Teaching slavery
Schools sanitize it or shy away from it
INDIANAPOLIS –Twenty-three little bodies – all clad in navy uniforms – are wriggling in their seats at Avondale Meadows Academy. There are superhero cutouts dangling from the ceiling, a “Wakanda Forever” poster on the wall, and Snickers, the class guinea pig, just had a slice of apple. It’s a typical Wednesday morning at the Indianapolis charter school, and Shorron Scott is asking her class about their feelings.
Sad. Bad. Mad. Angry. Afraid.
“Of whom?” Scott asks one of her students.
“Of the slave master,” he says.
Avondale Meadows’ third grade is learning about slavery in the United States, and it’s not always easy.
Across the hall, in Katie Millikan’s class, her two dozen students are looking at pictures of a slave collar and the scarred back of a slave.
Nine-year-old London Moore said sometimes her classmates cry. When that happens, the class takes a break from the heavy material with a vocabulary video.
“It helps,” London said.
The material can get heavy for 7- and 8-year-olds. Teachers work to keep the material age-appropriate, but they don’t sugarcoat the truth, either.
“We learned they treat them like, um, they dehumanize them and don’t treat them like how they are,” said Thaddeus Obirieze, another student in Millikan’s class. “If they get splinters or anything, their owners won’t care. Their owners would probably sometimes put splinters in their food. If it gets on their tongue and stuff, they wouldn’t care.”
Thaddeus, 8, said he doesn’t get sad, but he tries not to think about it too much.
“It’s the equivalent of kids not being able to do division. There is no other subject we could teach as bad as we do American history and still be employed.” Hasan Jeffries History professor at Ohio State University
“It’s so unfair,” he said.
That’s part of what makes slavery so difficult to teach – and so important to get right.
And many schools aren’t there. In February alone:
❚ Students at Madison’s Trust Elementary School in Ashburn, Virginia, pretended to be slaves on the Underground Railroad as part of a physical education class. A third-grader, the only African-American in his class, was designated a slave during the activity. The school apologized.
❚ On a field trip, South Carolina elementary students were told to pick cotton and sing a slave song, according to a TV station. Students from Ebenezer Avenue Elementary were visiting the Carroll School, which was built in 1929 for African-Americans and now gives programs about the Great Depression. The school district said the tunes were not intended to sound like slave songs.
Research by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017 found U.S. schools are failing to teach the hard history of slavery. Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed in the SPLC’s report “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery” could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
“It’s the equivalent of kids not being able to do division,” said Hasan Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University who serves as chairman of the Teaching Hard History Advisory Board and host of the podcast “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.” “There is no other subject we could teach as bad as we do American history and still be employed.”
The research found, too, that this isn’t a regional problem. It isn’t a Southern problem. It’s a national problem, Jeffries said.
“I get students in my history classes ... and I talk about slavery and the Civil War, and their jaws drop,” he said. “I shouldn’t be blowing their minds with that. That’s Early American History 101.”
What must schools teach?
For starters, states fail to set high expectations with their curriculum standards, the law center’s research found. Jeffries’ team reviewed 15 sets of state standards and found most lacked details about slavery or its essential role to the American economy.
In Indiana, explicit mentions of slavery in academic standards are few and far between – just a handful of times between fourth grade and high school.
What’s more, most popular textbooks fail to provide comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved people, the research found.
For example, when the center reviewed 12 history textbooks, it found:
❚ An Alabama history text lists “states’ rights” as the first cause of the Civil War in a list of several factors.
❚ An AP edition of an American history text from publishing giant McGraw-Hill presents the relationship between slavery and racism as “undecided,” the review found. The textbook described the routine sexual assault of slaves as “frequent sexual liaisons” or “unwanted sexual advances” that were only “sometimes” rape.
❚ Most textbooks also failed to cover the profit motive inherent in slavery.
The Indiana Department of Education provides extra resources online, but it’s unclear how widely they’re used.
For example, a video about Mary Bateman Clark, a slave who sued to end indentured servitude in Indiana, was uploaded to Vimeo three years ago and linked on the state resources website.
It has been played just 44 times.
A ‘watered down’ retelling
At Indianapolis Public Schools, teachers still use textbooks. But because the books try to appeal to the widest audience possible, they’re often designed with the standards and politics of the biggest states in mind. Things can get “watered down,” said Eric Heagy, curriculum and instruction specialist for social studies and world languages.
So Nick Sargent had his seventhgraders at Northwest Middle School reading excerpts from the writing of Olaudah Equiano, an African man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a child in Nigeria. He endured the Middle Passage on a slave ship to the Americas and later bought his own freedom.
“I’m really big on not sugarcoating history for them,” Sargent said. “There are a lot of examples of people trying to whitewash history and not make it sound so bad, but that doesn’t do it any justice.”
For many of his students, reading Equiano’s story is the first time they hear about the “shipping” aspect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“Every other slave history thing I’ve learned is mainly on land,” said Estefany Ponce, 13. “This is the first time finding out someone’s on a boat, having to go through all these things.”
Deep levels of discomfort
Perhaps a larger problem than the resources for teaching slavery are the ways in which it’s taught, said Keith Barton, a professor of curriculum and instruction at Indiana University.
Schools tend to teach students that slavery is a moral failing of individuals, Barton said – a past problem that was solved by the Civil War, rather than an institution with influences that African-Americans continue to feel today.
In some cases, the teacher might lack a full understanding of slavery, Barton said. In others, the miseducation might happen because the truth is so difficult to broach – and can be controversial.
As an unnamed teacher said in the survey: “It’s difficult, as a white teacher to majority non-white students, to explain that white people benefited significantly at the very real expense of black people.”
This discomfort is playing out, too, in a teaching force that is still predominantly white. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that while demographics of America’s students are shifting rapidly – most schoolchildren are non-white now – the same cannot be said of their teachers. More than 80 percent of teachers are white.
“There’s this sense of: ‘What if we’re doing it wrong? What if it gets misinterpreted?’ ” Jeffries said.
The segregation effect
Like many of the country’s large cities, Indianapolis and its surrounding suburbs have intensely segregated school systems. When the city and county merged municipal services in 1970, school districts were excluded.
By the time court-ordered busing started a decade later, a massive decline in Indianapolis Public Schools enrollment was well underway. Enrollment in the district plummeted from more than 100,000 students at the start of the 1970s to fewer than 30,000 in 2010.
Today, nearly three-quarters of Indianapolis’ public schools students are black or Hispanic, and most are poor enough to qualify for free or reducedprice lunch.
The wealthy suburbs in the donut counties surrounding the city, though, are the inverse. Within the past year, several districts have had racist incidents.
❚ At Hamilton Southeastern Schools, a photo was posted in September of a student in blackface.
❚ Last November, a racist shooting threat was found in a bathroom at neighboring Noblesville High School.
❚ Students at another suburban high school, Zionsville, were seen on a social media post this winter using a Nazi salute.
It’s likely that the way schools teach slavery is contributing to incidents of racism, Jeffries said.
The vast majority of teachers want to do better, the research found. They need stronger education programs and administrative support and better resources.
An easy way to start that: Talk about African-American history more often, rather than relegating it to Black History Month in February.