederate history.

This summer, an angry review of a historic plantation tour went viral on social media, after white reviewers said they were "extremely disappointed" when the tour guide talked about slavery. "We didn't come to hear a lecture on how the white people treated slaves," the reviewer wrote. "We came to get this history of a southern plantation."

History is about telling the truth, Janney said. Putting historical figures on pedestalsand ignoring their racism and white supremacy is inaccurate. Their flaws and their strengths helped shape the country.

"It means confronting those ugly parts of our past as well as the quite wonderful and amazing parts of our past," Janney said. "It's not a negative story. It's just an honest story."

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Slavery in America: Some historical sites try to show the horrors. Others are far behind.

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FORT MONROE, Va. - On a scraggly rock outpost in eastern Virginia 400 years ago, a ship came to Fort Monroe with colonial America's first Africans, forced against their will to land in the New World. That moment inaugurated the racist slavery that set the course of the black experience in this country.

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Website of Kevin M. Levin
More about K. Levin's reflections on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinlevin?lang=en

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Earlier this week Vanderbilt University announced that it would remove the word "Confederate" from the stone pediment at the entrance to a campus dormitory known as Memorial Hall. The decision brings to a close a long-standing dispute between the university and the Tennessee division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which provided the funds for the construction of the building and claimed naming rights in 1933. As part of the agreement, the school will pay the UDC $1.2 million or the present value of their initial $50,000 donation. This decision is the latest in a string of high-profile moves to remove Confederate iconography from public and private places as well as a reflection of the UDC's long decline.

The women who founded the UDC in 1894 were committed to preserving and defending the memory of Confederate soldiers and their cause. By World War I, membership in the UDC had reached roughly 100,000. While chapters were eventually established throughout the country, they remained most influential in the South, where they organized Decoration Day ceremonies, monument dedications, and raised money to support veterans in their old age. Their most important function, however, was the overseeing of how history was taught to the next generation on the high school and college levels. Students were expected to assume the responsibility of defending their ancestors once the generation that lived through the war had died. They did this primarily by authorizing textbooks for classroom use and rejecting those they deemed to be a threat to the memory of the Confederate soldier.

The UDC promoted histories that celebrated the Confederate cause by praising leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and ignoring or re-interpreting the central cause of the war, namely slavery. Consider Susan Pendleton Lee's 1895 textbook, A School History of the United States, in which she declared that although abolitionists had declared slavery to be a "moral wrong," most Southerners believed that "the evils connected with it were less than those of any other system of labor." "Hundreds of thousands of African savages," according to the author, "had been Christianized under its influence-the kindest relations existed between the slaves and their owners." It should come as no surprise that in her account of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was necessary "for protection against . . . outrages committed by misguided negroes."

By the first decade of the 20 th century and with the encouragement of the UDC, most Southern states established textbook commissions to oversee and recommend books for all public schools that provided a "fair and impartial" interpretation. These committees worked diligently to challenge publishers who stood to threaten the South's preferred story of the war: "Southern schools and Southern teachers have prepared books which Southern children may read without insult or traduction of their fathers. Printing presses all over the Southland-and all over the Northland-are sending forth by thousands ones which tell the true character of the heroic struggle. The influence . . . of the South forbid[s] longer the perversion of truth and falsification of history."

Perhaps the best example of the oversight exercised by the UDC was through the efforts of Mildred L. Rutherford of Georgia, who served as the organization's "Historian General." In 1919 Rutherford published A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges, and Libraries. The book was recommended for "all authorities charged with the selection of text-books for colleges, schools, and all scholastic institutions" and recommended that "all library authorities in the southern States mark all books in their collections which do not come up to the same measure, on the title page thereof, 'Unjust to the South.'"

Rutherford's recommendations included rejecting books that spoke of the Constitution as anything other than as a compact between sovereign states. Textbooks were also rejected that did not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, which it was believed led directly to secession. Any book that suggested that the Confederacy fought to protect slavery was rejected. This also held for any book that characterized slaveholders of the South as cruel and unjust to their chattel. Finally, Abraham Lincoln was not to be glorified nor Jefferson Davis vilified.

In response to some of the most egregious violations having to do with the history of slavery, Rutherford offered a number of corrections. She suggested that "Southern men were anxious for the slaves to be free. They were studying earnestly the problem of freedom, when Northern fanatical Abolitionists took matters into their own hands." And in a claim that is still today widely repeated, Rutherford argued that, "Gen. Lee freed his slaves before the war began and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant did not free his until the war ended."

The effort made by the UDC to control history textbooks paid off immeasurably and continued to shape how Americans remembered the Civil War well into the 20 th century. As late as the '70s, the state of Virginia still used the popular textbook Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis B. Simkins, Spotswood H. Jones, and Sidman P. Poole, first published in 1957. Its chapter on slavery-"How the Negroes Lived under Slavery"-featured a well-dressed African-American family on board a ship shaking hands with a white man, who is presumed to be the family's new owner. Here is how it describes slavery:
A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes . . . The house servants became almost as much a part of the planter's family circle as its white members . . . The Negroes were always present at family weddings. They were allowed to look on at dances and other entertainments . . . A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other ... The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous. Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked . . . But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.
It is unclear what the UDC will do with the $1.2 million payment, but one thing is certain and that is they will not be able to use it to push the agenda of their forebears. Their preferred historical narrative has been largely discredited over the past few decades and the organization itself is now largely ceremonial.

In the wake of Vanderbilt's decision, some have expressed concern that in changing the name of the building the university is "erasing history." Such claims are ironic given the UDC's efforts to control and distort (for their own self-serving purposes) the teaching of history that takes place on high school and college campuses every day across the country.
Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently at work on Searching For Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. You can find him online at Civil War Memory and Twitter @kevinlevin.

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Earlier this week Vanderbilt University announced that it would remove the word "Confederate" from the stone pediment at the entrance to a campus dormitory known as Memorial Hall. The decision brings to a close a long-standing dispute between the university and the Tennessee division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which provided the funds for the construction of the building and claimed naming rights in 1933.

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How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history

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How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history

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The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women's group that was formed in 1894, led the effort to revise Confederate history at the turn of the 20th century. That effort has a name: the Lost Cause. It was a campaign to portray Confederate leaders and soldiers as heroic, and it targeted the minds and identities of children growing up in the South so they would develop a personal attachment to the Confederate cause.

Even without the right to vote, the group was extremely influential. They lobbied local governments to erect memorials to the Confederacy all over the South, including in prominent public spaces like courthouses and state capitols. They formed textbook committees and pressured school boards to ban books that the UDC deemed "unjust to the South," which was anything that shed negative light on the Confederacy.

Their work with children went beyond the classroom as well. They formed an auxiliary group called the Children of the Confederacy, a program that sought to get kids actively involved in "Southern" history. They would recite UDC-sponsored rhetoric, visit veterans, participate in monument unveilings, and more.

Watch the video above to learn more about the UDC's efforts to present their distorted version of history as "real history."

You can find this video and all of Vox's videos on our YouTube channel. Subscribe for the latest.

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How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history

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The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women's group that was formed in 1894, led the effort to revise Confederate history at the turn of the 20th century. That effort has a name: the Lost Cause.

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Twisted Sources: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks

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Twisted Sources: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks

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Link to

A measuring rod to test text books, and reference books in schools, colleges and libraries by Mildred Rutherford: https://archive.org/details/measuringrodtot00ruth/mode/2up

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Where does it come from, the ignorance that has been on display of late? In the college-age photos of white men, now elected officials, in blackface? In the simulated Klan lynchings for yearbook laughs? In mischaracterizations of black slaves as "indentured servants?" In the denials that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War?

One answer is: from the 69,706,756.

That's how many students were enrolled in the South's public elementary and secondary schools between 1889, when the government began counting students, and 1969, the height of the segregationist Jim Crow era, according to the U.S. Department of Education statistics. There they were subjected to the alternative reality of the Lost Cause, a false version of U.S. history developed in response to Reconstruction that minimizes slavery's central role in the Civil War, promotes the Confederacy's aim as a heroic one, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, and portrays the white South as the victim.

The poisonous Lost Cause lessons were taught to multiple generations of Southerners to uphold institutionalized white supremacy - in part through public school curriculums shaped by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). More famous these days for their controversial Confederate monuments, the UDC had an almost singular focus on making sure the Lost Cause propaganda was so ingrained in the minds of Southern youth that it would be perpetual. Their most effective tool? School textbooks.

The constitution of the UDC's North Carolina Division, for example, said the group aimed to insure that "the portion of American history relating to [the Civil War] shall be properly taught in the public schools of the State, and to use its influence towards this object in all private schools." That barebones concept was given flesh by Division President Mrs. I.W. Faison, at the group's annual convention in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909:

We must see that the correct history is taught our children and train them, not in hatred towards the North who differed from us, but in knowledge of true history of the South in the war between the States and the causes that led up to the war, so that they will be able to state facts and prove that they are right in the principles for which their fathers fought and died; and continue to preserve and defend their cause, until the whole civilized world will come to know that our cause was just and right. ... There is an expression often used by our people as the "Lost Cause." Let us forget such, for it is not the truth. ...No, our cause was not lost because it was not wrong.

A few years earlier, national UDC President Mrs. James A. Rounsaville put it this way at the group's annual convention in Charleston, South Carolina:

It has ever been the cherished purpose of the Daughters of the Confederacy to secure greater educational opportunities for Confederate children, and by thorough training of their powers of mind, heart and hand, render it possible for these representatives of our Southern race to retain for that race its supremacy in its own land.

The UDC's propaganda campaign utilized other tools to be sure. In 1932 alone, the North Carolina Division placed 183 portraits of Confederate figures in the state's public schools, along with 206 Confederate flags. The following year, it was 865 flags. The UDC, with schools' permission, also conducted essay contests on topics like "The Origin of the Ku Klux Klan" and "The Right of Secession." Submissions were routinely in the thousands.

But the UDC's primary focus was on insuring that Southern schools used only those history books loyal to the Lost Cause.

The Rutherford Committee

At its annual reunion in Atlanta in 1919, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) set up a committee to promulgate the Lost Cause version of history through textbooks. It brought together the most prominent Confederate heritage associations - UCV, UDC, and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Each appointed five members. It came to be known as the Rutherford Committee after its most prominent member, Mildred Lewis Rutherford.

An officer in the national UDC for years, Rutherford served as the group's historian from 1911 to 1916. Her decades of popular, pro-Confederate writing brought her to national prominence, and she was also well known for serving up speeches that emphasized the victimization of the white South by the North, defended slavery, and praised the Ku Klux Klan.

Another prominent member of the committee was Julian S. Carr, the former Confederate general and North Carolina industrialist. He's now infamous for his 1913 speech at the dedication of the UDC's "Silent Sam" Confederate veterans monument formerly on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill in which he urged support for white supremacy and called it a "pleasing duty" to horsewhip a "Negro wench" for allegedly publicly insulting a "Southern lady."

The man who served as the committee's chair for a number of years was C. Irvine Walker of South Carolina, also a former Confederate general. He was known for spearheading the reopening of the Citadel, the South's premier military academy, which was closed after the Civil War. "During the days of Negro domination in South Carolina, I knew it would be hopeless to attempt the resuscitation," he wrote in the "Memorandum of Gen. C. Irvine Walker of His Work Concerning the Reopening of the Citadel," now housed in the school's archives. "But when the state was returned to the control of its own citizens, the white people of South Carolina, I felt that the time had come to move, and I started the movement, which ended in success."

Irvine was also a leader in the Carolina Rifle Club, a group that offered itself as an alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, which Irvine had joined but personally found "too cumbersome and liable to be abused," as he wrote in his 1869 book titled after the club itself. The purpose of the Rifle Club, he said, was to combat "the greatest social crime of all the ages - the sudden emancipation of four million of African slaves wholly incapable of freedom." According to Irvine:

That the South was partially saved from the terrible results which were to be expected from this sudden emancipation of four millions of negro slaves, her people are and ever will be indebted, first, to the civilizing and humanizing influences of the institution of negro slavery as it had existed in the Southern States from the days of the Colonies down to 1865, second, to the innate superiority and naturally dominating power of the white race, third, in the absence of the quality of savage ferocity in the negro race in the South, induced by generations of humane training by his white masters and mistresses, and to the kindness and loyalty felt and manifested by the former slave to his white friends in the South and, mainly, to the courage and endurance of Southern white women and the manliness and patience of Southern white men.

These were the people who would guide history education for generations of Southerners.

Setting UDC standards

In 1919, the Rutherford Committee published the 23-page pamphlet "A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries." Written by Mildred Lewis Rutherford herself, it was the committee's set of standards for what was acceptable in a history textbook - the Lost Cause mythology distilled into accessible bullet points and blurbs, backed by cherry-picked quotes from professors, politicians, newspapers, and period speeches.

The national UDC immediately embraced "Measuring Rod," as did the state divisions. The UDC now had not only a simple set of rules for textbooks but also a distillation of Lost Cause ideology in a format easy for the general public to digest.

In 1920, Rutherford followed "The Measuring Rod" with a 114-page book titled "Truths of History," in which she expanded the content of "The Measuring Rod" by adding more perceived wrongs levied upon the South by the North. This time, though, she specifically called out textbooks that offended the UDC by name. It was a blacklist, and it had an immediate effect as state divisions launched campaigns to ban books.

The book banning effort built on the earlier work pioneered by Daughters like Mrs. Helen De Berniere Wills, the longtime chair of the North Carolina Division's textbook committee. De Berniere Wills had pushed local her local UDC chapters to aggressively engage their local schools systems and promote the books they liked and fight those they didn't.

By 1905, at the annual North Carolina Division convention, De Berniere Wills announced that local school superintendents across the state had assured her that no textbooks offensive to the UDC were being used. School systems in Asheville, Charlotte, Mooresville, and Statesville, as well as Alamance, Cumberland, Orange, and Pender counties, had gone about "purifying the schools from objectionable books," she said.

De Berniere Wills also announced that J.Y. Joyner, the state superintendent of public instruction, wrote to her assuring his support of her efforts to purge textbooks that were offensive to the UDC, and that Dr. Alexander Graham, Charlotte's superintendent of schools, promised that his teachers would "correct orally, errors that are to be found in many text-books, such as do injustice to the South."

By 1906, North Carolina had a newly created state textbook commission which largely took selection away from local boards. The UDC now needed to lobby only one governmental agency to carry out its propaganda mission.

Using its considerable political clout, the North Carolina Division also secured Gov. Robert B. Glenn's assurances that he would appoint only Lost Cause loyalists to the new textbook commission. By 1916, the Division itself was reviewing history textbooks and sending their written reviews, approvals, and rejections directly to the state textbook commission.

North Carolina was hardly alone: This was business as usual in the Southern states when it came to public schools choosing history textbooks. For example, both Mississippi and Texas actively partnered with the UDC and UCV to choose textbooks.

And, it was not unusual for UDC members to actually be appointed to the state textbook commissions. The UDC divisions in North Carolina and Texas both had members appointed to their respective state textbook commissions at various times. Many state commissions also allowed UDC members to attend their deliberative meetings to promote or criticize books.

The bottom line for national book publishers was they had decisions to make if they wanted to sell books to Southern schools. Go all in with Lost Cause dogma and be able to sell the book only in the South? Or have two versions of the same book - one with carefully worded, watered-down history for the South, and another one with historical facts for everyone else? The latter was often the choice. This also meant that books covering only state history tended to have a local author, a local publisher - and a stronger Lost Cause bias.

The indentured vs. the enslaved

In 1923, at its annual convention in Greensboro, the UDC's North Carolina Division endorsed for use as a school textbook "Young People's History of North Carolina" by Daniel Harvey Hill Jr. First published in 1907, it had been in use in North Carolina since 1911 and would continue to be used until well after 1940.

The author, the son of a famous Confederate general, attended Davidson College near Charlotte and eventually obtained his law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill. After teaching in Georgia, he returned to Raleigh to take a position at the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, now North Carolina State University. In 1908, Hill became the school's third president. Its main library, D.H. Hill Library, is named after him.

Hill's textbook cast the conflict over slavery as the North's fault, blaming the "pushing zeal" of Northern abolitionists for "keeping the nation stirred to its depths" and leading many Southerners to "feeling that the Constitution was being violated" and "declaring the need of withdrawal from the Union." It also portrayed President Lincoln as a villain whose inaugural speech was a declaration of war on the South.

Hill also described the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in almost mystical terms. In this passage, Hill refers to the Loyal Leagues, also known as Union Leagues, secretive men's clubs established during the Civil War to promote fealty to the Union and Lincoln:

All at once, in many counties negroes and their white leaders on their way home from League meetings were startled and terrified by meeting strange processions of wild-looking beings in the shadows of the road. Sometimes these frightful-looking objects would pass as silently as the midnight. Not a sound of horses' feet, not the ghost of a whisper would be heard. ... As soon as these strange horsemen began to be seen in a neighborhood, the dens of the Loyal Leagues closed in a hurry. The negroes did not care to meet the white riders twice. ... At first the clubs were controlled by the best men in the South and used only as a means of keeping order. Of course, this was not a lawful way of putting down wrong, but it was at the time the only way open to the suffering people.

In describing the conditions faced by enslaved people, Hill's textbook clung to the Lost Cause line that they were well treated and better off in slavery:

As a rule the slaves were comfortably clothed, given an abundance of wholesome food, and kindly treated. Occasionally some hard-hearted master or bad-tempered mistress made the lot of their slaves a hard one, but such cases were not common. Cruel masters and cruel mistresses were scorned then just as men and women who treat animals cruelly are now scorned. These slaves were brought into the colonies fresh from a savage life in Africa and in two or three generations were changed into respectable men and women. This fact shows, better than any words can, how prudently and how wisely they were managed.

In discussing slavery, Hill intermingled discussion of white indentured servants in the colonial South with enslaved blacks - a common tactic in textbooks endorsed by the UDC. The point was to minimize the immorality of slavery by equating the enslaved with those working off a debt, very often the debt of Atlantic passage. Indentured servants often apprenticed to tradesmen, allowing them to gain a marketable skill with which to make a living once the debt was paid. Though it was not without problems, indentured servitude was not the same thing as chattel slavery, but conflating the two was a common Lost Cause red herring.

A much more aggressive equivalency between indentured servitude and slavery was drawn in another UDC textbook favorite, "The History of the United States" by Waddy Thompson, a plantation owner, South Carolina legislator and former U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Used for years throughout the South and endorsed by the national UDC, Thompson's textbook intentionally mischaracterized indentured servants as "white slaves" and described enslaved black people as being exceptionally well-treated, perfectly happy, and loyal to their masters.

"The History of the United States" also defended secession as a response to the North violating Southerners' constitutional rights (to own slaves) and justified the Ku Klux Klan as the protector of the white race during Reconstruction. Thompson recounted largely imagined Northern economic and political victimization of the South, both before and after the war, on everything from tariffs to trade - another classic Lost Cause trope.

Racist caricature as classroom poetry

Besides textbooks, the United Daughters of the Confederacy also made recommendations for supplementary readers to be used in the South's schools. Consider the one endorsed by the UDC in 1914.

"De Namin' ob de Twins, and Other Sketches From the Cotton Land" is a book written in 1908 by Mary Fairfax Childs, who was born in 1870 in Lexington, Kentucky, and later lived in Virginia. It was one of a slew of "black dialect" works of the time; considered a form of poetry, they used exaggerated phonetic spelling to caricature black speech and portrayed black people as comically foolish, childlike buffoons utterly dependent on whites for survival.

Childs herself was a UDC member and an officer in her own state's division, and she dedicated "Twins" to the UDC itself. The story, which intends to be humorous, revolves around an enslaved grandmother choosing names for her dead daughter's twin babies, who it refers to as "little darkies." In the preface Childs wrote, "The very fact that negroes made no attempt toward being humorous rendered them, as a race, irresistibly so."

In stating its approval of the book in 1914, the UDC's Committee on Endorsement of Books gushed:

It would be impossible to enumerate all, but one other author must be mentioned, one, who like Irwin Russell, sings of the humble folk, of those who helped make the Old South what it was, of the faithful servers who stood behind our grandmothers' chairs and with picturesque and stately turkey feathers wooed the cooling breezes on a feverish summer day, who sat at their footstools and placed the slippers on their slender little feet, and who sang and danced for the amusement of the home circle. Of those who waited upon the sick, comforted the suffering, and who, at the last, helped shut out the world and all its shadows with the snowy winding sheet. The poet is Mary Fairfax Childs, a Kentuckian by birth, a Virginian by inheritance. Her book, dedicated to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, is, "De Namin' ob de Twins," published by B. W. Dodge & Co., New York. Its pathos is irresistible, its humor contagious, its literary quality fine.

In 1917, "Twins" was endorsed again for schools, this time by Mrs. S.E.F. Rose, the UDC's historian general. Rose was famous for her own book, a supplementary reader published in 1913 titled "The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire." It was a glowing, pseudo-historical white supremacist tribute to the Reconstruction KKK, and both Rose and the national UDC recommended its use in schools. "The Ku Klux Klan" was first adopted by the school system in West Point, Mississippi, in 1915 and was pushed on schools in other states like Texas. The book was endorsed for use in schools by the UDC, UCV, and SCV.

One commonality in all the UDC-endorsed books was that they were written by white Southerners. The UDC not only railed against books slanted to what it called "the Northern view" of history, they routinely rejected books written by Northerners or anyone educated in the North, no matter how well qualified the author. The anti-Northern bias was so extreme that some prominent members of the UDC, including Mildred Lewis Rutherford herself, actually wanted to ban Northerners from teaching in Southern schools or from serving on Southern school boards.

Embracing a murderer

Some materials the UDC introduced into public schools came from minds twisted by other pathologies in addition to white supremacy.

Oscar W. Blacknall was the son of a well-known Confederate officer who died during the Civil War. A native of the town of Kittrell in Vance County, along North Carolina's border with Virginia, Blacknall owned one of the South's largest plant nurseries, which specialized in strawberries. He was also an amateur historian who focused on the Civil War. His wife and daughter were both active in the UDC. In fact, his wife (and his double first cousin), Carrie Thomas Blacknall, had been an officer in the state division and served as the local chapter's president. Their daughter Kate, one of seven children, had served as its secretary.

Like many white Southerners during Jim Crow, Blacknall was a publicly avowed white supremacist. For example, in the Sept. 6, 1903 edition of Raleigh's News and Observer - a newspaper that at the time was outspokenly white supremacist - Blacknall authored a rambling column titled "Transportation of Negroes Impossible and Chimerical." In it, he said the nature of blacks was to sink to the lowest of criminal and immoral behavior. He warned against racial mixing, that "the infusion of negro blood will be large enough to mongrelize the American stock to its everlasting harm." After asserting the racial superiority of whites, he advocated rounding up black people and shipping them to a foreign land.

But Blacknall's masterwork was "Lincoln as the South Should Know Him," published in 1915. Fewer than 20 pages, it was basically a pamphlet. Light on history and bloated with swirling hyperbole, it is at once a diatribe against Sherman's March, a defense of Southern secession, and an attack on Lincoln. At its core, it is an espousal of white supremacy.

For example, after comparing Lincoln to Satan and Napoleon, Blacknall declared the Emancipation Proclamation a meaningless political stunt because the slaves stayed on their plantations and didn't run away. But ultimately it was Lincoln, he wrote, who "unleashed four million savages ... in our very midst, against our defenseless women and children." Blacknall then continued his theme of casting blacks as inherently immoral and criminal and heralded the white Southerner as "the purest blooded branch of the sane and virile Anglo-Saxon race."

The North Carolina Division was thrilled. At its 1917 convention held in Kinston, the Manly's Battery Chapter - a Raleigh unit of the Children of the Confederacy, a UDC youth auxiliary group for children under 18 - announced that it had printed 500 copies of Blacknall's pamphlet and distributed them across 20 states.

Then in July 1918, Blacknall murdered his wife and his daughter Kate, then 25, before killing himself. The murder-suicide was described by The Cleveland Star newspaper of Shelby, North Carolina:

The triple tragedy occurred just after the noonday meal. Mrs. Blacknall was shot as she was leaving this dining room, the daughter just before she could reach the rear steps to the home, and the father fired a bullet into his own brain, standing between the bodies of his dying wife and daughter.

The paper notes that friends and associates attributed the killings to insanity, saying Blacknall had been under business and financial pressure.

Rather than dropping the publication of a man who had just murdered two of its own leaders, the North Carolina Division's printing and distribution of Blacknall's pamphlet increased exponentially. Between 1920 and 1923, the Division and Manly's Battery went on to print 1,545 copies of "Lincoln" for distribution in public schools and libraries.

Nor did the killings faze Mildred Lewis Rutherford. She went on to endorse Blacknall's pamphlet in her first volume of "Miss Rutherford's Scrapbook," published in 1923.

Confederate heritage groups still embrace Blacknall today. In fact, the SCV still sells "Lincoln as the South Should Know Him" on its website for $7.99, plus shipping and handling.

Banning books, targeting teachers

What did the UDC do when a Southern school system adopted a textbook they hated? They got it banned. Consider the Muzzey affair.

David S. Muzzey was a nationally known history professor. Educated at Harvard University, Union Theological Seminary, and the Sorbonne in Paris, he wrote a number of successful textbooks in his career. But it was his "American History," published in 1911, that drew the UDC's wrath.

The UDC targeted "American History" as early as 1916 at their annual convention in Dallas, when it landed on a list of history books deemed unacceptable by the group's Endorsement of Books Committee. But ultimately it was Mildred Lewis Rutherford's condemnation of Muzzey's book in her "Truths of History" that sparked an explosive controversy.

"American History" ran afoul of every rule Rutherford had laid out to further the Lost Cause narrative. Muzzey's book presented Lincoln in positive terms and Jefferson Davis negatively, named slavery as the cause of the Civil War, and characterized slavery as bad and Southern secession as unconstitutional.

In early 1920, the North Carolina textbook commission surprisingly approved "American History" for use in the state's schools. The UDC's North Carolina Division immediately protested to Dr. E.C. Brooks, the state superintendent of public instruction. Brooks tried to mollify the Division by requiring the editing of what it considered problematic language. But that wasn't good enough for the UDC.

By October 1920, the North Carolina Division called for the book to be banned outright, kicking off a highly coordinated two-year campaign to banish it from the state's schools. It began with a letter-writing campaign targeting first Brooks and then the textbook commission chair, Dr. T.R. Foust of Greensboro. The Division demanded that "American History" be banned and Lewis's "Truths of History" adopted in its stead. Tiring of the onslaught of letters, Brooks pointed the UDC towards the textbook commission's chair.

It wasn't long until the national UDC and the Rutherford Committee itself joined the fray. In a June 7, 1921 letter to Foust, Rutherford Committee Chair C. Irvine Walker demanded that only histories favorable to the South be used in North Carolina schools. He also noted that his group was already selecting histories in partnership with Mississippi and Texas and wanted North Carolina to extend the same privilege.

Julian Carr himself wrote Foust on June 9, 1921, demanding that objectionable history books be eliminated from North Carolina schools. Carr enclosed a multipage critique from the Rutherford Committee of various books, including Muzzey's, that it deemed objectionable and offensive.

A frustrated Brooks vented to a colleague that Muzzey's book had been chosen by Lost Cause loyalists on the textbook commission and said the controversy was being stoked by competing book publishers. Clearly, the UDC didn't share that view.

The reality of Brooks' situation was that the state contracted with textbook publishers in two-year blocks. Until Muzzey's contract came up for renewal, Brooks was going to have to take the beating.

By August 1921, the UDC had launched a full-scale media blitz against the book, landing coverage in North Carolina newspapers both large and small. For example, a story that ran in the Hickory Daily Record blamed the superintendent and textbook commission for approving "American History," citing various complaints including the fact that the book said slavery caused the Civil War. In another story, the paper reported:

Tar Heel Daughters of the Confederacy objections to historian Muzzey's [book] is two fold. His history, it is said, misrepresented the South and its people, and its omissions are as equally glaring. The Daughters have enlisted the confederate veterans and their protest is now in Governor Morrison's hands, who will very probably use his influence in doing something for the U.D.C. chapters.

Walker kept up the Rutherford Committee's pressure by sending a lengthy critique of "American History" directly to the State Board of Education, which oversaw the textbook commission and Superintendent Brooks.

By 1922, the public pressure and political arm-twisting had paid off: The North Carolina Textbook Commission did not renew the contract for Muzzey's book. At the state Division's annual convention that fall, Mrs. Frank L. Wilson, chair of the textbook committee, announced, "We feel safe in saying that our organization has, at this time, the sympathy and interest of the State Board of Education."

The North Carolina Division was not alone in attacking "American History." The UDC launched a similarly vicious campaign against the book when it was adopted in Virginia in 1932, and the publisher was forced to sell a watered-down version in Alabama.

And the UDC didn't stop with books: They also went after teachers who veered from the group's orthodoxy.

In February 1911, the chair of the University of Florida's history department, Enoch M. Banks, published an academic article in a New York journal arguing that the preservation of slavery was the reason Southern states seceded, thus slavery was the cause of the war. When a newspaper in Florida got wind of the article, its resulting editorial ignited a firestorm in the Florida UDC and other Confederate heritage groups. They demanded Banks' head.

By early March, Banks was the subject of a withering media campaign and had become fodder for state politicians. He soon found himself without any support from his own university administration. He then tried to reason with the UDC and defend his writing with historical evidence, but that only fueled the fire.

Several weeks later, Bank was forced to resign. His academic career effectively destroyed, he retired to his home in Georgia where he died several months later.

Resisting integration

By the 1930s, the power of the Confederate heritage groups like the UDC was on the wane. Time had taken its toll on the UCV as Civil War veterans died off. Societal events like the Great Depression, two world wars, and then the Cold War sapped the focus and interest in groups like the UDC. As the old-guard UDC members died out, the younger generation of Southern women had much less interest in stepping in to fill the breach.

But their Lost Cause propaganda lived on.

Segregationist politicians picked up where the UDC left off and actively continued to push the Lost Cause deeper into school curriculum and the general public domain. As the civil rights movement in the South gained steam in the 1950s, the Lost Cause proponents dug in as Southern state and local governments reacted to the protests, marches, school integration, voting rights progress, and defeat after defeat in historic court cases.

In 1957, Virginia commissioned a slew of Lost Cause textbooks. One of the more famous, "Virginia: History, Government, Geography," presented slavery in glowing terms. "Enslaved people were happy to be in Virginia and were better off than they would have been in Africa," it said. "Abolitionists lied about slavery in the South."

These textbooks blamed the Civil War on Abraham Lincoln, and they falsely asserted that states' rights and not slavery were the cause of the Civil War. The publisher even included illustrations showing happy captive Africans in Western dress clothes, shaking hands with their new masters on slave ships.

A fourth-grade history book commissioned at the same time, "Virginia History," had this to say about slavery:

Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked.

The high school history book "Cavalier Commonwealth," also commissioned then, said slaves:

... did not work so hard as the average free laborer, since he did not have to worry about losing his job. In fact, the slave enjoyed what we might call comprehensive social security. Generally speaking, his food was plentiful, his clothing adequate, his cabin warm, his health protected and his leisure carefree.

It also said that both the slave and master "understood that bondage as they knew it was not totally evil; both realized that enslavement in a civilized world had been better in many respects for the Negro than the barbarities he might have suffered in Africa."

Consider the similarities of the above with this excerpt from a 1914 speech delivered by the UDC's Mildred Lewis Rutherford in in Savannah, Georgia:

The negro race should give thanks daily that they and their children are not today where their ancestors were before they came into bondage.

Was the negro happy under the institution of slavery? They were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe - free from care or thought of food, clothes, home, or religious privileges.

It would be well into the 1970s before Virginia phased out these books.

Other Southern states also procured new Lost Cause books that were used well into the 1970s. In 1963, for example, Tennessee began using a history book by Mary Utopia Rothrock called "This Is Tennessee: A School History." It not only omitted slavery as the cause of the Civil War but defended it as necessary to the economy of the South and Southern culture itself. The book went through several editions.

Showdown in Mississippi

Up until 1980, Mississippi's public schools used Lost Cause textbooks exclusively - and it took a federal court order to make them stop.

In a bellwether moment for history textbooks in the South, authors James Loewen and Charles Sallis, with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, sued Mississippi in federal court in 1975. The lawsuit came after the state textbook review committee, in a 5-2 vote that broke down along racial lines, rejected their nationally acclaimed, award-winning textbook, "Mississippi: Conflict and Change."

Instead, the commission chose "Your Mississippi" by Lost Cause proponent John K. Bettersworth. Though it was an updated version of an older Bettersworth book, "Your Mississippi" contained classic Lost Cause tropes, totally ignored historic racial violence such as lynchings, and almost entirely overlooked the civil rights movement.

To show Mississippi had violated its own objective book selection standards and, in the process, violated Loewen's and Sallis' constitutional rights, the lawsuit pitted the books against one another - Lost Cause vs. basic historical fact - in court.

Bettersworth's book presented enslaved people as being largely well treated by white masters and blamed harsh punishment of slaves on black overseers. It also said that states' rights were the core reason for the Civil War, and it portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a simple fraternal club while totally ignoring its violence.

The white members of the textbook commission denied any racial bias in their rejection of Loewen's and Sallis' book, but trial testimony showed otherwise. The textbook commission's white members thought it focused too much on "black history" and harped on issues they considered unsavory, like the treatment of slaves, lynchings, segregation, and violence against civil rights protesters. They clearly preferred the Lost Cause version of history.

The white commission members also said "Conflict and Change" had too many disturbing pictures, like white people standing over the burning body of a black lynching victim. John Turnipseed, the committee chair, said he wanted to leave those images in the past, which prompted an exasperated Judge Orma Smith to interject himself directly into the questioning of a witness, rare in a trial:

Judge Smith: Didn't lynchings happen in Mississippi?

Turnipseed: Yes, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now?

Judge Smith: It's a history book isn't it?

In 1980, the plaintiffs won their lawsuit and forced Mississippi to adopt "Conflict and Change" for its schools - the first time that state endorsed a textbook that veered from the Lost Cause narrative.

Lost Cause resurgent

Recent years have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause propaganda promoted by remnants of the UDC and SCV, as well as by openly white-supremacist and so-called "alt-right" groups, often in connection with fights over Confederate monuments.

Elements of the Lost Cause narrative have also been incorporated into mainstream conservative political ideology and manifest in fights over school curriculum.

Consider what happened in Texas in 2010. As part of a highly publicized revamp of the state social studies curriculum, the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education removed slavery as the central cause of the Civil War and replaced it with states' rights and secession, with Republican board member Patricia Hardy calling slavery "an after issue." The Republican members also considered referring to the slave trade as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade" before finally settling on "Transatlantic Slave Trade."

The new curriculum was silent on the KKK during Reconstruction and failed to mention the Jim Crow era at all. It also equated Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln.

In addition, the curriculum claimed that Joseph McCarthy was correct when he said the U.S. government had been infiltrated by communists in the 1950s, included lessons on why the U.S. needs to return to the gold standard, and asserted that the United Nations, International Criminal Court, and global environmental initiatives undermined U.S. sovereignty. And it scrubbed any mention of Thomas Jefferson's role in U.S. history because he advocated for the separation of church and state.

It would be 2018 before the Texas standards were revised. They now blame slavery, secession, and states' rights equally as causes of the Civil War.

What happened in Texas shows the consequences of feeding Lost Cause propaganda to generations of Southern students. In some respects, the UDC's textbook campaign was quite successful, with public polling showing marked confusion about the causes of the Civil War. For example, a widely reported 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that 48% of Americans thought the conflict was mainly about states' rights - including 60% of those under age 30 - while only 38% thought it was primarily about slavery.

This miseducation continues to have ramifications for U.S. civic life. A 2018 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center found serious inadequacies in how the history of American slavery is taught. Students' lack basic knowledge about the critical role the slavery played in shaping the United States and how it continues to affect society today. As Hasan Kwame Jeffries notes in the report's introduction:

Our discomfort with hard history and our fondness for historical fiction also lead us to make bad public policy. We choose to ignore the fact that when slavery ended, white Southerners carried the mindsets of enslavers with them into the post-emancipation period, creating new exploitative labor arrangements such as sharecropping, new disenfranchisement mechanisms including literacy tests and new discriminatory social systems, namely Jim Crow. It took African Americans more than a century to eliminate these legal barriers to equality, but that has not been enough to erase race-based disparities in every aspect of American life, from education and employment to wealth and well-being. Public policies tend to treat this racial inequality as a product of poor personal decision-making, rather than acknowledging it as the result of racialized systems and structures that restrict choice and limit opportunity.

With white extremist violence on the rise around the South and elsewhere, confronting propaganda posing as facts is as important now as ever.

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TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks

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Though better known these days for erecting statues to Confederate veterans during the Jim Crow era, the United Daughters of the Confederacy also promoted white supremacist Lost Cause propaganda through their campaigns to control history textbooks used in the South's public schools. That miseducation continues to haunt our politics today.

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The Civil War Never Stopped Being Fought in America’s Classrooms. Here’s Why That Matters

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The Civil War Never Stopped Being Fought in America’s Classrooms. Here’s Why That Matters

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The Civil War Never Stopped Being Fought in America's Classrooms. Here's Why That Matters

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John Kelly's controversial statement on the Civil War, which blamed the conflict on failure to compromise, didn't come about by accident

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By Kevin Levin in The New Republic (2019)

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On April 19, 2019, a man-who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag-posted in a Facebook group called "Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of Northern Aggression," which has more than 2,000 members. "Heads up y'all there's gonna be a book coming out in sept saying black confederates are a myth," he wrote. "Be prepared to give a negative review on amazon when it's released." "I damned sure will," another man immediately replied.

The University of North Carolina Press 240 pp., $30.00

Within this online community, the publication of Kevin M. Levin's excellent book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth, is nothing less than a declaration of war. In the last several decades, Levin writes, a growing number of people have begun to accept as fact claims that between 500 and 100,000 black soldiers fought in racially integrated units in the Confederate Army. There are hundreds of web sites, legions of online communities, and whole books devoted to perpetuating these claims. Billboards reading "75,000 Confederates of color?" have recently appeared in Missouri, and one fourth-grade Virginia history textbook asserted that "thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks." Although it is difficult to measure the pervasiveness of this narrative, one study from 2013 found that 16 percent of students at a Virginia university believed that "blacks fought for the Confederacy."

Yet, as Levin patiently explains, this is totally untrue-predicated on a misreading and misunderstanding of historical documents, as well as outright lies and manipulations. The myth of black Confederates enables white supremacists to portray the Civil War inaccurately as a struggle over states' rights, not slavery; as a fight for Southern liberty, not for oppression. This in turn justifies their retrograde and racist politics in the present. To those who have embraced this myth, Levin's book is a terrifying prospect, and for good reason. Searching for Black Confederates is a bracing corrective, a slender yet vital volume in the growing library of texts dedicated to dispelling white supremacist talking points.

There were plenty of black men present in Confederate Army camps, and even on the gray side of Civil War battlefields. The Confederate Army pressed tens of thousands of slaves into work as teamsters, butchers, blacksmiths, ditchdiggers, and hospital attendants; thousands more were brought to war by their masters, for whom they performed less desirable labor and assisted with washing, sewing, and food preparation. Countless slaves used the excitement of war and the confusion of battle to flee. Many others stayed, some for years, sometimes even saving their masters' lives and nursing their wounds; they may have felt some sense of kinship with their masters, with whom they were now sharing close quarters and the intimacy of the trenches, but many undoubtedly remained because they had family still on their masters' homesteads, and they feared reprisals against their loved ones or the loss of the chance to reunite. As the war continued, the increasing flood of escapes led the Confederate Army to employ free blacks-"who, it was believed, had fewer reasons to flee"-though only in "support roles."

It is true that some black men did occasionally "man artillery and perform as sharpshooters," likely when they themselves feared Northern shells or after their masters had fallen. But these black men were not soldiers. Indeed, they could not have been. The Confederacy did not allow black men-free or enslaved-to serve in its military. As the Confederate Army began racking up defeats, there were increasing calls to dragoon slaves or pay free blacks to serve as soldiers, and Jefferson Davis eventually voiced his support for this-but it never came to pass. Lee surrendered before a single black Confederate soldier ever marched into battle.

Observers at the time vehemently denied scattered reports in Northern newspapers that the Confederacy had recruited black soldiers. "This is utterly untrue," wrote John B. Jones of the Confederate War Department. Even the few black men who tried to fight for the Confederacy were ultimately blocked from doing so. Though free men of color formed the 1st Louisiana Native Guard in 1861, the law limited membership in the state militia to "free white males," and the unit "was never accepted into Confederate service." By September 1862, many of its former members were fighting for the Union.

In the years immediately following the war, no reports or memoirs emerged of black Confederates. Such accounts would have struck former Confederates as bizarre or absurd-and certainly demeaning to white supremacy. As the so-called Lost Cause narrative began to take shape, stories of camp slaves being rebellious or lazy were forgotten, replaced by magnolia-scented tales of loyal slaves who were only too happy to serve the Confederacy (in noncombatant roles). Statues and monuments were erected to celebrate Dixie, some of them depicting adoring blacks-though none of them in uniform.

It was only in the 1970s that the myth of black Confederate soldiers emerged. This was an era in which scholars reevaluated slavery and its role in causing the Civil War, teachers challenged the Lost Cause hagiography so predominant in museums and textbooks, and civil rights activists battled white supremacy in the streets and in the courts. In popular culture, the role that black people themselves, especially black Union soldiers, had taken in destroying slavery became increasingly visible. Alex Haley's wildly popular Roots television series, released in 1977, enraged the neo-Confederate community, as it portrayed the long genealogy of black resistance to slavery; the 1989 movie Glory, depicting the heroic black men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and Ken Burns's 1990 Civil War PBS miniseries angered them, too.

A group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans began pushing back, fighting for the Lost Cause legend-and, in so doing, they created the myth of black Confederate soldiers. First through articles in Confederate Veteran magazine, SCV leaders began arguing that Confederates had been fighting for the freedom of the South and against Yankee interlopers, not for slavery or white supremacy. To lend credence to this pretense, they began claiming the existence of "black veterans," digging up photos of slaves in Confederate regalia and records of black people receiving Confederate military pensions as evidence that black men had served as Southern soldiers. Levin devotes an entire chapter to showing that the "exceedingly small" number of black men who received such pensions received them as former slaves or servants, never as soldiers.

More recently, the SCV has begun placing "Black Confederate" markers on the graves of black men, in an effort to "literally inscribe its preferred interpretation of the role of African Americans in the Confederacy at their final resting places." These ceremonies are often elaborate and well-publicized events, designed to make a statement rather than quietly show respect. With the advent of the internet, neo-Confederates also created thousands of web sites "to spread their understanding of the war beyond the confines of their narrow community." Many of the sites feature primary sources, lending them a sheen of credibility, but the materials have "either been misinterpreted or even manipulated."

A small number of black people have embraced the myth, speaking at reenactments and other Confederate heritage events. Their presence is a conundrum that Levin could have devoted more time to plumbing. He proposes that "a small number of African Americans have embraced the black Confederate narrative as a means to identify and to celebrate stories of ancestors who they believe have been long forgotten or intentionally ignored." He also speculates that the myth may have "offered conservative black Americans an outlet to voice their political agenda." Interviews could have rounded out these observations, and could have proved worthwhile, too, in Levin's discussion of SCV activities, though he has gotten his hands on some internal SCV reports.

Levin seems more in his element when challenging prominent academics, such as John Stauffer and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who, he writes, have misinterpreted evidence and spread "unsubstantiated claims about the existence of loyal black soldiers," despite never having "conducted any serious research on this subject." Stauffer has discussed it in his university lectures for years, and in an essay in The Root (which has been gleefully cited by neo-Confederates), while Gates has spread the myth on his PBS show Finding Your Roots, among other places. Gates has also publicly claimed that scholars' refusal to embrace the black Confederate narrative is evidence of "left-of-center" academics censoring themselves and ignoring the "complexity of the African American community."

The myth of black Confederate soldiers is important because it allows neo-Confederates to manipulate the popular understanding of white supremacy; to claim that flying the Stars and Bars is a matter of heritage, not hate. Levin notes that during the campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from state grounds across the South following the murders at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the SCV objected. Its argument for keeping the flag cited the existence of black Southern soldiers. Happily, the neo-Confederates lost that fight. With this important book, Levin is determined to rout them once and for all.

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On April 19, 2019, a man-who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag-posted in a Facebook group called "Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of Northern Aggression," which has more than 2,000 members.

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Black Bostonians Fought For Freedom From Slavery. Where Are The Statues That Tell Their Stories?

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Black Bostonians Fought For Freedom From Slavery. Where Are The Statues That Tell Their Stories?

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By Kevin Levin (2020)

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It was just a matter of time before the monument debate that has swept across the country, since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month, arrived in Boston.

Last week, Dorchester native Tory Bullock posted a video on his Facebook page calling for the removal of the Emancipation Memorial or Freedman's Memorial on Park Square. The memorial - a copy of the original designed by Thomas Ball, dedicated in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1876 and paid for by formerly enslaved people - depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling slave beckoning him to rise to claim his freedom. Bullock has already caught the attention of Mayor Marty Walsh, who is open to relocating the memorial.

In the video, Bullock expresses frustration with the "Black dude on his knees" - a popular motif within abolitionist circles before the Civil War. Bullock asks, "Does that make you feel powerful? Does that make you feel respected? Does that make you feel good?"

He is not the first African American to express such concern with the depiction of the Black man in this memorial or the narrative of emancipation that it represents.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass served as the keynote speaker at the D.C. dedication. In front of thousands of Black residents and much of the federal government, including President Ulysses S. Grant, Douglass declared, "my white fellow-citizens...you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity." Douglass fought too hard and for too long to fall in line with the image of Lincoln as the "Great Emancipator."

Although Douglass never referenced the enslaved man in his speech, modeled after Archer Alexander, he is reported to have objected privately by suggesting, "it showed the negro on his knee when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom."

Even the most generous reading of the memorial ultimately falls short. "In bronze, Archer Alexander can never rise and stand, never come to consciousness of his own power," writes historian Kirk Savage. "The narrative remains frozen in place, the monument perpetuating its image of racial difference for eternity."

Douglass, Bullock and Savage highlight the inadequacies that many people have acknowledged over the years. It places African Americans in a submissive posture, who simply waited for the gift of emancipation from Lincoln and the rest of the nation rather than claiming it for themselves. It runs roughshod over the steps that enslaved men and women took throughout the war to undercut the Confederacy from within by running away from plantations as well as the service of roughly 200,000 Black men in the United States army.

The memorial itself deserves a serious review and public discussion, but it also highlights a glaring omission...

By the time the Emancipation Memorial was dedicated in Boston in 1879, African Americans - many of them formerly enslaved - were already standing on their two feet and engaged in political action in former Confederate states. They served in state legislatures and in Congress, where they pushed for a progressive platform that included the establishment of public schools, the redistribution of land and the expansion of voting rights. They did this in the face of brutal violence at the hands of terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

The memorial itself deserves a serious review and public discussion, but it also highlights a glaring omission on Boston's downtown commemorative landscape that so far has gone unnoticed. Just two blocks from the Emancipation Memorial visitors and residents of the city can walk through the Public Garden, which includes numerous statues celebrating the city's white abolitionist leaders, such as William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, is also located nearby on Commonwealth Avenue.

Lost in all of this is any sense that Black Bostonians crusaded for their own freedom. Before the Civil War, the north slope of Beacon Hill was a vibrant and politically engaged African-American community and one of the most important centers of Black abolitionism. Black abolitionists such as Lewis Hayden, William Cooper Nell, William Wells Brown, David Walker, Maria Stewart and Eliza Ann Gardner campaigned for the desegregation of Boston's public schools, stood up to the federal government in the 1850s in defense of fugitive slaves and demanded the end of slavery. Their efforts culminated in Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the recruitment of Black soldiers in the United States army in 1863 - a story that is beautifully commemorated in the memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, located just across from the State House.

Like the kneeling slave in Thomas Ball's memorial, the absence of statues commemorating these men and women leaves visitors with the impression that African Americans contributed nothing to their own emancipation. Rather, these statues reinforce the myth that emancipation was a gift from white Americans. According to historian Manisha Sinha, "Black abolitionists were integral to the broader, interracial milieu of the movement. To read them out of the abolition movement is to profoundly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism."

Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, these men and women did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.

Today, the stories of Boston's Black abolitionists are told in the African Meeting House, run by the Museum of African American History and the National Park Service, for those visitors willing to stray from the more popular Freedom Trail. Contrary to the image of the kneeling slave, these men and women did not wait passively for the "Day of Jubilee." They led the charge.

Our commemorative landscape in the heart of Boston should reflect this important truth. More importantly, it needs to reflect the history of all Bostonians if only so we can chart a better path forward together.

It's time for a conversation.
Follow Cognoscenti on Facebook and Twitter.

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Black Bostonians Fought For Freedom From Slavery. Where Are The Statues That Tell Their Stories?

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It was just a matter of time before the monument debate that has swept across the country, since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month, arrived in Boston. Last week, Dorchester native Tory Bullock posted a video on his Facebook page calling for the removal of the Emancipation Memorial or Freedman's Memorial on Park Square.

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A powerful new memorial to U-Va.’s enslaved workers reclaims lost lives and forgotten narratives

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A powerful new memorial to U-Va.’s enslaved workers reclaims lost lives and forgotten narratives

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The WP (2020)

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Visitors at the University of Virginia's Memorial to Enslaved Laborers in Charlottesville this month. The memorial acknowledges the estimated 4,000 enslaved people who lived and worked at the university from 1817 to 1865. (Evelyn Hockstein/for The Washington Post)

If you stand outside the concentric rings of the University of Virginia's new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, there is a curious acoustic phenomenon: The conversations of people inside the gray, granite walls are clearly audible, even from a distance.

Architects Eric Howeler and Meejin Yoon say that's no surprise, given the way curved surfaces reflect sound. "We knew the geometry had [acoustic] qualities, but it wasn't until it was built that it became so evident," says Yoon.

So, this evocative and moving new memorial to the thousands of enslaved people who helped build and then served the university that Thomas Jefferson designed can make private conversations public. And that echoes the larger challenge of this memorial, part of the university's ongoing effort to confront the legacy of slavery and white supremacy: how to memorialize people whose names and stories are mostly lost to history.

Of the roughly 4,000 enslaved people whose lives intersected with the university - as construction workers, craftsmen, domestic servants, gardeners, cooks - the names of only 578 (to date) are known. Another 311 were known by their roles within the campus or their relation to others who lived or worked there: bricklayer, mother, son, niece.

That left more than 3,000 blank places on a wall meant to honor a whole community of people who were an essential part of university life but also subject to explosive violence and sexual abuse from students raised to be masters in a system of racial domination. The design solution is something the architects call "memory marks," small gashes in the stone that stand in for the anonymous laborers, gashes that look a bit like wounds. After a rainstorm, a visitor to the memorial noticed that water was slowly dripping from the memory marks. That visitor, a descendant of the community of enslaved laborers, told the architects this reminded her of "the tears of our ancestors."

For better and worse, Charlottesville is at the center of this country's conversation about race, the legacy of slavery and the persistence of white supremacy. The infamous 2017 Unite the Right march brought neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other extremist groups to Charlottesville for two days of violent protests, including a torchlight march on the university campus in which White men chanted, "Jews will not replace us," and the murder the following day of Heather Heyer, an anti-racist counterprotester.

On Richmond's Monument Avenue, an evolving legacy of ugly ideas

Charlottesville was also the epicenter of the Jeffersonian dream - agrarian, egalitarian, intellectual and racist - one of the most fraught and frustrating chapters of American history. Jefferson founded the university in 1819, designed the campus (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and laid out an ambitious academic agenda for an institution that was meant to train the future leaders of a democracy that paradoxically embraced slavery. Idealism and cynicism were baked into the brick of this neoclassical Piedmont masterpiece, an oblong campus of pavilions connected by a colonnaded loggia around a slowly descending greensward.

The new memorial, which was scheduled to open in April before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the university, is an effort not just to think about Jefferson but to think beyond him. Its circular form recalls the slave tradition of a ring shout (an African-derived spiritual-dance ritual). But it also serves as an outdoor classroom, small amphitheater or gathering spot. During the design process, the architects had to determine the exact dimensions of the circle. Again by fortuitous discovery, they realized that the diameter of Jefferson's dome for the central Rotunda building was also the right size for a memorial that needed to be both big enough to make a statement and small enough to be intimate.

But they also used a locally quarried granite that stands apart, with funereal reticence, from the mainly classical, red-brick and white-trimmed campus. And while the memorial sits within the UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is set to the side of Jefferson's Academical Village, along a prominent pathway that connects students to the cafes, shops and restaurants along University Avenue. And so it echoes humanist discourse at its best: distinct, independent, always qualified to be precise and general only in its open acknowledgment that little is finished or certain.

The two circular forms include a timeline of slavery at U-Va. along the inner ring and the wall of names and memory marks along the outer one. The exterior of the outer wall also includes a subtle (and sometimes difficult to discern) set of eyes, derived from an image of Isabella Gibbons, an enslaved woman who was owned by professors at the university before emancipation and who went on to become an educator of freed African Americans.

The eyes, visible from certain angles depending on the light, reinforce what the echo suggests: the sense that something hidden or obscure is being made available and present. Images of enslaved people, especially during the early years of the university, are extraordinarily rare. A 2018 report delivered to U-Va.'s President's Commission on Slavery and the University included just one known image of an enslaved person at the school during the antebellum period: a Black woman holding a White baby, standing on the balcony of one of Jefferson's pavilions. Gibbons, who survived slavery and lived during the age of photography, offers a rare, direct encounter with one of the thousands of otherwise anonymous laborers.

The lack of early images of slavery doesn't make slavery invisible, says Louis Nelson, professor of architectural history at U-Va. The campus design, which pushed the domestic life of enslaved labor into ground-level spaces not visible from the center of the lawn, and into gardens obscured by eight-foot-high serpentine walls, continued architectural gestures built into Jefferson's mansion at Monticello. These were "strategies to remove the presence of the Black body and obscure the institution of slavery," says Nelson, who describes Jefferson's campus and Monticello as "White landscapes" in which slavery is tucked into the sides or underneath.

A virus shows us the future of architecture, after pandemics and civil unrest

Unlike elite universities in the North, which were mainly urban and had a ready supply of labor and resources for their daily operation, Jefferson created an ideal village, essentially ex nihilo, into which he incorporated all the necessities of the university's agenda, including its dependence on slavery. Rather like the Enlightenment conception of the cosmos, in which God is often likened to an invisible architect or clock maker, slavery was part of the hidden works of the larger mechanism.

That gives the round form of the memorial, which some have compared to broken shackles, yet more resonance. So, too, the presence, just up the hill, of the 1876 Brooks Hall, originally devoted to natural history, with the names of prominent scientists carved on its exterior, including Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who helped create the modern taxonomic system. The name of Linnaeus, who played a key role in the origins of scientific racism (the pseudoscience of categorizing humans by racial types and hierarchies), is clearly visible from the memorial.

College campuses are, by their nature, thick with meaning, intentional, accidental, associative and uncanny. In 2007, the university installed a small memorial marker near the central Rotunda, which read: "In honor of the several hundred men and women, both free and enslaved, whose labor between 1817 and 1826 helped realize Thomas Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia." It was inadequate in multiple ways: its seeming equivalence between free and enslaved labor, its limit to the "several hundred" who worked on campus construction rather than the decades-long history of enslaved labor up to the Civil War, and its reflexive inclusion of Jefferson's name, as if it were an honor to be unrightfully bound to fulfilling his vision.

It was also small, and easy to miss, rather like it is easy to overlook Linnaeus's name on Brooks Hall. Both should probably be left where they are, reminders that history, science and the self-image of institutions always involve an admixture of motives, benign and malign and sometimes inscrutable even to the most conscientious observers. The designers of the new memorial, which can't be missed and is already attracting a steady stream of visitors, say they wanted to fulfill the need for a memorial that made an invisible, often whitewashed history visible. They also wanted something open-ended, subject to interpretation, a place of happy accidents like that strange echo.

They succeeded. Here is a space you might sit in for a long time, and wonder: How did we get here? And where are we going?

Is a new Eisenhower memorial the last of the "great man" monuments?

We need libraries, and this one can't open soon enough

Thomas Jefferson, a great scientist, and a mastodon skeleton

Today's Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

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Review | A powerful new memorial to U-Va.'s enslaved workers reclaims lost lives and forgotten narratives

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If you stand outside the concentric rings of the University of Virginia's new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, there is a curious acoustic phenomenon: The conversations of people inside the gray, granite walls are clearly audible, even from a distance. Architects Eric Howeler and Meejin Yoon say that's no surprise, given the way curved surfaces reflect sound.

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Slavery and Emancipation. The History of History

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Slavery and Emancipation. The History of History

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A collection of resources exploring the ways that historians and history educators have approached some key themes in the American past.

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A collection of resources exploring the ways that historians and history educators have approached some key themes in the American past.

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How does 1619 help us connect the past with the present?

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Standards
Common Core:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.7

Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts.
C3 Framework:
D2.Geo.3.3-5. Use maps of different scales to describe the locations of cultural and environmental characteristics.

D2.Geo.5.3-5. Explain how the cultural and environmental characteristics of places change over time.

D2.His.3.3-5. Generate questions about individuals and groups who have shaped significant historical changes and continuities.

D2.His.3.6-8. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant.
National Council for Social Studies:
Theme: Time, Continuity, Change

Theme: Culture
National Geography Standards:
Standard 4. The physical and human characteristics of places.

Standard 6. How culture and experience influence people's perceptions of places and regions.
Virginia Standards of Learning
Standard VS.1c, d, g

Standard VS.3d, e

Standard VS.7c

Teacher Tips: Think about what students should be able to KNOW, UNDERSTAND and DO at the conclusion of this learning experience. A brief exit pass or other formative assessment may be used to assess student understandings. Setting specific learning targets for the appropriate grade level and content area will increase student success.

Suggested Grade Levels: Upper Elementary, Middle School

Suggested Timeframe: 5 class sessions, 30-45 minute class periods

Suggested Materials: Internet access via laptop, tablet or mobile device, projector and screen for viewing video segments as whole class activity if providing face to face instruction, access to free Timeline tool fromReadWriteThink.org, other free web-based tools as noted.

Archaeologist - a person who studies human activity by discovering and analyzing artifacts, or evidence of material culture

Asylum - protection granted to a refugee, a person who left their country for fear of their own safety or the safety of others in their home country

Commemorate - to honor the memory of an important person or event

Consensus - a general sense of agreement or respect of opinions on a topic of discussion or debate

Contraband - property that is illegal to own or transport/smuggle; historically, during the U.S. Civil War a term used to describe escaped enslaved Africans given sanctuary by Union forces who declared them goods that may not be supplied by people who are neutral in a war

Fugitive - someone who escapes from captivity or the law

Landscape - the cultural landscape of a historically important place, including evidence of human interaction with the physical landscape or terrain, Earth's surface

Material culture - the physical objects people create and use in daily life (ex. artifacts, clothing, food, buildings, documents, tools and technology)

Refuge - a condition of being safe; shelter from pursuit, danger or harm (people who seek or take refuge are called refugees)

Sanctuary - a place of refuge or safety, historically often a church or government building where fugitives were protected from arrest or harm (ex. Sanctuary cities)

Secede - to break formal or political ties, to leave a governing group or nation (ex. The south seceded from the Union during the U.S. Civil War)

Viewshed - a geographic term to describe an area visible from a specific location

Teacher Tips: This Learning Resource is developed in collaboration with New American History, Virginia Public Media, and Field Studio, producers of The Future of America's Past.

This Learning Resource utilizes theQuestion Formulation Technique (QFT) for analyzing historic events and primary sources. The QFT is an evidence-based strategy developed by the Right Question Institute that teaches all students how to create, work with, and use their own questions-building skills for lifelong learning, self-advocacy, and democratic action. Educators will need to set up a free account to use these materials-well worth the effort!

Other instructional strategies embedded in this Learning Resource include using a Gallery Walk and a Consensogram for students to share their work with teachers and peers and solicit feedback, and creating a One-pager, and a Found Poem. Another activity includes a Socratic Seminar to promote civic engagement and model ways for students to engage in respectful civil discourse. Hyperlinks with directions for each of these strategies and learning activities are included, and your feedback or suggestions are always welcome via our feedback form located at the bottom of every Learning Resource.

You may access the original images for this Learning Resource, embedded as Google Slides, to project on a screen for whole group, face to face instruction or to share with students digitally via your school's LMS such as Canvas or Google Classroom. Videos may be played directly off the New American History website.

These Learning Resources follow a variation of the 5Es instructional model, and each section may be taught as a separate learning experience, or as part of a sequence of learning experiences using all the segments from the same episode of The Future of America's Past. We provide each of our Learning Resources in multiple formats, including web-based and as an editable Google Doc for educators to teach and adapt selected learning experiences as they best suit the needs of the students and the curriculum. You may also wish to embed or remix them into a playlist for students working remotely or independently.

How do we interpret multiple events that unfolded across a single historic landscape?

Use the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to study this quote with your classmates. The teacher will introduce the first Question Focus, (or QFocus), using the quote on slide 1, and the rules for the exchange as posted below. If you are working remotely, you may work independently or, if possible, with a group via video conferencing.

The process may begin for a second round once you (and your classmates) conclude the first discussion with a second QFocus, this time using the second slide which includes the same quote with the speaker's name now revealed.

Once all students have examined one or both versions of the quote, take time to explore the original source by viewing the opening segment from The Future of America's Past, "Freedom's Fortress." (View video segment, "The Fog of History.") After you have viewed the segment, allow time for a final round of the QFT, using slide 3 with the video as the QFocus.

Follow the student-developed action plan to learn more about Fort Monroe. An exit ticket may be used, or a reflective journal for the last step of the QFT process.
Your teacher may ask you to record your answers on an exit ticket.

Explore: How can visiting historic sites help us develop a Sense of Place as we explore physical and cultural landscapes?

In The Future of America's Past, historian Ed Ayers visits places that define the most misunderstood parts of America's past. In this segment, Ed visits Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton, Virginia, and has a conversation with the park superintendent, Terry Brown, about the legacy of this historic landmark. (View video segment, "Making Freedom's Fortress.")

Geographers often look at history through a specific lens, a Sense of Place, examining the human and physical characteristics of a place over time, noting what makes each location unique from all other points on Earth.

Examine these historical maps and images from the video about Fort Monroe. What clues do they provide to help us understand more about the people and events that shaped the physical and cultural landscape of this place over time? (You may also rewatch the video for additional clues!)

You may now work independently, in pairs or small groups to take a closer look.

How might you sort these maps and images?

What categories or labels would you assign to each map or image in this collection?

Do the maps and images include any text or captions to help you interpret what you are seeing?

What material culture is present in the images that might help us determine the approximate time period when these images were created? (objects, buildings, clothing?)

Do the images or maps have any other clues to help us understand more about the place and time each image reflects?

Create a visual timeline using several of the maps and images. Your timeline should include significant events from the history of Point Comfort, now known as Old Point Comfort, and Fort Monroe. You will need to create short captions for each image you use from this segment of the episode of The Future of America's Past. Your teacher may choose to print each map and image and have you sort them and create your timeline by hand like a museum exhibit, or you may sort them and create your timeline digitally as you might see on a museum website. This free timeline tool might help!

Once you are finished, share your timeline with one or more people, comparing their timeline to yours. Your teacher may allow you to participate in a gallery walk to view multiple timelines if space and time permit, or perhaps via a digital gallery walk.

Do you see any similarities or differences between the timelines?

Discuss how you (and your partners, if you didn't work independently) decided how to categorize each map and image. What clues helped you decide how to place them chronologically?

After discussing these differences, would you consider adjusting or reorganizing any of your maps or images on your timeline?

Now select 2-3 maps or images from the collection you are most curious about for further investigation.

Who might have created these maps and images, and how?

For what purpose do you think these particular images were captured?

Where might you look for more information about the maps or images you selected?

Create a more detailed caption, using historic information shared by Ed or Terry in the video, or from your own research, for each of the images you selected.

Your teacher may ask you to record your answers on an exit ticket.

How does 1619 help us connect the past with the present?

When the first English explorers came to Virginia in 1607, they discovered a Native American fishing village inhabited by the Kecoughtan near the site where the James and York Rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay. Recognizing this strategic location had value as a viewshed, or "early warning site" for ships entering the bay, the early settlers named this area Point Comfort. By 1619, when the first Africans landed in British North America, Point Comfort was the entry point for all ships entering the harbor. Starting in 1861, it was the site where slavery began to unravel.

In this segment of The Future of America's Past, historian Ed Ayers spoke with Calvin Pearson, a community leader in Hampton, Virginia. Calvin describes the grim legacy of slavery, and how he and others commemorate the arrival of the first Africans and honor their ancestors. (View video segment, "Remembering a Beginning.")

In this segment, Calvin Pearson makes an important distinction about the way we commemorate, rather than celebrate, the events of 1619.

"So what we tell people when they come here today, in past years and in the future, is that this is a commemoration, it's not a celebration. We do not celebrate slavery. This is a commemoration of the arrival of the first Africans. But we also want to celebrate 400 years of history. Because if you look at a people who are brought here against their will and in chains, who eventually help build this great nation, this is still our country too. This is a sacred place for us. When we walk these grounds, we feel the spirit of our ancestors. So that's why it's so special to us."

In 2019, communities across Virginia and the United States commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in North America. The ceremony was held at Fort Monroe, at the site now known as Old Point Comfort. In the video, you saw how Calvin Pearson and other members of the African American community commemorate this event every year.

Read this excerpt and study the maps and images from An Atlas of Virginia, shared by the Virginia Geographic Alliance.

Turn and talk to a partner:

How did the events of 1619 change the course of history?

Explain what you think Calvin Pearson means when he states in the video, "...this is a commemoration; it's not a celebration."

What other historic events, people, or places do we commemorate?

Are there certain historic events, people or places we do celebrate as a community? A state? A nation?

In August of 2019, the New York Times published The 1619 Project, a special issue of their magazine. The project also includes a kids' section, What You Should Know About 1619, for younger readers. The editor stated the goal of the project is to "reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."

The 1619 Project includes images, poems, short stories, and essays. It was written by African American historians, journalists, and artists. They make the case that the founding of America was rooted in slavery. The authors encourage readers to think about how generations of black Americans have been denied basic human rights, even after slavery was abolished. These include freedom, citizenship, education, fair job opportunities and basic medical care. Many of these ideas have not been discussed in detail in most history classes.

Some historians and politicians have been critical of The 1619 Project, arguing the authors are trying to "rewrite history." Some thought that the project is too negative, and that it ignores the progress that the nation has made toward equality. Others thought the project made historical errors. Some disagreed with The 1619 Project's claim that the founding fathers fought the American Revolution mostly as a way to preserve the institution of slavery for their own financial and political benefit. The New York Times published a letter from five historians who criticized the project in December 2019. In February of 2020, another group of critics launched their own website to present their arguments, The 1776 Project.

On both sides of the debate are historians, politicians, teachers, students, and parents. No matter where you stand on this ongoing debate, one thing is clear: the controversy has led to more people thinking and talking about history. The 1619 Project is not just about memorizing facts. It motivates us to discuss how we teach and learn about slavery. It reminds us the legacies of slavery are still with us today, and we must teach a history that includes people from all races, religions, genders, and social classes.

Take a moment to reflect on the significance of the people and events that helped shape our nation. Turn and talk to a partner, or use a reflective journal to address the following questions:

Was America built on the idea that "all men are created equal?"

Who gets to decide what version of history is taught in schools? In textbooks? On TV, in movies or at museums?

How do we continually rewrite our telling of the past, and why?

History is happening all around us, every single day. We are always finding new clues about the past, and discovering new ways to think about the people, places, and events we thought we already knew about. Maybe that is where they got the title, The Future of America's Past.

Create a One-Pager to share your reflections on what you have learned about the significance of the events of the year 1619. You may choose to investigate and weigh in on your own thoughts about the controversy over the 1619 Project or the reading from An Atlas of Virginia. You will also want to share your thoughts about the video segments you have viewed from The Future of America's Past. Your teacher will provide an opportunity for you to share your work and learn from your classmates by participating in a Consensogram.

A Consensogram is similar to a gallery walk, but this time you will give your classmates feedback by placing sticky notes or emojis next to ideas you agree on (use an "A" or thumbs up emoji"), respectfully disagree on (use a "D" or thumbs down emoji) or find interesting / challenge your own thinking (use a "?" or a thinker emoji and add a comment to clarify). Once everyone has weighed in with their opinions, you may revisit your own One-pager to view comments and answer questions. A Consensogram is not designed to persuade everyone to adopt the same viewpoint but is a way to encourage civil discourse in a respectful way, and perhaps bring a group to consensus or a general agreement on a topic of discussion.

This may be completed digitally using a collaborative slide deck such as Google Slides where each person uploads their One-pager to a slide and classmates leave feedback using the comment feature or presenter notes area below each slide.
Your teacher may ask you to record your answers on an exit ticket or accept your One-pager as an exit ticket.

Does commemorating the past and preserving our history get in the way of progress?

Archaeologists like Matt Laird study human activity by recovering (digging up!) or analyzing material culture, including artifacts, documents, and buildings. In this video segment, historian Ed Ayers meets up with Matt to discuss the artifacts he and his team discovered as they explored an historic neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia, just outside of Fort Monroe. Once known as the "Grand Contraband Camp," it was here that African Americans built a community after the Union army and United States government provided refuge, or sanctuary for runaway enslaved African Americans at Fort Monroe. Nearly two years after three men first escaped to Fort Monroe, the Emancipation Proclamation officially changed the game, declaring slavery abolished in the rebelling states. The courage and sacrifices of those who sought refuge here showed President Lincoln that formerly enslaved people were not fugitives: they were allies. (View video segment, "Unearthing the Past.")

Turn and talk to a partner about the work of archaeologists like Matt Laird as observed in the video.

How do archaeologists use material culture to piece together new narratives about the past?

What specific examples of material culture did Matt and his team collect?

Where could you go to find out more information about the Grand Contraband Camp and the artifacts recovered there?

In the video, Matt Laird discussed the historical and scientific value of retrieving and preserving historical artifacts and showcasing them in museums and historic sites. Not all members of a community are always in agreement on whether or not we should spend money and use resources for historic preservation. Some people would like to keep these physical and cultural landscapes untouched, while others would like to see them developed or repurposed into new spaces, arguing that it is "progress." Often, they come together to discuss their concerns, hoping to come to a consensus for the common good of their community.

Take a few minutes to examine these documents. The first two are from a series of archaeological blueprints for a proposed new Visitor Center and Education Building at Fort Monroe. The next two are from a website created by Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, a local civic group of concerned stakeholders who are alerting their members about attending a public meeting to be held to discuss the proposed project.

You will participate in a Socratic Seminar with your classmates. There are many ways to organize these types of structured discussions, and your teacher will explain the directions they prefer. Your teacher will begin the discussion by selecting a student leader to facilitate the discussion. The student leader will pose an open-ended question, similar to the focus from an earlier learning activity in this Learning Resource.

Here are some suggested questions to guide the discussion if this is your first time participating in a Socratic Seminar:
Question #1: Does commemorating the past and preserving our history get in the way of progress?
You will participate in the discussion based on your teacher's directions and the guidance of the student leader. These Question Stems might help you if you get stuck or need a prompt. The main rule is to participate thoughtfully in the conversation as both a listener and a speaker. If time permits, your teacher may offer a second round selecting a new student leader, using the following to guide the next round of the discussion:
Consider this statement from Archaeologist Matt Laird:

"We don't have to slow progress at all. And archaeology by its very nature is a destructive process. As we do these excavations, we're removing history from the ground, and in that sense we've essentially cleared the path for development. So it doesn't have to be an either/or. We can certainly gain the information and understand more about our history and our archaeological resources and still have progress at the same time."

Question #2: Can historic preservation efforts coexist alongside development without sacrificing progress?

Round 2 of the Socratic Seminar continues with students using examples from the earlier resources, including the blueprints and the website from the concerned citizens of the Fort Monroe community, along with this quote from Matt Laird in The Future of America's Past.

At the conclusion of the Socratic Seminar, it is important to pause and reflect on your experience.

How do you see your role as an active listener and participant in the discussion?

How did you respectfully agree or disagree with other speakers?

Did your thinking change as you explored the original question, "Does commemorating the past and preserving our history get in the way of progress?" or did it stay the same?

Your teacher may ask you to record your thoughts about the Socratic Seminar experience using a Reflective Journal or an exit ticket.

How can we honor the people, places, and events woven into the fabric of our communities, and continue to make history every day?

Colita Nichols Fairfax is an historian at Norfolk State University. In this segment of The Future of America's Past, historian Ed Ayers visits Colita and learns about Emancipation Oak, a historic symbol of freedom on sacred ground within the African American communities in Hampton.

While viewing the video, jot down some key words, phrases or ideas you hear. Sketch any symbols or images you see in the video that inspire you about the people, places, and events being described. (View video segment, "Emancipation Oak.")

After viewing the video, turn and talk to a partner (if participating remotely, consider collaborating via a video chat with a partner if your teacher allows). Share your sketches and notes with each other. If your teacher allows, you may go back and rewatch the video segment, pausing to note any words or phrases you'd like to remember. (You may turn off the sound and use the closed captioning feature for help with spelling or capturing a speaker's exact words.)

What word or phrase do you most remember from the video?

Who are the people connecting this sacred space to the historic events which have unfolded in this community over the past few hundred years?

What symbol or image was the most compelling to you? Explain your answer.

"We are on sacred ground. Here is where Emancipation Oak, as it is called, one of the great oaks in the world, according to National Geographic Magazine."

I think we talk about freedom only in a sense of escaping from a physical place, the plantation or a workhouse. But freedom, I think, the part that we're missing, really is what you are able to do to live out your cultural self, to be able to attend to your needs mentally and emotionally, is to live life on your terms.

Continue to sketch and jot down more words, phrases, and ideas as we visit with a few more members of the Hampton, Virginia and Fort Monroe community. In this next segment, Ed introduces us to the Tucker family. (View video segment, "Descendants of the First African American.")

You will now create a Found Poem. Found Poems are based on words, phrases, text, images and ideas. Use this video segment about the Tucker family from The Future of America's Past, and any other video segments you have seen from this episode, to create your own Found Poem reflecting on the people, places and events you have learned about from Hampton, Virginia, or Freedom's Fortress and the beginning of slavery in North America. Here are a few examples of some found poems to help you get started!

Your teacher may provide you with an opportunity to share your poems either digitally, aloud or by displaying them in the classroom or school. An adult may help you share via social media as long as your name and image are not included for safety reasons.

History is all around us, and there are many stories still yet to be told, uncovered and retold from another perspective. Fort Monroe and Old Point Comfort have been the site of many historical events, some of which we commemorate and others we may honor or celebrate.
Your teacher may ask you to submit your Found Poem as an exit ticket.
Citations:

2010 Pdf. Hampton: Fort Monroe Authority. Viewshed Report. 2010. http://fortmonroe.org/wp-content/uploads/fort-monroe-historic-viewshed-report.pdf.

2020. Pdf. Hampton: Fort Monroe Authority. Http://Fortmonroe.Org/Wp-Content/Uploads/Appendix-B-Relevant-Drawings-For-Archaeology.Pdf.

2020. Pdf. Hampton: Fort Monroe Authority. http://fortmonroe.org/wp-content/uploads/06_1C-Natl_Historic_Landmark_District.pdf.

2020. Pdf. Washington DC: Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/poetry/pdf/teacher_guide.pdf.

"Consensogram." eduTOOLBOX. Ayers Institute, 2020. https://www.edutoolbox.org/rasp/2053?route=toolkit/list/assessment-for-learning.

"Empowering Students: The 5E Model Explained." Empowering Students: The 5E Model Explained. Lesley University. Lesley University, 2020. https://lesley.edu/article/empowering-students-the-5e-model-explained.

Potash, Betsy. "A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers." Cult of Pedagogy. Cult of Pedagogy, December 23, 2019. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/one-pagers/.

"Socratic Seminar." Facing History and Ourselves. Facing History, 2020. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/teaching-strategies/socratic-seminar.

"Step by Step Instructions." Gallery Walks. Carleton College, May 7, 2018. https://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/step.html.

"The Future Of America's Past: Freedom's Fortress." 2019. TV program. Field Studio. VPM: Virginia Public Media. https://futureofamericaspast.com/.

"The Story of Virginia Digital Timeline." Virginia Museum of History & Culture. VMHC, March 16, 2020. https://www.virginiahistory.org/learn/learning-resources-0/story-virginia-digital-timeline.

"Timeline - ReadWriteThink." readwritethink.org. ILA/NCTE , 2020. http://www.readwritethink.org/parent-afterschool-resources/games-tools/timeline-a-30246.html#activity1.

"Very Important Meeting!/Our View." Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, February 14, 2020. http://fortmonroecitizens.org/.

Wikimedia Commons. 2020. Timeline Icon. Image. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timeline_(656040)_-_The_Noun_Project.svg#/media/File:Timeline_(656040)_-_The_Noun_Project.svg.

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Freedom's Fortress * New American History

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At New American History, we're committed to helping students see how current events take their shape from history. Our tools and resources are free and freely available to all educators, intended to uncover new ways to teach the past in light of the present.

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To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.
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Episode 6, Season 1 To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.

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There is No Neutral on Racism and Hate: Back to School for White Educators

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There is No Neutral on Racism and Hate: Back to School for White Educators

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by Kathleen Osta, National Equity Project (2019)

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Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage

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Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage

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Page d'accueil | Fondation pour la memoire de l'esclavage

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Page d'accueil | Fondation pour la memoire de l'esclavage

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La création d'une Fondation pour la mémoire de l'esclavage témoigne de la reconnaissance que ce passé occupe dans l'histoire de France comme dans le monde.

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L’esclavage, les traites négrières et leurs abolitions dans les programmes scolaires d’enseignement

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L’esclavage, les traites négrières et leurs abolitions dans les programmes scolaires d’enseignement

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Rapport IGESR-DGESCO (septembre 2020)

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By Clint Smith in The Atlantic

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For some Americans, history isn't the story of what actually happened; it's the story they want to believe.

Paul Spella

This article was published online on May 10, 2021.
Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows-masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery's deconsecrated church. One morning before the pandemic, I took a tour of the church along with two other visitors and our tour guide, Ken. When my eyes adjusted to the hazy darkness inside, I could see that in each window stood a saint, surrounded by dazzling bursts of blues and greens and violets. Below these explosions of color were words that I couldn't quite make out. I stepped closer to one of the windows, and the language became clearer. Beneath the saint was an inscription honoring the men "who died for the Confederacy."

Outside, lawn mowers buzzed as Black men steered them between tombstones draped in Confederate flags. The oldest marked grave at Blandford dates back to 1702; new funerals are held there every week. Within the cemetery's 150 acres are the bodies of roughly 30,000 Confederate soldiers, one of the largest mass graves of Confederate servicemen in the country.

From 1866 into the 1880s, Ken told us, a group of local women organized the tracking-down and exhuming of those bodies from nearby battlegrounds. "They felt that the southern soldier had not been treated with the same dignity and honor that the northern soldiers had," and they wanted to do something about it. Most of the bodies were not identifiable; sometimes all that was left was a leg or an arm. Nonetheless, the remains were dug up and brought here, and the ladies refurbished the old church as a memorial to their fallen husbands, sons, and brothers.

Tiffany Studios cut them a deal on the stained glass: $350 apiece instead of the usual price of about $1,700 ($51,000 today). Thirteen southern states donated funds. Ken outlined the aesthetic history of each window in meticulous detail, giving each color and engraving his thorough and intimate attention. But he said almost nothing about why the windows were there-that the soldiers memorialized in stained glass had fought a war to keep my ancestors in chains.

Almost all of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery are white. "It's not that a Black population doesn't appreciate the windows," Ken, who is white, told me. "But sometimes in the context of what it represents, they're not as comfortable." He went on: "In most cases we try and fall back on the beauty of the windows, the Tiffany-glass kind of thing."

But I couldn't revel in the windows' beauty without reckoning with what those windows represented. I looked around the church again. How many of the visitors to the cemetery today, I asked Ken, are Confederate sympathizers?

"I think there's a Confederate empathy," he replied. "People will tell you, 'My great-great-grandmother, my great-great-grandfather are buried out here.' So they've got long southern roots."

We left the church, and a breeze slid across my face. Many people go to places like Blandford to see a piece of history, but history is not what is reflected in that glass. A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling-or refusing to grapple-with America's history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.

For so many of them, history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth. This is especially true at Blandford, where the ancestors aren't just hovering in the background-they are literally buried underfoot.

We went over to the visitors' center, where Ken introduced me to his boss, Martha, a kind-looking woman with tortoiseshell glasses.

She said her interest in women's history had drawn her to Blandford. "This is how they helped to get through their grief," she told me. "And this is what their result was, this beautiful chapel." She added, "I think you could take the Civil War aspect totally out of it and enjoy the beauty."

I asked her whether Blandford was concerned that, by presenting itself in such a positive light, it might be distorting its connection to a racist and treasonous cause.

She told me that a lot of people ask why the war was fought. "I say, 'Well, you get five different historians who have written five different books; I'm going to have five different answers.' It's a lot of stuff. But I think from the perspective of my ancestors, it was not slavery. My ancestors were not slaveholders. But my great-great-grandfather fought. He had federal troops coming into Norfolk. He said, 'Nuh-uh, I've got to join the army and defend my home state.' "

As we spoke, I looked down at the counter and reached for one of the flyers stacked there. Martha's gaze followed my hand. Her face turned red and she thrust her hand down to flip the paper over, attempting to cover the rest of the leaflets. "Don't even look at this. I'm sorry," she said. "I will tell you, from a personal standpoint, I'm kind of bothered."

I looked at the flyer again, trying to read between her fingers. It was a handout for a Memorial Day event at Blandford hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Paul C. Gramling Jr., then the commander in chief of the group, would be speaking. It was May 2019, and the event was just a few weeks away.

Illustration by Paul Spella; images from Library of Congress / Corbis / Getty

"I don't mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That's okay," she said. "But as far as I'm concerned, you don't need a Confederate flag on-" She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn't follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. "If you're just talking about history, it's great, but these folks are like, 'The South shall rise again.' It's very bothersome."

She told me that she'd attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn't again. "These folks can't let things go. I mean, it's not like they want people enslaved again, but they can't get over the fact that history is history."

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More people were coming into the visitors' center, and I didn't want to keep Ken and Martha from their work. We shook hands, and I made my way out the door. Before getting back in my car, I walked across the street, to another burial ground, this one much smaller. The People's Memorial Cemetery was founded in 1840 by 28 members of Petersburg's free Black community. Buried on this land are people who were enslaved; a prominent antislavery writer; Black veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; and hundreds of other Black residents.

There are far fewer tombstones than at Blandford. There are no flags on the graves. And there are no hourly tours for people to remember the dead. There is history, but also silence.

After my visit to Blandford, I kept thinking about the way Martha had flipped over the Memorial Day flyer, the way her face had turned red. If she hadn't responded like that, I don't know that I would have felt so curious about what she was trying to hide. But my interest had been piqued. I wanted to find out what Martha was so ashamed of.

Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve "the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause." It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.

The entrance to the cemetery was marked by a large stone archway with the words our confederate heroes on it. Maybe a couple hundred people were sitting in folding chairs around a large white gazebo. Children played tag among the trees; people hugged and slapped one another on the back. I felt like I was walking in on someone else's family reunion. Dixie flags bloomed from the soil like milkweeds. There were baseball caps emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag, biker vests ornamented with the seals of seceding states, and lawn chairs bearing the letters UDC, for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In front of the gazebo were two flags, one Confederate, one American, standing side by side, as if 700,000 people hadn't been killed in the epic conflagration between them.

William and I stood in the back and watched. The event began with an honor guard-a dozen men dressed in Confederate regalia, carrying rifles with long bayonets. Their uniforms were the color of smoke; their caps looked as if they had been bathed in ash. Everyone in the crowd stood up as they marched by. The crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance, then sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." After a pause came "Dixie," the unofficial Confederate anthem. The crowd sang along with a boisterous passion: "Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton / Old times there are not forgotten / Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land."

I glanced around as everyone sang in tribute to a fallen ancestral home. A home never meant for me. Speakers came to the podium, each praising the soldiers buried under our feet. "While those who hate seek to remove the memory of these heroes," one said, "these men paid the ultimate price for freedom, and they deserve to be remembered."

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More than a few people turned around in their seat and looked with puzzlement, and likely suspicion, at the Black man they had never seen before standing in the back of a Sons of Confederate Veterans crowd. A man to my right took out his phone and began recording me. The stares began to crawl over my skin. I had been taking notes; now I slowly closed my notebook and stuck it under my arm, doing my best to act unfazed. Without moving my head, I scanned the crowd again. The man in front of me had a gun in a holster.

A man in a tan suit and a straw boater approached the podium. His dark-blond hair fell to his shoulders, and a thick mustache and goatee covered his lips. I recognized him as Paul C. Gramling Jr. from the flyer. He began by sharing a story about the origins of Memorial Day. "I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it," he said, before reading aloud the account of a ceremony that took place on April 25, 1866, in Columbus, Mississippi, when a group of women "decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers." Those soldiers, he continued, had "earned their rightful place to be included as American veterans. We should embrace our heritage as Americans, North and South, Black and white, rich and poor. Our American heritage is the one thing we have in common."

Gramling's speech was strikingly similar to those at Memorial Day celebrations after the end of Reconstruction, when orators stressed reconciliation, paying tribute to the sacrifices on both sides of the Civil War without accounting for what the war had actually been fought over.

Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments-to the people who are "trying to take away our symbols." In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer's racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.

Gramling said that this was the work of "the American ISIS." He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. "They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don't like."

I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don't have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don't want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling's face, is a terrorist.

Gramling urged all who were present to understand the true meaning of the Confederacy and to "take back the narrative." When his speech ended, two men in front of William and me started swinging large Confederate flags with unsettling fervor. Another speech was given. Another song was sung. Wreaths were laid. The honor guard then lifted its rifles and fired into the sky three times. The first shot took me by surprise, and my knees buckled. I shut my eyes for the second shot, and again for the third. I felt a tightening of muscles inside my mouth, muscles I hadn't known were there.

"I don't know if it's true or not, but I like it"-I kept coming back to Gramling's words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.

Confederates had converted Charleston's Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison for captured Union soldiers. The conditions were so terrible that nearly 260 men died and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After the Confederates retreated, Black men reburied the dead in proper graves and erected an archway bearing the words martyrs of the race course. An enormous parade was held on the track, with 3,000 Black children singing "John Brown's Body," the Union marching song. The first Memorial Day, as Blight describes it, received significant press coverage. But it faded from public consciousness after the defeat of Reconstruction.

It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Confederate cause in the words of its leaders
We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-the greatest material interest of the world," Mississippi lawmakers declared during their 1861 secession convention. Slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution," the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, adding that the Confederacy was founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."

The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence. Besides, it argues, slavery wasn't even that bad.

The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.

That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
Read: Five books to make you less stupid about the Civil War
After the speeches, I began talking with a man named Jeff, who had a long salt-and-pepper ponytail and wore a denim vest adorned with Confederate badges. He told me that several of his ancestors had fought for the Confederacy. I asked what he thought of the event. "Well," he said, "I think if anyone never knew the truth, they heard it today."

He spoke about the importance of the Confederate flag and monuments, contending that they were essential pieces of history. "They need to be there for generations in the future, because they need to know the truth. They can't learn the truth if you do away with history. You'll never learn. And once you do away with that type of thing, you become a slave."

I was startled by his choice of words but couldn't tell whether it was intentionally provocative or rhetorical coincidence.

"I think everybody should learn the truth," Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

"What is that truth?" I asked.

"Everybody always hears the same things: 'It's all about slavery.' And it wasn't," he said. "It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself."

He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a "Black gentleman" named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he'd been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.

Poplar, I would learn, is central to the story many people in Petersburg tell about the war. The commemoration of Poplar seems to have begun in 2003, when the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pushed for an annual "Richard Poplar Day." In 2004, the mayor signed a proclamation establishing the holiday; she called Poplar a "veteran" of the Confederate Army. The tombstone with his name on it was erected at Blandford.

But the reality is that Black men couldn't serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.

Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy's legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?

One Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne, actually did float the idea of using enslaved people as soldiers, but he was scoffed at. A senator from Virginia is reported to have asked, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?" General Howell Cobb was even more explicit: "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." In a desperate move just weeks before General Robert E. Lee's surrender, the Confederacy approved legislation that would allow Black people to be used in battle. But by then it was too late.

Read: The myth of the kindly General Lee
I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. "Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can't deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed." But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.

It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.

Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn't call it the "Civil War," because that distorts the truth. "We call it the 'War Between the States' or 'of Northern Aggression' against us," he said. "Southern people don't call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion ... If you stayed up north, ain't nothing would've happened."

When Jeff said "nothing would've happened," I wondered if he had forgotten the millions of Black people who would have remained enslaved, those for whom the status quo would have meant ongoing bondage. Or did he remember but not care?

A mosquito buzzed by Jeff's ear, and he swatted it away. He told me that 78 of his family members were buried in the cemetery, dating back to 1802, and he had been coming here since he was 4 years old.

"Some nights I just sit there and just watch the deer come out," he said, pointing to the gazebo, his voice becoming soft. "I just enjoy the feeling. I reminisce ... I want to preserve history and save what I can for my granddaughters.

"This is a place of peace," he said. "The dead don't bother me. It's the living that bother me."

A little later, I was speaking with a mother and son about how often they came to events like these when a man in a Confederate uniform, carrying a saber in his left hand, approached us and stood a few feet away. I watched him from the corner of my eye, unsure whether he was trying to intimidate me or join the conversation.

I turned toward him, introducing myself and getting his name: Jason. He had a thick black beard and a mop of hair underneath his gray cap. He told me that "Civil War reenactor" had sounded like a cool job. "I didn't realize it's all volunteer," he said with a laugh.

I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. "How do I put this gently?" he said. "People are not as educated as they should be." They're taught that "these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that's what you grow up believing, you're looking at people like me wearing this uniform: 'Oh, he's a racist.' " He said he'd done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.

"We used to be able to stand on the monuments on Monument Avenue [in Richmond, Virginia]-those Lee and Jackson monuments. We can't do it anymore, 'cause it ain't safe. Someone's gonna drive by and shoot me. You know, that's what I'm afraid of."

I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.

The typical Confederate soldier hadn't been fighting for slavery, he argued. "The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn't have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they're going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life-the lice, the rats, and everything else-just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn't make sense ... No man would do that."
Read: Why "most Confederate soldiers never owned a slave" is misleading
But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that "the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery." Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.

Illustration by Paul Spella; image from Peregrine / Alamy

Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.

The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: "Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?" The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and "amalgamate together the two races in violation of God's will."

These messages worked, Horton's research found. One southern prisoner of war told a Union soldier standing watch, "You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to niggers"; a Confederate artilleryman from Louisiana said that his army had to fight against even the most difficult odds, because he would "never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person."

The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, "You don't have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system."

Jason and I were finishing our conversation when another man, with a thick gray beard and a balding head, walked up to us. We shook hands as he and Jason greeted each other warmly. "He's a treasure trove of information," Jason said. I mentioned that I had seen him talking with my friend William. "I been in his ear good," the man said, telling me that he'd even given him his phone number. I said that was very generous. He looked at me, his eyes searching. His face shifted. "I told him, if you write about my ancestors"-the air trembled between us-"I want it to be correct. I'm concerned about the truth, not mythology."

Like Blandford Cemetery, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana has a church. It is large and white and flaked with a thin coat of dirt. The door whistles as it opens, and the wooden floor moans under your feet as you step inside. There are no stained-glass windows here.

Instead, scattered throughout the church's interior-standing next to the pews, sitting on the floor, hiding in the corners-are statues. There are more than two dozen of them, life-size sculptures of children with eyes like small, empty planets. The boys wear shorts or overalls; the girls, simple dresses. When I saw them I was startled because, at first glance, I thought they were real. Each one was so alive despite its inanimateness, intricately detailed from the contours of the lips to the bridge of the nose. They look like they're listening, or waiting. They are The Children of Whitney, designed for the plantation by the artist Woodrow Nash.

Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events-bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands-alluring in its decadence-but it's not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.

On a plot of earth tucked into a corner of the property, between a white wooden fence and a redbrick path, are the dark heads of 55 Black men, impaled on silver stakes. Their eyes are shut, their faces peaceful or anguished. They're ceramic, but so lifelike that the gleam of the sun could as easily be the sheen of blood and sweat. These heads represent the rebels in the largest slave revolt in American history, which took place not far from here in 1811. Within 48 hours, local militia and federal troops had suppressed the uprising. Many rebels were slaughtered, their heads cut off and posted on stakes lining the Mississippi River.

Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site's director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.

At the center of the courtyard is a statue of an angel down on one knee. Her chest is bare and a pair of wings juts from her back. Her hair is pulled into thick rows of braids and her head is bent, eyes cast downward at the limp body of the small child in her hands.

My own son was almost 2 at the time, and his baby sister was a couple of weeks from making her way into the world. This child, cradled in the angel's hands, evoked in me a surge of grief I had not expected. I felt the blood leave my fingers. I had to push out of my head the image of my own child in those hands. I had to remind myself to breathe.

"There's so many misconceptions about slavery," Yvonne said. "People don't really consider the children who were brought over, and the children who were born into this system, and the way to get people to let their guard down when they come here is being confronted with the reality of slavery-and the reality of slavery is child enslavement."

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. "No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they're only coming to admire the architecture," she said.

Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is "I know slavery was bad ... I don't mean it this way, but ... Were there any good slave owners?"

She took a deep breath, her frustration visible. She had the look of someone professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the toll it takes.

"I really give a short but nuanced answer to that," she said. "Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system ... You can't say, 'Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.' How absurd does that sound?"

But so many Americans simply don't want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, "You're asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters."

So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn't make that story true.

Would Jeff's story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney's murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?
This article has been adapted from Clint Smith's new book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. It appears in the June 2021 print edition with the headline "The War on Nostalgia."

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent and the forthcoming nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed.

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For some Americans, history isn't the story of what actually happened; it's the story they want to believe. This article was published online on May 10, 2021. Most of the people who come to Blandford Cemetery, in Petersburg, Virginia, come for the windows-masterpieces of Tiffany glass in the cemetery's deconsecrated church.

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The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

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The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

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Boston University Center for Antiracist Research

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Our Mission: To build an antiracist society that ensures racial equity and social justice

The mission of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research is to convene researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice. We foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven educational and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives. We are working toward building an antiracist society that ensures equity and justice for all.
Read the Founder's Statement by Ibram X. Kendi
What is antiracist research?

Whereas racist research historically has posed the question, "What is wrong with people?" antiracist research now asks a different question, a better question: "What is wrong with policies?" Our belief is that framing research on race and racism around antiracist questions leads to antiracist narratives, effective policy solutions, and impactful advocacy campaigns that cut to the root of racial inequality: racist policy.
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The Center for Antiracist Research is dedicated to solving seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.

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6.1. Civil Rights Groups

6.2. Civil Rights Constituency Groups

6.3. Legal Defense of Civil Rights Groups

6.4. Immigration Rights Groups

National Immigration Project

A network of lawyers, law students, legal workers, and community advocates working to defend and expand the rights of all immigrants in the United States, regardless of legal status.

America's Voice

Works to guarantee full labor, civil, and political rights for immigrants and their families.

United We Dream

An immigrant-youth-led network of 100,000 immigrant youth and allies and 55 affiliate organizations in 26 states that advocates for the dignity and fair treatment of immigrant youth and families, regardless of immigration status.

National Immigration Law Center (NILC)

Dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of low income immigrants and their family members.

6.5. Criminal Justice Groups

6.6. Groups Challenging Capital Punishment

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP)

Provides information, advocates for public policy, and mobilizes and supports individuals and institutions that share an unconditional rejection of capital punishment.

Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC)

Provides the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment.

6.7. Community Organizing Groups

Also see 12.3. Progressive Training and Education Groups

and 1.3. Progressive Lobbying and Electoral Action Groups

6.8. Disability Rights Groups

6.9. Elder Advocacy Groups

Alliance for Retired Americans

A nationwide organization allied with the AFL-CIO and other partners working to ensure social and economic justice and full civil rights for all citizens, particularly focusing on retiree legislative and political issues.

AARP Public Policy Institute

Researches and advocates on a wide variety of issues related to aging especially health and long-term care, economic security, independent living, and consumer issues.

National Academy on an Aging Society

A policy institute that fosters critical thinking about the implications of an aging society.

6.10. Children Advocacy Groups

6.11. Family Advocacy Groups

Futures Without Violence

Develops innovative strategies to prevent domestic, dating, and sexual violence, stalking, and child abuse.

MomsRising

Works to increase family economic security, to end discrimination against women and mothers, and to build a nation where both businesses and families can thrive by educating the public and mobilizing massive grassroots actions.

6.12. Feminist / Women's Liberation Groups

6.13. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Liberation Groups

6.14. Family Planning Groups

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National Immigration Project A network of lawyers, law students, legal workers, and community advocates working to defend and expand the rights of all immigrants in the United States, regardless of legal status. America's Voice Works to guarantee full labor, civil, and political rights for immigrants and their families.

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Abolitionist Teaching Network's mission is simple: develop and support educators to fight injustice within their schools and communities. Utilizing the intellectual work and direct action of Abolitionists in many forms, including community organizers, educators, parents, social workers, counselors, lawyers, therapists, artists, health care providers, and incarcerated folx, we will organize and take action for educational freedom.

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Abolitionist Teaching Network's mission is simple: develop and support educators to fight injustice within their schools and communities. Utilizing the intellectual work and direct action of Abolitionists in many forms, including community organizers, educators, parents, social workers, counselors, lawyers, therapists, artists, health care providers, and incarcerated folx, we will organize and take action for educational freedom.

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See particularly their podcast.

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L'association Les Anneaux de la Mémoire a pour vocation la mise en œuvre de projets culturels sur les thématiques des mémoires l'histoire de la traite transatlantique et de ses héritages. L'association travaille au niveau local et international en lien étroit avec un grand nombre d'acteurs culturels, de chercheurs et de militants.

Nous créons des expositions, publions des ouvrages, travaillons à la transmission et la vulgarisation de l'histoire de la traite afin de donner des clés de compréhension des phénomènes sociaux de notre monde contemporain.

Exposition permanente sur une ancienne caféière

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Association | Nantes | Les Anneaux de la Mémoiren

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L'association Les Anneaux de la Mémoire a pour vocation la mise en œuvre de projets culturels sur les thématiques des mémoires, de l'histoire de la traite des Noirs et de ses héritages. L'association travaille au niveau local et international en lien étroit avec un grand nombre d'acteurs culturels et de chercheurs.

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Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages

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Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages

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ACTUALITÉS TOUTES LES ACTUALITÉS REVUE TOUS LES NUMÉROS DERNIERS LIVRES AUX ÉDITIONS KARTHALA / CIRESC TOUS LES TITRES

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Last Seen is recovering stories

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