I love history, but I LOVE Black history. I am not sure when I fell in love with Black history, but I know it was not based on my K-12 educational experiences.
As an elementary student, I distinctly remember sitting through history lessons thinking, “Some of this history stuff does not make sense.” My schooling rarely taught about Black people and events. Still, when my teachers did, I learned that slavery was a paternalistic system and that Black people were content as slaves — or at least accepted their oppressed conditions because slaves were well taken care of by their masters. I learned that the Civil War was about states’ rights — not slavery — and I was taught to have compassion for white Southerners and their way of life. I learned Rosa Parks was just tired; Black folks had to achieve equity only through nonviolence, and racism was over after the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
I give my K-12 educational experiences credit as these history narratives — which were disconnected from me, my conversations with Black folks about their life, and my experiences living in the Deep South — influenced me to be curious about the histories of people who looked like me.
Growing up, I attended schools in the 1980s and ’90s in Louisiana. I was the kid who liked to learn the history on my own, so I read about historical figures from the encyclopedia book sets from our living room, scouring our Ebony magazine collections for historical articles written by Lerone Bennett, and going to the local library to learn about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Booker T. Washington.
My parents were not historians, not Afrocentric, not overly pro-Black, were not liberals, nor were they overly political. Still, they were supportive in my endeavors as children of the 1950s and ’60s from rural East Texas and central Louisiana experienced systemic and individual racism and discrimination. Their experiences instilled in me the importance of loving myself as a Black person, pride in Black people, and being an educated person. To them, my knowledge of history — especially Black history — was important because they knew that the K-12 educational system would fail to teach me and that U.S. society has never loved Black folks. They wanted me to know history not to hinder or gripe about the past, but to give me the strength to be a liberated Black person who can stand on my own, be able to recognize racial injustice, and be confident in knowing that Black folks are more than what they tell us we are in those history books.
By the time I got to high school, I knew I wanted to be a history educator. During my junior year, I took an honors U.S. history course taught by Mrs. Linda Pendergrass. Mrs. Pendergrass quickly became my favorite teacher. For the first time, I felt that a teacher taught history through multiple perspectives. Still, there were significant gaps in her methods, but at the time, I was impressed with her sincerity. A teacher finally cared about my historical perspective, given the evidence provided. Although I don’t think my classmates were amused, she even entertained me when I questioned history. I believe Mrs. Pendergrass sensed that I was a serious history student and recommended reading the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen. This book, along with “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” by Carter G. Woodson, was the genesis of my understanding of how our educational system treats history — especially Black history.
Woodson’s “Mis-Education of the Negro” was published in 1933 as a collection of essays critiquing how the education system failed to educate Black people. The essays include a broad range of topics focusing on Black colleges, vocational education, Black churches, electoral politics, and economic policies. One critical argument made in the book was the lackluster way Negro history was presented (or not presented) in schools. History education primarily focused on European history and excluded or minimized Black history. When Black history was presented, African and African American people’s skills, abilities, or contributions were rarely featured. Instead, narratives stressed their subordinate roles in society and depicted them as subhuman and heathens. These textbooks often emphasized Black people’s good fortune at having been exposed, through slavery, to the white man’s civilization.
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