Black History Month Cover Story – Four Hundred Souls and the Need To Teach Black History 24/7

Over five years after a summer of racial justice protests against the police murder of George Floyd, followed by the January 6 white supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the teaching of Black history is more important than ever. We have failed to learn the lessons of enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. And it shows, as the ICE slave patrols lynch people in the streets, including White people, in a manner traditionally reserved for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and their White coconspirators.

On the approaching 250th anniversary of the United States, the 50th anniversary of the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and the 20th anniversary of the mandatory African American Studies curriculum in Philadelphia public high schools, Black history remains crucial. This is precisely why the Trump administration removed the slavery exhibit from the presidential mansion in Philadelphia – the mansion President Washington called home. Ona Judge, who escaped bondage from the presidential mansion and found freedom in New Hampshire, causing the president to take out an ad seeking her return, and Hercules Posey, the chef who fled Mount Vernon and emerged in New York, are only two of the many self-emancipated Africans who ran away from Washington. One of the deified leaders of America, Washington, who held hundreds of Black folks captive, did not have wooden teeth as they would have you believe, but rather wore dentures made from the extracted teeth of African people.

People who ignore their history are doomed to repeat it. And in a country that has failed to account for its legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and institutional racism – or the role of Black folks in building this nation through blood, sweat and tears – white supremacy lives in America, and with no signs of abatement.

I had the honor of being a contributing author to the book, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, the book features the untold stories, people, places and events concerning Black people, from the arrival of Africans in Jamestown, Virginia to the present-day Black Lives Matter era. In my chapter, I explored the Royal African Company (RAC) of England, which accounted for up to three-quarters of the transatlantic slave trade. Twelve million African women, children and men were kidnapped and trafficked, packed as human cargo in floating dungeons and shipped through the Middle Passage to the Americas, many perishing during the journey.

RAC was a corporate monopoly formed for the sole purpose of bringing profit to the royal family. All the suffering and trauma Black people have endured for centuries – the forced labor, torture, raping and genocide – was the result of a business deal allowing white families to amass vast intergenerational wealth exploiting our ancestors. The slave trade caused cities such as Liverpool to flourish, and provided the economic foundation for Wall Street – which began as a slave market – and American capitalism.

Many have not learned a history conspicuously absent from school curricula. Some refuse to learn because it undermines their narrative of American exceptionalism and white supremacy – in a transforming nation where most children are Black and Brown. In the era of racial reckoning and awakening, calls for change are met with backlash. In several states, Republican lawmakers have sought to criminalize and defund public schools that teach the 1619 Project, which centers U.S. history around the contributions of Black people and the role of slavery. Critics such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) deride the 1619 Project as “left-wing propaganda” and “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.”

Part of dismantling white supremacy means destroying its culture. Decentering Eurocentric and Western ways of thinking and upholding Black lives in education will allow Black children to flourish and achieve their potential, ultimately benefiting all students academically.

Black history is American history, and must be taught year round and embedded in all subject areas – all the love and joy, the pain and suffering, without whitewashing. If we hope to solve today’s problems and create a future with policies rooted in equity and justice, we must teach our past.