In 1973, working in a summer camp program, I taught my worst history lesson ever. I am white and I was the counselor for a group of middle school students who were all African American. We were writing a play about slavery in the United States and I showed the campers quotes from Southern white slaveholders justifying the enslavement of Africans. The middle schoolers were not only outraged by the quotes, they were also outraged with me, accusing me of sharing those racist ideas. It took two weeks, and intervention by the program’s director, to get the kids to accept me as their teacher, although I doubt if trust was ever established.
From this experience and others during a long teaching career, I learned many important lessons. One is that lessons are not abstract things determined by a central authority – the teacher. They are interactive and involve all the people in the classroom, people who bring their own experiences, ideas, and understandings. Another is that it is difficult to teach about a topic like slavery in the United States because racism continues and African American students and their families are justifiably suspicious of the intent of white teachers who introduce it into the curriculum.
Recently a New Jersey eighth grade social studies teacher was accused of forcing students to pick mock cotton and lay on a dirty floor while he made whipping sounds and kicked them as part of a lesson illustrating the hardship of slavery. The teacher defended the activity arguing, “Slavery existed within our country and the lessons learned, even if uncomfortable, need to be told.” He explained, “At no time was my intention to harm the sensitivities of any student. If this lesson did that, I apologize to those affected.”
There have been a number of other disputed lessons as teachers try to include more about the history of slavery in the curriculum, sometimes very inappropriately. An elementary school teacher in Hamden, Connecticut was suspended after having her fourth-grade students enact a play “A Triangle of Trade,” that was part of an anthology of instructional plays about colonial America published by Scholastic magazine in 2003. A parent complained that the teacher had cast Black children as the slaves. In another incident, a student teacher in Nashville, Tennessee was removed from a fourth-grade classroom after assigning students to read excerpts from a 1712 defense of slavery as part of a Black History Month lesson. In both cases school districts said the material used in the lessons was not approved for instruction. A year ago, a teacher in a New York private school was removed after reenacting a slave auction by putting imaginary chains on black students and having white students bid on them.
Teachers who reenact the middle passage and slave auctions in their social studies classes may be well intentioned, however, based on my experience, I think this is a serious mistake. While students may tolerate these reenactments and participate in them, I do not believe they can be done with either sensitivity or authenticity. I suspect most White students think they have experienced and learned more about slavery than they have any right to believe, while Black students are left embarrassed or alienated by the attempted reenactments.
As a high school teacher, I learned a very important lesson about teaching about slavery from one of my students, an African American young woman. In class she said that she resented continually learning about slavery and how her people were oppressed. She wanted to know other things about Black history. Her challenge forced me to reconsider how I felt as a teenager learning about the history of my own people, Eastern European Jews, who died in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. Knowledge of oppression did not satisfy me then. I felt humiliated and I wanted to scream out, “Why didn’t we fight back?” What finally helped me come to terms with the European Holocaust was reading about Jewish resistance in Leon Uris’ (1961) book about the Warsaw Ghetto and the creation and defense of the State of Israel. I realized that the key for my coming to terms with the 20th century history of Jews was recognition of human resistance.
In response to this student and the connections she helped me understand about my own life, I shifted the focus on Black history in my classroom from emphasizing the burdens of oppression to exploring the history of people’s struggles for justice. Among other things, this meant that studying about the horror of slavery and the slave trade always had to be combined with examining the way people fought to establish their humanity.
In my high school social studies classes, students edited and presented excerpts from the speeches and writings of African American and white abolitionists promoting resistance to bondage and expressing a deep longing for freedom. We used traditional African American folk songs to explore the meaning of slavery, the longing for freedom, and resistance to oppression. These included “All the Pretty Little Horses”, “Go Down Moses, and “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” I also had students read passages from Solomon Northup’s autobiographical narrative, Twelve Years a Slave (Eakin and Logsdon, 1967) and we viewed segments from the PBS version of his life, Solomon Northup’s Odyssey.
Follow the Drinking Gourd- This song is an oral map of the Underground Railroad. The “drinking gourd” is the star constellation known as the Big Dipper.
When the sun comes up and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is awaiting for to carry you to freedom, if you follow the drinking gourd.
Chorus- Follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is awaiting for to carry you to freedom, if you follow the drinking gourd.
The river bank will make a mighty good road, the dead trees will show you the way,
Left foot, peg foot, travelin’ on, follow the drinking gourd.
Chorus- Follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is awaiting for to carry you to freedom, if you follow the drinking gourd.
The river ends between two hills, follow the drinking gourd,
There’s another river on the other side, follow the drinking gourd.
Chorus- Follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is awaiting for to carry you to freedom, if you follow the drinking gourd.
Questions
1. Why does the song tell passengers on the Underground Railroad to follow the “drinking gourd”?
2. Why freedom seekers prefer an oral map to a written map?
3. What does this song tell us about the experience of enslaved Africans?
I reject using role-playing about an issue as controversial and painful as slavery. We would never have children reenact people, including young children, being herded into Nazi gas chambers.
There are other ways to help younger students learn about slavery in the United States. They can read and discuss children’s literature and write and illustrate their own “big books.” I especially recommend In the Time of the Drums by Kim L. Siegelson (1999), illustrated by Brian Pinkney (New York: Hyperion); Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson (1993), illustrated by James Ransome (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Dragonfly Books); A Place Called Freedom by Scott Russell Sanders (1997), illustrated by Thomas B. Allen (New York: Aladdin); Follow the Drinking Gourd (1988) by Jeanette Winter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); Harriet and the Promised Land (1993) by Jacob Lawrence (New York: Aladdin); and Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) by Faith Ringgold (New York: Crown).
In an after-school program where I assisted, a multiracial group of fifth graders performed a version of Virginia Hamilton’s story about slavery and the undying desire for freedom, “The People Could Fly.” In this story, an elderly African remembers magic words that allow enslaved people to soar off into the sky and return to Africa. The story and play are about oppression, but also the human desire for freedom. The children were upset by a scene where a white overseer and a black driver whip a young mother while she is holding her infant because she cannot work faster. After discussing the meaning of the story and the fact that they “don’t treat people that way,” the children decided to perform it. However, they also decided not to cast the parts according to the race of the characters or of the actors and to create giant puppets to represent the overseer and driver. Part of the success of this lesson was the willingness of teachers to discuss race and casting with the students and the students’ sense of empowerment because of the decisions that were made.
Another lesson that I learned while teaching about oppression and resistance is that a symbol can be more powerful than a reenactment. One of the most successful depictions of a human catastrophe similar to slavery in the Americas is the United States Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC. The two exhibits that had the most powerful effect on me were the pile of thousands of shoes standing in stark reminder of what happened to their owners and the gradual narrowing and darkening of the corridor as museum visitors prepared to enter a model of a cattle car that transported European Jews to death camps. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Washington DC Mall has a number of similar exhibits that evoke the horror of the past. In response, I have students create their own Museum of Slavery and Resistance or Museum of African American History. They select an image and reproduce it in three-dimensions inside a 3x2 foot or larger cardboard box wit a museum card attached.
Students can also become historians who explore the history of their communities uncovering accomplishments as well as injustices. They can use their own discoveries to develop curriculum and present what they found to school leaders and school district officials.
Racism in the United States is not going away soon and teaching about topics like slavery will remain difficult. It requires sensitivity to students and families, good judgment, and a school district’s commitment to staff development.
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