How history textbooks reflect America’s refusal to reckon with slavery

How history textbooks reflect America’s refusal to reckon with slavery

Textbooks have been slow to incorporate black humanity in their slavery narratives. And they still have a long way to go.

Four hundred years ago, a group of about 20 Africans were captured in the African interior, probably near modern-day Angola, and forcibly transported on a slave ship headed to the Americas. After tumultuous months at sea, they landed ashore in the first British colony in North America — Jamestown, Virginia — in late August 1619

“The settlers bought them,” explained the 1903 text, “... and found them so helpful in raising tobacco that more were brought in, and slavery became part of our history.”

Its barebones lesson plan included just two easily digestible factoids for the year 1619: the introduction of the Africans — with an illustration of two half-naked black people standing on a beach before a pontificating pirate and a crowd of onlookers — and the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first formal legislative body in the American colonies.

But the history of Jamestown and slavery isn’t that simple. Even though the 1619 landing wasn’t the first arrival of Africans in the Americas, it fits within the history of colonial America, black America, the global slave trade, and ultimately the foundation of our country. So how textbooks summarized this history — one characterized by a scant documentary record and often from the perspective of European settlers and white Americans — matters.

“Textbooks are supposed to teach us a common set of facts about who we are as Americans ... and what stories are key to our democracy,” said Alana D. Murray, a Maryland middle-school principal and author of The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative.

As textbooks show — through omissions, downright errors, and specious interpretations, particularly regarding racial issues — not everyone enjoys the perks of civic belonging or gets a fair shake in historical accounts. This is even true of textbooks used today — 400 years after Africans’ 1619 arrival, more than 150 years after emancipation — with narratives more interested in emphasizing the compassion of enslavers than the cruelty endured by the enslaved.

Textbooks have long remained a battleground in which the humanity and status of black Americans have been contested. Pedagogy has always been preeminently political.

From fast facts to black inferiority: how slavery has been portrayed historically in textbooks

The Hazen’s textbook framed Jamestown and its role in the development of US slavery as an inevitable matter of labor demand and economic pragmatism, a common argument in US school materials at the turn of the 20th century.

Yet that was just one school of thought. After slavery’s end in this country, many Southern-focused textbooks promoted a Lost Cause approach to Jamestown and slavery writ large, portraying the institution as part of a natural order. White Southerners created ideologically driven narratives that yearned for the Good Ole Days where whites sat atop the hierarchy and African Americans were faithful slaves. In this racist revisionism, they didn’t have to reckon with the new black citizen, voter, or legislator as nominal equals.

Somewhat typical in this distorted history was A Child’s History of North Carolina, circa 1916, which also focused on slavery’s profitability and erased its violence. In this view, the enslaved people were happy, and Southern slave owners were reluctant masters at best.

According to the book, enslaved people “were allowed all the freedom they seemed to want, and were given the privilege of visiting other plantations when they chose to do so. All that was required of them was to be in place when work time came. At the holiday season they were almost as free as their masters.” Moreover, “most people in North Carolina were really opposed to slavery and were in favor of a gradual emancipation. Slavery was already in existence, however, through no fault of theirs. They had the slaves and had to manage as best they could the problem of what to do with them.”

Furthermore, the book argued that abolitionists — never a huge voting bloc — were responsible for electing Abraham Lincoln, and that their unspecified violence made the South “indignant.”

Some Northern writers tried their hand at what they believed was a more nuanced approach in revising children’s history books in light of emancipation. And that included how they talked about that slave ship arriving in Virginia and the people aboard.

Take the example of Children’s Stories of American Progress, published in 1886. Northern white writer Henrietta Christian Wright, known for her popular stories of fairies and magic, described that day in August 1619 as a time when the meadows alongside the James River were “beautiful with summer” — a sight lost on the African captives.

However, Wright also imagined eyes that “looked wearily out from the port-holes of the ship” and saw a new landscape that “only seemed dreary and desolate, a land of exile and death.” She alternated between seeing through their eyes with being the omniscient narrator viewing them from above. She implicated European powers for turning Africa into “the great hunting-ground” and capitalizing off internecine struggles on the continent. Yet the plunder that carried Africans “like dumb beasts across the Atlantic” was “all because the white man chose to use his greater intelligence to oppress instead of befriend them.”

Wright didn’t skimp on moralizing about slavery as an evil, unsuitable enterprise for a putatively Christian nation, but she didn’t see Africans as Europeans’ peers, either. Her portrayal of the inferiority of black people reflected a common belief among white Americans, even some former abolitionists. Accounts like hers shaped how generations of white Americans thought about their black compatriots and, according to a rising cadre of black educators, how black Americans who read such textbooks thought about themselves.

Black voices enter the textbook industry after the Civil War — but barely disrupt it

The benevolent racism that infected textbooks also inspired a new generation of history writers who wanted to inject less bias and more accuracy into instructional materials. African Americans, often women teachers or laypeople with little formal training, began authoring textbooks and creating history pageants that spanned centuries with song, speech, and dance in the decades after the Civil War.

“You have these big textbooks that were in schools, but they had nothing to do with what black people are writing. Black history textbooks and black people had a totally different view of citizenship [in the late 1800s to mid-1900s],” Murray said.

She became interested in how black people wrote their own history when her graduate class on teaching social studies failed to even mention the father of what became Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson. Shocked by the glaring omission, Murray began researching and found women like Dorothy Guinn, a YWCA director, who co-wrote Out of the Dark (1924), a pageant in which spectators and its high school performers got a theatrical tour through the slave trade in Africa, Reconstruction, and then-contemporary moments.

A character named the Chronicler intones about Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, and Sojourner Truth. She gets an assist from musical numbers like “Go Down, Moses,” Paul Laurence Dunbar poems, and muse-like characters called the Children of Genius, who represent music, literature, science, and art. They are her Greek chorus, there to enlighten with well-placed tidbits of information.

Enjoy Christmas 2023 with these promotions offers and its benefits. Special offer for our readers and it's free. Hurray