By Marian Wright Edelman
At the February 13 Senate confirmation hearing on Linda McMahon’s nomination to become Secretary of Education, among the questions about withholding funding from schools teaching some lessons on gender and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) pressed the specific question of whether public schools that offer classes in Black history might now be at risk of losing federal funding. Her initial answer was “I’m not quite certain,” adding that she “would like to take a look at these programs and fully understand the breadth of the executive order and get back to you on that.” In the middle of Black History Month this was yet another stark reminder of what has always been at stake in the debate over whether to teach or erase Black history.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, “the Father of Black History,” was born in Virginia in 1875 to parents who had both formerly been enslaved. When his family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, they were close to Frederick Douglass High School, one of the rare high schools open for Black students, but he remained largely self-taught while working in the local coal mines to help support his family first. He finally had the opportunity to enroll at Douglass and attend school full time when he was 20. In between teaching and school leadership jobs that followed, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Berea College, a second bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and ultimately became the second Black scholar after W.E.B. DuBois to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1912. But as a historian and educator, everything in his formal experience showed him Black history was “overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” He was deeply alarmed that as a result so few people, including Black people, knew anything at all about Black people’s achievements, and he dedicated his professional life to correcting this.
Dr. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (today the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) in 1915, and established the first observance of “Negro History Week” in 1926. Before the observance grew to a full month, he chose the second week of February to coincide with Frederick Douglass’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays. Dr. Woodson understood just how critical it was to claim our rightful place in the history books and teach future generations about the great thinkers and role models who came before us. As he said: “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.” But he also understood that this was much more than just an academic discussion. He saw the connection between erasing Black history and assaulting Black bodies, and said the crusade to teach the truth about Black history was even “much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?”
In his seminal book The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Woodson also explained that providing a standard “mis-education” to young Black children in the school system—“the thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies”—was a calculated and insidious attack: “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.” He believed teaching students about Black history and Black accomplishments was a crucial corrective step.
Most of us now understand the wisdom behind teaching not just Black children but all children Black history in our increasingly multicultural nation and world. Once again: Black, Native American, Latino, Asian American, LGBTQ, immigrant, and women’s history are all American history. None of our children and young people can afford miseducation and ignorance about the rainbow of others around them—or forced attempts to make them believe their own history and existence are subversive, marginal, inferior, or only worthy of the back door.