Black History: How Books Aid in the Fight for Knowledge
By: Haley Graham
Shop this article (*affiliate): https://bookshop.org/lists/non-fiction-readin-magazineIs what you remember about your seventh-grade Black history section in social studies class really reflective of what happened? Why are some schools adopting the 1619 Project to teach the horrors of Black history in America, while others are teaching that slaves were hired help who were actually very satisfied with their lives? In this article, we’re exploring what different states are doing now to squash their fears of spreading Critical Race Theory into U.S. schools, and a few helpful books by Black authors that can help to educate us this Black History Month.
The Underground Railroad wasn’t an actual railroad?
Despite what you can likely recall from the history class of your youth, as it turns out, it wasn’t.
It also wasn’t an underground system of tunnels where Harriet Tubman led rebelling slaves in the dark by candlelight. However, this imagery is consistent with most social studies curriculums pushed through by state legislators who can’t seem to agree about how to approach Black history in textbooks. What many of us in the U.S. can recall from our Black history education is shrouded in convenient language that appears to tell only a fraction of the story. Most of it focused on the freeing of slaves, the non-violence of Dr. King, and a quick lesson on Rosa Parks for good measure. There you go! Black history is done!
As the culture of American politics has become more contentious over the past decade, a significant portion of Congress has dedicated an alarming amount of time to moving the goalpost toward outright lies.
This is not a new concern. At the end of the Civil War, a movement was created by Neo-Confederates referred to as the “Lost Cause”: a group of Southerners dedicated to maintaining an err of racism and southern superiority to pacify themselves after the loss (Bradley, 2023). This movement, in a pre-Industrial Revolution era, was best perpetuated through the most suggestible among us– children.
Textbooks were the first places that racist Neo-Confederates jumped to reclaim their history, recasting their roles to be seen in a more favorable light. This was so common, in fact, that Georgia University researchers coined a term for these books– mint julep textbooks (Bradley, 2023). Named after a signature Southern cocktail that was known for being calming, restorative, and relaxing, mint julep textbooks were designed to make the defeat palatable for Southerners at the cost of Black lives.
In 1914, a daughter of slave-owning parents and member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), Mildred Lewis Rutherford, addressed the organization in a speech stating that enslaved persons, “were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe, free from care or thought of food, clothes, home, or religious privileges.” A Tennessee mint julep book (published by William Garrett, a charter member of the United Confederate Veterans’ History Committee) which was used in schools at the turn of the century stressed in its preface the importance of non-partisan attitudes from teachers when addressing these subjects while also making claims like, “Africans who were brought to Jamestown in 1619 ‘found homes and friends, and hailed their entrance into slavery with joy.’ The textbook also claims that, before the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people in the U.S. were inherently the most docile race and only began to have a soured relationship with white Southerners when white Northerners put the thought of emancipation in their minds” (Bradley, 2023).
With individuals like Mildred and William leading the charge to write curriculum for students, we can see exactly how conflicting reports on the realities of racism have become the norm. And though we love to believe that much has changed in the years since the UDC influenced American politics, that too is an overstatement. The Thurgood Marshall Institute reports, “In Florida, publishing companies that produce textbooks for Florida are being told that any attempts to circumvent the state’s standards will be rejected and sent back to publishing houses for corrections until the standards are met. These actions showcase the U.S.’s long history of essentially blacklisting books that accurately recount the lived experiences of Black people in this country.”
A recent textbook quote was released from the curriculum used in Texas and published in the Texas Tribunal in November of 2024: “A kindergarten lesson titled ‘Our Great Country,’ for example, instructs teachers to tell students that founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson ‘realized that slavery was wrong and founded the country so that Americans could be free.’ The passage omits the fact that many of them enslaved people.”
Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, was also described in this curriculum as having ‘excellent abilities’. When discussing the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany, there is no mention at all that these were directly influenced by Jim Crow laws of the American South.
After reviewing the state's push towards using these curricula, senior program analyst for the American Historical Association, Julia Brookins, stated, "The lack of specificity is striking."
I haven’t been taught Black history from a curriculum outlined by the state since 2015, but I can recall this part for sure: We never learned about The Great Migration, The War on Drugs, and certainly not a peep about White Flight. Schools aren’t having discussions about the cultural implications of the OJ trial in the wake of Rodney King or the Tuskegee medical experiments. Where is the curriculum that focuses on the influence of Black culture on music and art, and how it shapes the world we live in now? The book Night Flyer: The Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles could teach us more about Harriet Tubman in some 200 pages than I had in all of my years of education.
How does our image of patriotism change when we learn the truth of the decades-long flight from Southern states that an estimated six million Black Americans were forced to take to flee white violence in the South from 1915 to 1970 (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson).
What impressions are ingrained in our public consciousness about race when we are faced with statistics about Black-on-Black crime as a response to honest questions about why our prison system is incarcerating Black people at a rate five times higher than that of white people (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander).
A bitter pill to swallow, best explored in Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, is the reality that World War II, so heavily focused on in public education history curricula as America's shining hero moment, was heavily influenced by eugenics work done in the U.S. (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson).
In a March 2023 interview with The Onbeing Project, Wilkerson reports, “A book written by an American eugenicist was seen as a bible for Hitler. That was my entry into this entire world of connection between our country and the Jim Crow laws, the anti-miscegenation laws in this country, the very restrictive immigration laws, which they sent people to our country to study these laws as they were beginning their work of establishing what would become the Nuremberg Laws. It was just chilling to discover. Hitler especially marveled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’”
Is this why my public school education didn’t prepare me for a racial reckoning in my 20s? Because it’s actually crucial and intentional that the American people maintain an “air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death?”
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, spoke of racial reckoning in a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, discussing what has changed in the world in the ten years since The New Jim Crow’s Obama-era publication. Alexander’s book became a household name with its stunning revelations that were already well understood in low-income communities decimated by police violence, redlining, food deserts, housing discrimination, etc. Her book cast a light on the injustice, named it, and showed a mirror to those who had ignored it.
“As I see it, the crisis of mass incarceration is not simply a legal or political problem to be solved, but it’s a profound spiritual and moral crisis, as well. And it requires a reckoning, individually and collectively, with our racial history, our racial present, and our racial future. Many academics and lawyers are reluctant to face or engage in this reckoning, in part because it seems so big, so overwhelming.”
You hear others– distant uncles at family parties or some lurky family friend– say that it all happened just soooooo long ago. How impacted could you be by what happened to your great, great, great grandma, huh? Get over it, woke mob!
But I can’t say that I’ve ever heard that sentiment from anyone who knows a shred more about Black history than the U.S. public education system currently provides. To read about these things is to see the direct throughline that brings us to our current political climate, how each generation has piggy-backed off of the one before it, and some of that pain lives deep in your DNA. Down to the studs. Inextricable.
Knowing this was what first challenged me to prioritize reading diversely. To know anything is to know it from more than one lens, and to only read books by people who look, sound, and talk like you would be simply living one form of a life, over and over again. To read diversely is to see the value in a story, even if that story is not like your own.
When we think about the way that Black history is taught in the U.S., it may be crucial to consider the way that institutional racism has shape-shifted in recent years to perpetuate stereotypes, myths, and inherited biases passed on from generations before us. How has the lie of white supremacy continued to wiggle its way into so many places in American life? And what exactly is our role in changing that?
In a digital world inundated with ideas, information, and research on any topic imaginable, anywhere you look online, you can find a place where Black creators are doing the hard work of providing history and context to stories of their ancestors. Anywhere from podcasts, documentaries and entire social media accounts to college classes, research articles, and nonfiction books, there are countless places to go where you can supplement the watered down version of the story that many of us were fed. To begin understanding the reality of historic events and practices like the Transatlantic Slave Trade is to grasp the understanding as to why Black folks across the country just won’t let it go. Once you hear the stories, once you hear not only the history, but the way that science now tells us that gene expression passed down through generations continues to impact the bodies and minds of people alive today, it feels too obvious as to why learning the raw truth of Black History is an essential part of education. While all of our bodies carry some of the predispositions and wounds of our ancestors thanks to epigenetics, the wounding inherent to the Black experience in the U.S since the beginning is present, unique, and insistent. Luckily, so is the resilience, the fearlessness in the face of adversity, and the determination to have a story told.
I think that, as per usual, Isabel Wilkerson says it best:
“I like to view myself as the building inspector of this old house we call our country. And I’ve delivered the report. These are some of the systems that need attention. And when you get that building report, you may not want to look at it. Sometimes it could be 100 pages and you don’t want to look at it. But if you don’t look at it, it’s your own peril. It is up to us, the current occupants. While we did not erect or install the frayed wiring and the corroded pipes, they’re on us now to fix. They’re on us to repair, overhaul, whatever it takes so that it can remain.”