Teaching Enslavement in American History

List of Tables

Table 1.1: Enslaved Population of Selected Colonies, 1770

Table 2.1: Destination of Enslaved Africans, 1501–1625

Table 2.2: Enslaved Africans Disembarking in the Americas by Slave Ship Flag, 1601–1700

Table 2.3: Enslaved Africans Disembarking in British North America/USA, 1626–1825

Table 2.4: The Atlantic Slave Trade, Enslaved Africans Disembarking in Europe and the New World

Table 3.1: Song Lyrics

Table 4.1: The Three-Fifths Compromise

Table 4.2: The Slave Trade Compromise

Table 4.3: The Fugitive Slave Clause

List of Illustrations

Image 1.1: Watercolor, “The Old Plantation”

Image 1.2: Graph of Children per 100 Enslaved Women

Image 2.1: Benin Plague, The Oba with Europeans, 1500s

Image 4.1: Constitution Cut: An American Printer’s Cut Reflecting Confidence in the Constitution

Image 6.1: “Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law,” 1850

Image 6.2: Woodcut, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831

Image 8.1: “Slavery as it exists in America. Slavery as it exists in England,” 1850

Image 8.2: “The Coming Man’s Presidential Career,” 1860

Image 9.1: “Selling a Freedman to Pay his Fine,” 1867

Acknowledgements

Teaching Enslavement in American History is possible because of the contributions of countless individuals. Thanks to the Georgia State graduate students, Wade Morris, Asia Thomas, and Sonya Miller, working teachers all, who helped with this book and its lessons. Wade Morris deserves a special medal of honor for assisting with every leg of this journey during a nearly three-year period of time. Thanks also to the Georgia State University librarians, Morna Gerard, Denise George, and Laura Burtle, who always assisted with any question, no matter how obscure it might appear to be. Thanks also are extended to the series editor, Caroline Pryor, who was always timely with responses, and to Patty Mulrane, Dani Green, and Jacqueline Pavlovic at Peter Lang who never questioned why the process kept being extended (who knew in 2019 that America would face protests in 2020 that would return the issue of American race relations to the front pages of the media?). A special shout-out to poet, actor, and author David Mills, who donated his creative energy to writing a poem for the book. David Mills is deeply knowledgeable of African American history and his creative writings are inspired by that history. He has held several fellowships to study enslavement in Massachusetts and New York, including one with the American Antiquarian Society. Peer reviewers and scholars have helped us to enrich our historical perspective, especially Erik B. Alexander, Ras Michael Brown and Jeffrey R. Young. Thanks to S.G. Grant for reviewing the Inquiry Design Model lessons and to the four teachers at the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education who reviewed lessons and provided helpful feedback: Jania Hoover, Vicki Shields, Demetrius Hobson, and Valencia Abbott.

The idea for a book was born out of two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes for Teachers. The brilliant two groups who totaled 50 teachers from across the United States helped us realize the need to improve the teaching of enslavement in the US. In particular, special thanks is due to Rhonda Webb who served as NEH grant manager and who organized the 2018 NEH Courting Liberty All-Stars, and a special shout-out to teachers Melissa Cohen, William Frazier, Mary Reid Munford, Matthew Shiloh, Jessica Piper, and Donell Osborne-Ziegler, who continue to inspire America’s youth with deep knowledge of its history.←xv | xvi→

Introduction

We began writing this book in 2019 on the 400-year anniversary of American slavery. While African slavery in North America can be traced to 1526 through Spanish occupation of the southeast coast, the year 1619 holds special significance for British North America. When the first 20 or so abducted Africans from the Kingdom of Ndongo arrived on the White Lion privateer ship, they landed on what would eventually become Point Comfort, Virginia. They were the first Black inhabitants of the colonies that would become the United States. But whether we date their arrival in 1526 or 1619, Africans were here from the beginning. Blackness is part of our country’s history.¹

To memorialize 400 years, 2019 was filled with various think pieces, educational events, and scholarly publications honoring Black history and reflecting on how the institution of slavery shapes both past and present. The United States Congress authorized a 15-member commission under the 400 Years of African American History Commission Act to help plan, carry out programs and activities, and distribute grants to organizations to educate about the history of enslavement throughout the United States. The New York Times Magazine published in August 2019 the ambitious (and controversial) The 1619 Project conceived and directed by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project won a Pulitzer Prize, has been published as a book, and developed into a curriculum for schoolteachers. The 1619 Project has also attracted a tempestuous backlash, including denunciation by (the now former) President Trump in a speech delivered on Constitution Day, 2020, at the Museum in the National Archives.²

Black history certainly has come a long way from being ignored in school history curriculum. This goes deeper than headline-grabbing politics. A study conducted by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano has shown that the pantheon of American heroes has changed and famous Americans such as Betsy Ross and Paul Revere have been superseded by Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. Granted, the study did not specify what the students actually knew about these historical figures. If contemporary research is a guide, then many students have ←1 | 2→likely decontextualized and whitewashed these famous American icons. Nonetheless, they are there. Pioneering education activists and scholars who for so long advocated for more Black representation in the history curriculum have, somewhat, succeeded. National awareness, perhaps, has been raised. As we complete this final draft of the book in the spring of 2022, the historic and contemporary effects of racialized violence have reverberated for nearly two years following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Protests rocked American cities in the summer of 2020. Granted, protests over racial injustice in America are nothing new. What is new is that a larger percentage of Americans recognize that protestors were motivated by longstanding concerns about the treatment of Black people in the United States. These same people are calling for more Black history in schools to help them understand the histories behind policing, oppression, and resistance.³

Yet, despite significant public attention, all is not well with the teaching of Black history.⁴ Saturday Night Live, in 2014, rather brilliantly captured the problem. Set in an all-too-familiar classroom, the skit (titled “Twenty-Eight Reasons to Hug a Black Guy”) begins with a white female teacher providing space for her three Black students (her ONLY Black students) to present about Black history in front of class because, of course, it is Black History Month (hence the title “28 Reasons,” one for each day in the year’s shortest month). The Black students, played by Jay Pharoah, Kenan Thompson, and Sasheer Zamata, begin their presentation by playing a happy and catchy tune with Jay Pharoah intoning the names of—who else—Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Harriet Tubman. Then Pharoah begins to rap about the absence of Black history in schools and how he has something important to say because Black history month is the only time dedicated for this space. Still upbeat, Pharaoh promises to deliver “28 Reasons to Hug a Black Guy Today.” Number 1, says Pharaoh, “is that Black people deserve a chance.” Numbers 2–28? The music screeches to a halt, Pharaoh and his co-presenters drop their smiles, and they deadpan the answer: “Slavery.”⁵

“Twenty-eight Reasons to Hug a Black Guy” is a funny skit, a masterpiece of comedic timing and transgressive genre-mixing (just listen to the catchy R&B chorus). But it is also a poignant statement about how society and schools treat Black history. After all, Black history isn’t an uncomfortable topic per se. It wasn’t Pharoah’s invocation of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Harriet Tubman (the very people whom Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano identified as the most famous Americans in history according to high school students) that caused the white students to squirm. It was slavery. The skit abruptly switches gears again when Kenan Thompson assures the white students that “we ain’t trying to brawl, you know we ain’t mad at all y’all.” Thompson asks the students to raise their hands if they’re “down with the cause.” A class full of hands goes up. Then Thompson says to keep your hands up “if your ancestors owned us.” Again, the music screeches to a halt, white faces turn uncomfortable, and hands slowly start to go down. This confrontational form of Black history and historical introspection prompts a white male student to stand up and offer to play “devil’s advocate.” He is quickly silenced by the teacher. At the end of the presentation, the Black students asked the white students for some call and response: “When I say slavery, you say sorry.” The Black students say “Slavery.” The white students uncomfortably reply “sorry” and the presentation ends.

To understand the genius of “28 Reasons” is to understand how slavery is approached in the official K-12 history curriculum. Slavery is a difficult topic, a hard topic, and many state standards, textbooks and teachers avoid it by turning to feel-good stories about the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and the Emancipation Proclamation. To the degree that slavery is addressed, it is subsumed within a progressive narrative of American history, as a “problem” ←2 | 3→that was solved long ago. More disturbingly, the institution of slavery is often disassociated from the concept of white supremacy. (Please see explanation of white supremacy and other terms at the end of the introduction in the note on terminology.) Taken together, this kind of pedagogy minimizes the institution of slavery, silences the voices of enslaved people, and ignores how slavery and white supremacy shaped economic, political, social and cultural patterns that far outlasted slavery’s violent demise.⁶

These are hard topics, and they need to be taught. They must, however, be taught with care. Bad pedagogy can, independent of curriculum, undermine students’ full comprehension of the chattel slavery system. Studies have confirmed that Black students can have contentious relationships with teachers’ instructional approaches regarding slavery and Black history. They feel that many teachers are unwilling, unknowledgeable, or not empathic enough to teach the subject critically.⁷ Black students have noticed that slavery has only focused on “how their people were oppressed” and that “slavery was proof that Black people were inferior… and would have remained as slaves forever if not for sympathetic whites who secured our freedom.”⁸ Consequently, Black students felt that their teachers would oftentimes ignore or silence their viewpoints. Terri Epstein related the story of Black students who tried to interject when their white teacher taught that “white slave owners beat or whipped blacks who disobeyed orders,” but when they attempted to provide additional anecdotes of slave amputation, sexual assault, and the aftermath of slavery after emancipation, the teacher ignored their suggestions.⁹

Scrutinizing pedagogy is important, but we are also keenly aware of the pressure under which teachers practice their craft. Teachers today are caught between the anvil of American exceptionalism and the hammer of social justice. American exceptionalism is the notion that America’s embrace of liberty and equality is exceptional in world history and that our national story (especially as it is taught in schools) must celebrate this narrative. Certainly, the principles of freedom and equality are currents in American history, and teachers should not ignore them or treat them as empty rhetoric. We believe that teachers should teach a civic-minded, patriotic history that faces the full complexity of the past. But to teach civic-minded history is to confront fully and honestly the institution of slavery and to recognize how slavery created and sustained many anti-Black political institutions and societal structures that survived slavery’s destruction and continue into the present. To put this another way, teaching civic-minded, patriotic history means understanding how American liberty has been shaped by injustice and oppression. The American experiment in self-government will only work if students understand that their democracy is and always was a struggle between contending interests and values. Feel-good narratives do not instill patriotism. They invite complacency.¹⁰

Teaching the history of slavery is sometimes seen as an attack on American civic values, and can arouse the anger of parents, administrators, and school boards. At the time of the writing of this book, several state legislatures considered bills that would ban the teaching of concepts associated with The 1619 Project and, more vaguely, “critical race theory.”¹¹ Teachers who want to tell the truth about slavery and its legacy can provoke powerful political constituencies, both local and national, into destructive action. In the face of such trenchant political reaction, teachers should keep calm and become subject-matter experts. They must study slavery’s centrality to American political and constitutional history. They must learn the rich heritage of the African diaspora. They must understand the role of Black people in bringing about the demise of slavery. They must be ready to answer their critics by being able to demonstrate just how deeply rooted slavery was in American politics ←3 | 4→and society, how difficult it was for peoples of the past to confront it, and how extricating it root and branch could not be accomplished in a day, a year, or even a generation.