Four hundred years ago, a group of about 20 Africans were captured in the interior of Africa, probably near present-day Angola, and forcibly transported on a slave ship bound for the Americas. After tumultuous months at sea, they landed in the first British colony in North America, Jamestown, Virginia, in late August 1619.
Hazen’s Elementary History of the United States: A History and a Lesson, a popular early 20th-century textbook for young readers, collected the history of early black Virginians there.
You are reading: Slavery taken out of history books
“The settlers bought them,” the 1903 text explains, “…and found them so useful for growing tobacco that they brought more, and slavery became a part of our history.”
his core lesson plan included just two easy-to-digest facts for the year 1619: the introduction of the Africans, with an illustration of two half-naked black people standing on a beach before a pontificating pirate and a crowd of onlookers, and the Creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first formal legislative body in the American colonies.
But the history of Jamestown and slavery isn’t that simple. Even though the 1619 landing wasn’t the first arrival of Africans in the Americas, it fits within the history of colonial America, black America, the global slave trade, and ultimately the foundation of our country. So how textbooks summarized this history — one characterized by a scant documentary record and often from the perspective of European settlers and white Americans — matters.
“textbooks are supposed to teach us a common set of facts about who we are as americans…and what stories are key to our democracy,” said alana d. Murray, Maryland High School Principal and Author of the Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative.
As the textbooks show, through omissions, glaring errors, and misleading interpretations, particularly when it comes to issues of race, not everyone enjoys the benefits of civic membership or is treated fairly in historical accounts . this is true even for textbooks in use today (400 years after the arrival of the Africans in 1619, more than 150 years after emancipation) with narratives more interested in emphasizing the compassion of the enslavers than the cruelty endured by the enslaved.
Textbooks have long been a battleground on which humanity and the status of African Americans have been contested. pedagogy has always been eminently political.
From Fast Facts to Black Inferiority: How Slavery Has Historically Been Portrayed in Textbooks
Hazen’s textbook framed Jamestown and its role in the development of American slavery as an unavoidable issue of labor demand and economic pragmatism, a common argument in American school materials in the early 20th century.
However, that was just one school of thought. After the end of slavery in this country, many southern-focused textbooks promoted a lost-cause approach to Jamestown and slavery in general, portraying the institution as part of a natural order. white southerners created ideologically driven narratives that longed for the old days when whites sat at the top of the hierarchy and African Americans were faithful slaves. in this racist revisionism, they did not have to reckon with the new black citizen, voter, or legislator as nominal equals.
Typical in this distorted history was the story of a North Carolina boy, circa 1916, who also focused on the profitability of slavery and erased its violence. in this view, enslaved people were happy, and southern slave owners were reluctant masters at best.
according to the book, enslaved people “were allowed as much freedom as they seemed to desire and were granted the privilege of visiting other plantations whenever they wished. all that was required of them was to be in his place when it came time for work. in the Christmas season they were almost as free as their masters.” Furthermore, “the majority of people in North Carolina were really opposed to slavery and in favor of gradual emancipation. slavery already existed, however, through no fault of their own. they had the slaves and they had to handle as best they could the problem of what to do with them.”
furthermore, the book argued that abolitionists (never a large voting bloc) were responsible for electing abraham lincoln, and that his unspecified violence made the south “outraged”.
some northern writers attempted what they believed to be a more nuanced approach in revising children’s history books in light of emancipation. And that included how they talked about the arrival of that slave ship in Virginia and the people on board.
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Take the example of Children’s Stories of American Progress, published in 1886. Northern white writer Henrietta Christian Wright, known for her popular stories of fairies and magic, described that day in August 1619 as a time when the meadows alongside the James River were “beautiful with summer” — a sight lost on the African captives.
However, Wright also envisioned eyes that “looked wearily out of the ship’s portholes” and saw a new landscape that “seemed only grim and desolate, a land of exile and death.” she alternated between seeing through her eyes with being the omniscient narrator watching them from above. she implicated European powers for turning Africa into “the great hunting ground” and capitalizing on infighting on the continent. however, the booty she brought to the Africans “like dumb beasts across the Atlantic” was “all because the white man chose to use his greater intelligence to oppress them rather than befriend them.”
wright did not skimp on moralizing slavery as an evil and unsuitable enterprise for a supposedly Christian nation, but neither did he see Africans as equal to Europeans. his interpretation of black inferiority reflected a common belief among white Americans, including some former abolitionists. stories like his shaped the way generations of white Americans thought of their black compatriots and, according to an emerging cadre of black educators, how the black Americans who read those textbooks thought of themselves.
black voices enter the textbook industry after the civil war, but barely disrupt it
The benevolent racism that infected textbooks also inspired a new generation of history writers who wanted to inject less bias and more precision into teaching materials. African Americans, often women teachers or laymen with little formal training, began writing textbooks and creating century-spanning history quizzes with song, speech, and dance in the decades after the Civil War.
“You have these great textbooks that were in the schools, but they had nothing to do with what black people write. black history textbooks and black people had a totally different view of citizenship [from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century],” said murray.
became interested in how black people wrote their own history when his grad class on teaching social studies didn’t even mention the father of what became black history month, carter g. woodson. Shocked by the blatant omission, Murray began to investigate and found women like Dorothy Guinn, a YWCA headmistress, who co-wrote Out of the Dark (1924), a show in which high school audiences and performers performed a theatrical journey through the slave trade. in africa, reconstruction and then contemporary moments.
a character named the chronicler sings about phillis wheatley, benjamin banneker and sojourner truth. She is aided by musical numbers like “Come Down, Moses,” poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and muse-like characters called the Sons of Genius, who represent music, literature, science, and art. they are the chorus of her greek of her, there to illuminate with well-placed information.
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The zeal to correct and counter other people’s accounts of black history motivated people like North Carolina’s Edward A. Johnson, a black lawyer who released his own textbook, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619-1819 in 1890.
in his preface, he wrote of his 11 years teaching and observing “omission and commission by white authors, most of whom appear to have written exclusively for white children, and carefully omitted the many meritorious works of blacks.” . … But how must the little colored boy feel when he has completed u’s assigned course? yes history and in it I found not a word of credit, not a word of favorable comment even for one among the millions of his ancestors who have lived through almost three centuries of their country’s history.”
leila amos pendleton, a former teacher from washington, dc, expressed similar sentiments in her account of black. Dating from 1912, it preceded Woodson’s pioneering Black Miseducation of 1933, which criticized the failure of the American educational system to teach accurate Black history.
pendleton reframed the arrival in jamestown of those early african virginians, placing it in a diasporic context that discussed african civilizations (an oxymoron, according to many white authors), the african presence in mexico, slavery in muslim countries, and abuse systematic study of indigenous peoples in the colonies.
also made a direct emotional appeal to black children: “Imagine, dear children, a small group of frightened and sad foreigners, their hearts aching for home and for the loved ones from whom they had been torn…. the first part of the seventeenth century belongs to the dark ages of world history, to the time when men had not yet understood that every human creature has the right to be free and that it is the solemn duty of every man and every being human. race to help all other men and all other races towards true freedom.”
Lagarrett King, professor and founding director of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education at the University of Missouri, said it’s hard to know how widely such texts were used. He can tell that Johnson’s was used at a high school in Blackraleigh, North Carolina. Murray, the director and academic from Maryland, pointed out that Pendleton’s was advertised in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, and that it likely had an unusual advantage: Her husband owned the publisher that produced her book.
But his explicitly political versions of history, recounting a black past that was more than slavery and sometimes had its own dose of romanticism, failed to dislodge decades (centuries, really) of white supremacy through of the textbooks. he was unable to prevent such ideologies from circulating in American schools, even in more recent decades.
from the civil rights movement to today, textbooks still leave a lot to be desired
Even at the height of the civil rights movement and beyond, textbooks still failed to capture the reality of what the enslaved suffered through their perspective. “In most textbooks, slave life is presented as a not too unpleasant condition; In fact, it was often described as quite personable for the sheer beauty of the relationship between the slave owner and the slaves,” wrote graduate student James O. Lewis, whose thesis on black representations in textbooks in 1960 influenced the NAACP’s efforts to revamp racist textbooks.
lewis also concluded that teaching materials were quick to equate blackness with slavery, especially when writing about jamestown. He noted that all the textbooks in his sample included the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown, and while he noted diversity in how the books described the arrival of Africans, most insisted that slavery began with them in Jamestown Settlement. .
Lewis, however, supported the view of a minority of those textbooks that these involuntary immigrants were indentured servants, a debate that continues today. In 1619, when the Africans arrived, Virginia had no legal framework for slavery in the colony, but she moved in successive decades to cement slavery as a hereditary racial institution.
King said that textbooks have generally failed to clearly communicate the nuances, questions and debates about the status of Africans in early Virginia. and that is part of a larger existential problem.
“The way we teach K-12 black history is either oppression or liberation,” he said. “Most teachers know that 1619 is a year in which we represent the first Africans [to arrive in British North America] on what would become our soil. but then what is missing is what happened next. then in terms of black history we just move on to slavery. many textbooks will now center them as both [slaves or servants], but how we understand slavery is very vague. our textbooks say they were sold for goods, but they could have been hired and sold for goods, until the terms [of their employment contracts] were up.”
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But few K-12 instructors know enough about the African status debate to figure out what’s what, and many agree that the textbooks they use are ineffective. A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” found that more than half of teachers (58 percent) surveyed were unhappy with their textbooks and almost 40 percent said their state offered little or no support for teaching about slavery.
king said there’s also the problem of what the teachers themselves learned from the textbooks they read as students because “we regularly saw egregious and racist references to black people as late as the ’70s.” The birth of black studies programs and the “new” social history, the popularity of Alex Haley’s roots, and civil rights activism helped usher in curricular changes. The NAACP, for example, had a textbook committee that monitored how schoolbooks portrayed black communities and history. But sometimes, so did groups like the Confederate Veterans of America, who published a 1932 report decrying a textbook description of Jamestown as a tattered settlement that didn’t compare well to New England’s early colonies.
Even if most textbooks are no longer openly racist, that doesn’t mean the pedagogy has changed enough. Over the past decade, school districts across the country have come under fire for the way they teach slavery, including incorporating references to slavery into math. equations
in 2012, an elementary school in atlanta posed this homework question: “if frederick got beat up twice a day, how many beat ups did he get in a week? two weeks?” And last year, parents in San Antonio, Texas complained about a history assignment that asked eighth graders to list the positives and negatives of slavery. It turns out that the activity was directly related to a textbook used by the school for about 10 years. Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States argued that all slave owners were not cruel: “some [slaves] never felt the lash,” and “many may not even have been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other way.” . ”
So it’s not surprising that according to the splc report, only 8% of high school seniors knew slavery was the central cause of the civil war, 12% understood slavery was important to the northern economy, and only 22% were able to identify how the constitution benefited slave owners.
textbooks are still a reflection of the political climate
textbooks have been part of the culture wars for a long time, king said. In the late 1990s, scholar Leah Wasburn analyzed depictions of slavery in American history textbooks used in Indiana, looking at how the religious right influenced textbooks of the 1980s and 1980s. 1990. During this period, there were more conservative references to how Christianity got the enslaved through hard times, as well as traditional family rhetoric that the wives of slave owners (who assumed women were not slave owners) they cared for the enslaved in a maternal way. .
king explained, “it all comes down to money and politics. one of the strategies of conservative politicians is to take over state school boards, where textbook policies are adopted.” seats on those boards are often appointed, and large states, those that can generate big sales to publishers and can require school systems to buy specific textbooks, have a huge influence on the content that gets into the hands and students’ minds.
Texas, for example, has earned a reputation for inserting dubious information and interpretations about the nation’s creation, evolution, and enslavement into its schoolbooks. in one case, moses of the ten commandments was listed as one of the founding fathers, and enslaved people were referred to as migrant workers in a textbook photo caption that a student marked in 2015. and this is a problem that transcends the lone star state; As a New York Review of State Curriculum Book Analysis stated in this epigram, “What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks.”
However, the outrage has prompted some changes: In late 2018, the Texas State School Board decided that public school curricula should be modified to emphasize slavery as a primary cause of the civil war, when Before, it prioritized sectionalism and the rights of states; Those changes are scheduled to go into effect this school year for middle and high school students.
But despite the desire of many Americans to see history as a straight line of progress, and that applies to the timeline of both the United States and the country and American textbooks, King sees a future of hard work ahead.
There are still few textbook authors of color, and in K-12 “more than 80 percent of [public elementary and secondary] teachers are white,” King said. “The curriculum remains Eurocentric, despite the cosmetic diversity. we have improved quantitatively in the diversification of the curriculum, although we have not improved qualitatively”. That’s because much of black history is defined only through contact with Europeans and white Americans, he says.
suggests an intentional evidence-based rethinking, complicating assumptions that black people’s reasons for their actions were the same as white people’s. For example, instead of pointing to the struggle of African Americans on both sides of the American Revolution as a mere test of patriotism, since African Americans are constantly required to prove their allegiance in history and contemporary politics, he points out that blacks were promised freedom, directly or indirectly. indirectly, if they took up arms.
Still, he explains that there are more great resources for teachers to learn and use today. This includes materials that are not hardcover texts, such as the recent New York Times Project 1619; teaching tolerance’s “Teaching the Hard History” series, which has multiple episodes on slavery with accomplished scholars and has recently updated content on teaching K-5 students; and online reading lists on a variety of race-related topics, such as the ferguson curriculum.
for her part, murray says that as a former teacher and now an administrator, she always strives to create another alternative canon.
“There is always a group of teachers who will teach the curriculum. but there is a teacher in every department who is involved in top-level discussions about how to create curriculum that matters to their students. For them, it’s not just about how much data they have to memorize; it’s about how to include lgbtq history, for example”.
To move forward, she says educators must continue to turn to intellectual descendants like Leila Amos Pendleton, whom she calls “dream weavers and writers, people who were in front of children, teaching them and writing for them.” as murray points out, “they were imagining for themselves and for us”.
dr. Cinthia R. Greenlee is a North Carolina-based historian, journalist, and editor. His writings have appeared in Literary Hub, Longreads, Smithsonian, and Vice, among others. follow her on twitter at @cynthiagreenlee.
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