How to teach black history? Strive to inspire, not to upset
Before a Nashville student teacher settled on reading a violent, n-word filled letter by a fictional character to fourth-graders during African-american history month, she should have talked to Dory Lerner.
Lerner, who is the educator at the National Civil Rights Museum, would have told the student teacher, who was fired after her lesson on the “Willie Lynch” letter on how to make a slave outraged parents at Waverly Belmont Elementary School, not to do that.
She also would have told the social studies teacher in Toms River, New Jersey, who made his students lie on the floor and pretend to pick cotton to understand what slavery felt like, not to do that.
And to the Phoenix, Arizona, teacher who, in 2019, had her white fourth-graders yell at a black fourth-grader to simulate what the Little Rock Nine, who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, endured?
No.
It serves no purpose, said Lerner, when such lessons cause black youths to absorb the trauma of their history more than its lessons and triumphs.
“I believe in creating interactive educational experiences,” Lerner said. “We’ll pretend we are (civil rights) marchers. We’ll walk bravely into a school, arm-in-arm. I will have students march and reenact the positive parts of the movement…
“But what I will never do is try and recreate the moments of trauma that we know people experienced. First of all, we know that in any time, that is not that moment, no one can know what it was like to live through that…
“You’re not going to ever know what it was like to have someone ashing cigarettes on your head or throwing milk in your hair when you’re just trying to get a cup of coffee. We could never show students that anyway, so why should we try? I also think it’s really wrong to try to say, ‘We can show you what that experience was like,’ because we can’t.”
Connecting past to present
Yet, some schools and teachers persist.
And the issue has struck such a nerve that the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report on it. For the most part, it found that simulations and role-playing were not effective learning strategies and could be particularly traumatic for black children.
Yet in the report, the case was made that when it came to elementary school age children, like the ones the Nashville student teacher read the Willie Lynch letter to, teaching slavery and black history from the context of resistance is effective – as are lessons and experiences that connect that past to the present.
That’s what Lerner strives to do when she helps teachers in Shelby County create lessons for children here.
“There’s something to be said to have students experience the more empowering parts of their history,” said Lerner. “I try to make students connected to civil rights by having them touch objects from that time, like a 1950’s camera, a rotary phone, or a typewriter, and talk about how much easier it is to spread information now than it was then…
“We talk about how long it would take to do a phone tree (to summon people to civil rights marches and gatherings) and to call each person individually instead of doing a group text. We talk about how Jo Ann Robinson typed that memo that started the Montgomery bus boycott and mimeographed 35,000 copies. One copy at a time…
“I won’t have students reenact an awful, traumatic moment, but I will have them reenact the positive parts, and touch these objects so that they can see how hard it was to start the movement and to spread information without a lot of resources.”
And recently, at Dexter Elementary School in Cordova, the students learned about perhaps one of the most powerful weapons used to power movements against oppression.
Music.
Teaching resistance, not despair
During its African-american History Month program, titled “A Musical Journey Through Time,” the Dexter Choir performed “Wade in the Water,” the song that Harriet Tubman sang to get escaping slaves off the trail and into the water to throw the hunting dogs off their track. They sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro National Anthem. They also honored the blues by singing B.B. King’s “Let the Good Times Roll.”
And lest anyone get the idea that the cruel parts of black history were being ignored, during the last part of the program the freedom song, “Ain’t Gon’ Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” was played against the backdrop of a video of civil rights marchers, black people drinking at segregated fountains and facing police dogs, and Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being heckled by white students
Then there was the last part: A montage of photos of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life accompanied by these spoken words: “1930s Georgia the heart of the South … A young man learns what the world is about … He can’t go to movies or restaurants … He had a white friend who said one day: ‘Sorry, but my dad won’t let us play.’
“He becomes a minister in the church … he ignites the fight for civil rights …”
Meaning that the emphasis was on resistance, not despair. And not suffering and submission – which the Lynch letter lesson and slavery simulations highlight.
Presenting painless African-american history is daunting. That’s because the African-american experience has been largely forged in trauma. Sadly, unlike white trailblazers, who had the freedom of inventing or leading and making history without having to first prove their humanity, black people haven’t had that privilege.
Yet the problem occurs when teachers believe the trauma is more consequential than the triumph; that being berated on the inevitability of becoming a slave and pretending to be one at auction leaves a deeper impression than how black people resisted it, and how they still resist vestiges of that oppression.
Those are the black history lessons that should be taught today; lessons that help youths find their power, Lerner said.
“The instruments of change are all around them,” she said. “They just have to use them.”