Black Lives Matter!

William R. Freeman (M.Div.‘01)

While turning the pages of the Friday, February 9, 2018, edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch my eyes lit up as I read an article reprinted on page A-3 from The Washington Post—“Study: U.S. students deeply ignorant of slavery history.” 

 

Below is 90 percent of that article:

“Consider this from a new report on how U.S. schools teach—or don’t teach—students about the history of slavery in the United States:

  • Only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
  • Sixty-eight percent of the surveyed students did not know that slavery formally ended only with an amendment to the constitution.
  • Only twenty-two percent of the students could correctly identify how provisions in the constitution gave advantages to slaveholders.
  • Only 44 percent of the students answered that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution.

 

These results were part of a new report titled ‘Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,’ which was researched over the course of a year by the Teaching Tolerance project of the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center. The report included results of surveys of U.S. high school seniors and social studies teachers in all grades — nationally representative of those groups — as well as an analysis of 15 state content standards and a review of 10 popular U.S. history textbooks.

The best text book achieved a score of 70 percent against a rubric of what should be included in the study of American slavery; the average score was 46 percent.  Teaching Tolerance also published a framework to help teachers properly teach the subject, with suggested resources and materials.

The report argues that the U.S. ‘needs an intervention in the ways that we teach and learn about American slavery,’ which will require an effort ‘by state education departments, teacher preparation programs, school boards, textbook publishers, museums, professional organizations and thought leaders,’

The report goes on to say, ‘Slavery defined the nature and limits of American liberty, it influenced the creation and development of the major political and social institutions of the nation, and it was a cornerstone of the American prosperity that fueled our industrial revolution.  It is not simply an event in our history; it is central to our history.  Other problems that fail to connect slavery and white supremacy include the prevalence of lessons that portray slavery as only a Southern institution.

The report says no state standards properly address how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery, and most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery, about the lives of millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was essential to the economy.”