Recovering African-American Traditionsof Civic Education

Meira Levinson

Civic & Moral Education Initiative Colloquium Series

Harvard Graduate School of Education

November 21, 2008

community-constructed historical and civic narratives

history education

within schools

youth civic

engagement

Outline of Argument1. History education is an essential component of

civic education2. Civically empowering history must be civically

inspiring3. Traditional school approach: “moderate

triumphalism”4. Arguments against moderate triumphalism5. History education must take into account youth’s

construction of history6. One approach: Traditional African-American civic

narrative of struggle, opportunity, and obligation7. Historical evidence of this narrative8. Evidence of contemporary resonance9. Complications and questions

1. History education is an essential component of civic education

a) Students need to understand history to be effective and appropriate civic agents

b) Students’ civic engagement is mediated by their understanding of history

2. For history to be civically empower-ing, it must be civically inspiring

I Love AmericaTiffany Nova

I love the country that made us slavesI love the country that segregatesI love this countryI love how we are old enough to go to war and risk our lives But we’re not old enough to drink or driveI love how we had to FIGHT to receive equal rightsI love the government that doesn’t careThe richest country that isn’t aware,Of the youth living amongst povertyI love Mr. President who doesn’t see what I can seeI love this country for going to war and killing our fellow

“Americans”They live for America and DIE for AmericaNow they died as strong soldiers and troopsOne day you’ll realize how much you love this country

too…

2. For history to be civically empowering, it must be civically inspiring

a) Neither automatic nor inevitable

b) One possible response: Tiffany has been taught the wrong kind of history

History WARS

American Textbook Council:

[F]aith in progress and patriotic pride have vanished….What has replaced them is too often a nation that has repeatedly fallen short of its ideals, led by a patriarchy that deserves censure…. Young readers….may learn about a nation’s shameful past…in such a way as to undercut civic confidence and trust….The new history textbooks are helping to erase—if not national memory—then juvenile appreciation of the nation’s achievements.

(Quoted in Albert Shanker Institute 2003: 13)

Fordham Foundation:

In the guise of providing teachers with ideas for a more engaging pedagogy and deeper understanding of a historical phenomenon, frequently one involving instances of prejudice, they recruit unwitting teachers as their agents in cultivating hostility toward America as a country, toward Western culture, and toward Americans of European descent. The poisonous effects of these supplemental resources on teachers’ thinking and pedagogical practices can spread throughout the entire school curriculum in the moral and civic vacuum created by neutered textbooks and a host of competing ‘multiple perspectives.’

(Sandra Stotsky 2004: 12)

State of Oregon (1920s):

Made it illegal to use any textbook that “speaks slightingly of the founders of the republic, or of the men who preserved the union, or which belittles or undervalues their work.”

(Quoted in Tyack 2003: 53)

3. Traditional solution in most schools: moderate triumphalism

“The great drama of American history, as traditionally told, was the conflict between the nation’s ideals and its practices; over time, that conflict was increasingly resolved by elections, court decisions, legislative changes, a bloody civil war, heroic individuals, reform movements, and other advances in the realization of democratic institutions. Even when they were violated, the ideals were a constant set of goals toward which Americans continued to strive.”

(Diane Ravitch 2003: 151)

4. Moderate triumphalism is not the solution

a) Obscures civic agency; suggests historical inevitability of progress

b) Fails to resonate with, and hence to be inspiring to, many students—especially those growing up in historically marginalized communities

5. Students construct their own historical understanding

a) Reflects lived experience

b) Reflects communal construction of historical and civic narratives

“Rather than being regarded as passively ‘socialized,’ the individual actively constructs—and co-constructs with others—explanations and stories that make sense of experience, to develop an identity that locates her or him in a social, cultural, and historical context. Self and group identity, negotiated through narrative and dialogue as well as through trying to make sense of social structures and representations, are crucial to understanding the construction of the citizen.”

(Haste 2004: 420)

Adults:For many African Americans, this orally transmitted history—as well as particular trusted books, films, and museums—competes with an ‘official’ version of the past that is often distrusted. African Americans judged high school and college teachers, museums, and books as significantly less trustworthy as did white Americans; but they more favorably evaluated accounts from eyewitnesses and relatives. Black Americans described themselves as more connected to the past than white Americans when gathering with their families but less connected when visiting museums, reading books, or studying history in school. Many African Americans criticized the history taught in school, which they said ‘ignored,’ ‘distorted,’ or even ‘lied’ about the black experience.

(Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998: 156)

Students:[T]he sociocultural contexts in which the students had been raised profoundly shaped their perspectives on U.S. history and the credibility of secondary sources. The African-American students not only objected to the absence of African Americans in history textbooks and classes, they also were suspicious of the absence of a perspective on the American past that took into account those which they had learned about at home and through African American-oriented media. Conversely, most of the European-American students saw little if any discontinuity between the history that they had learned about at home or through the media and that which they learned about at school.

(Epstein 1998: 408)

Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Rev. Wright Video

6. Traditional African-American civic narrative of struggle, opportunity, and obligation

African-American political discourse De facto segregated schools Morehouse and other HBCUs De jure segregated schools Freedom Schools African-American civic traditions

Martin Luther King, Jr.In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. . .

Carol Mosley-BraunI hope everyone here commits themselves to register voters and to let people know that every vote counts, in spite of the 2000 election. We have a responsibility to our children to make sure that we leave them no less opportunity, no less hope, no less freedom than our ancestors left us. And if we are to do honor to our ancestors and justice to our children, we have to come together to make certain that these people do not continue to bait and switch and take our country and take the promise of our country away from us.

Teachers in contemporary de facto African-American schools:

“You tell our children to take education for granted. Uh-uh….My forefathers worked too hard for children to have what they have today and not want it!”

“What’s stopping you? You don’t have to read by candlelight and in caves and be beaten and all of that for learning. Look at what your ancestors went through just so you could sit here. I used to tell the kids, ‘Just so you could sit here.’”

Teachers’ reflections on teaching in de jure segregated schools:

“I tell the children that they have to push and struggle for what they want….I also remind them that they have a responsibility to use their talent to benefit someone other than themselves, and that they have a responsibility to give something back to the community.”

SNCC/COFO Freedom Schools

Charles Cobb: “What they must see is the link between a rotting shack and a rotting America.”

civic and political action

Contemporary Freedom Schools

“We don’t shy away from the racism and the inequalities of power that exist, not just in Mississippi but all over the place. But we also don’t shy away from saying that if you have the guts, if you have the determination, you can and you will overcome those odds. Because there are a lot of opportunities in this country if you…engage [them].”

“Part of the reason that it is the land of opportunity is precisely because of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights movement and the things that they did to open up opportunities like ours. And to deny that, is not only wrong, not only a denial of reality but it’s also a slap in the face to the people who did sacrifice so much.”

Chris Myers, Sunflower County Freedom Project co-founder

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing:“Black National Anthem”

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;

Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Contemporary civic activists—Atiba Mbiwan:

That's why it's important really to help them [young people] understand the history of the struggle. Because again, when these great principles about democracy were written, most of us couldn’t vote. And understand that people died in order for us to exercise it….So we have a sort of responsibility.

Contemporary civic activists—Aaron Watson:

“What makes somebody American and what makes America, America?”

Well, I would say that as an African American -- in America I probably don’t define myself without that caveat -- that is, what does it mean to be an African American in America? …. I probably might extend it to other minorities in America, I think it means that you have the right to struggle…. [You have] the right and opportunity to struggle against all the various oppression, and the right and the opportunity, I would add, to succeed to the extent that you’re willing to pay the price of that success…. I’m one of the people that doesn’t think that struggling is a bad thing.

Contemporary civic activists—Aaron Watson:

I would not define myself as patriotic. I’m proud to be an American, but I’m proud to be an ‘Aaron Watson American.’ An American who’s here for the struggle, for the struggle for me, and for the struggle for a whole bunch of other people. I’m happy to be a part of that. . . .So I choose my own picture and in that picture I’m proud to be one of them.

Contemporary civic activists—Joel W.:

“What makes somebody American and what makes America, America?”

America – I don’t know. The first two words I think of are freedom and struggle…. Like there’s so many opportunities, but also struggle to get there.

Contemporary civic activists—Abed Hammoud:

So that’s what drives me, is to pave the way to a new generation of Arab-Americans. I think I’m the transitional generation…. I’m half/half. Ask me. I want to be as American as the Italian, Irish, French, everybody. And I think it will happen. Maybe in my lifetime I’ll sit here and tell stories to my grandkids how hard it was in my days….So, but to do that, some of us have to suffer. My dad even said to me one time, he said, ‘If you wait ten more years to get involved, it’ll be a lot easier for you.’ He said because the initial time people suffer a lot, and there’ll be lots of pain. I said to him, my answer was, ‘If everybody waits, then the transition will never happen.’

Contemporary civic activists—Abed Hammoud:

We need to tell these people that not only the peaceful not-rocking-the-boat Arab will make it. Not only the peaceful not-rocking-the-boat African-American will make it. Everybody will. And that’s why there should be movies about Malcolm X and all sides of his life. And about Martin Luther King. But also about Dearborn and AAPAC [Arab American Political Action Committee].

Implications/Complications: Should this narrative become the

civic narrative taught in schools? Factually accurate Potentially easy to mainstream

Can a plurality of stories and jarring perspectives fit into a coherent understanding of the American past? Quite simply, the particularities of social history can be mainstreamed readily enough by changing the governing narrative from the rise of democracy, defined in terms of electoral politics, to the struggle to fulfill the American ideals of liberty equal justice, and equality. This new narrative, arising out of a democratized historical practice, would speak to contests and conflicts over power and how such contests reflect the long struggles among various groups to elbow their way under the canopy of the nation’s founding promises. This narrative is as simple as the opening words of the Constitution: ‘to create a more perfect union. (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 2000: 101)

Implications/Complications: Should this narrative become the

civic narrative taught in schools? Factually accurate Potentially easy to mainstream Equally important for white youth

Even people who are thinking about more powerful forms of social education for children of color do not necessarily see the point of it for young people in the majority group. White children are presumed to be whole. In fact, racial privilege and class privilege bring their own ways of not seeing. . . . Denial and disremembrance call for some form of massive community-based education, a modern equivalent to Emancipation Day and similar customs. (Payne 2003: 27)

Implications/Complications: Should this narrative become the

civic narrative taught in schools? Factually accurate Potentially easy to mainstream Equally important for white youth Promotes unified civic narrative, and

hence civic unity

“The mastery of a common core of history binds us together, creates a common civic identity based on a patriotism of principles, and unites us in the shared undertaking that is both our past and our future.” (Shanker Institute: 3-4)

Implications/Complications: Should this narrative become the

civic narrative taught in schools? Factually accurate Potentially easy to mainstream Equally important for white youth Promotes unified civic narrative, and

hence civic unityBUT Risks homogenization and cooptation Ignores students’ active construction

of civic narratives Assumes single unified narrative

possible