Despite book bans, fired teachers and billionaires’ attacks on diversity, many schools have still trotted out teaching plans for Black History Month, complete with superficial lessons on Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. That’s an easy way to check a box: Black history taught.
That’s why I dread February’s designation as Black History Month. Its perfunctory tales of a handful of well-known Black Americans leave students with a wrongheaded idea — that the history of Black folk in this country is slight and unrelated to the main story.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no American history without the history of Black people, who first touched these shores in 1619, before the Mayflower landed at Cape Cod. We were crucial to the development of what became the United States. Anyone who willfully deletes us from that story is simply engaging in fraud.
Yet, that is what many conservative activists and their allies are doing. As legitimate revisionist historians, ambitious journalists and progressive activists have started to challenge traditional American myths — from the sainthood of Thomas Jefferson to the so-called honor of the Lost Cause — Donald Trump and his right-wing followers have responded with fury, desperate to hold on to a more white-centered version of the nation’s past.
Trump entered the fray after journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones oversaw the ambitious 1619 Project at The New York Times, a 2019 multipart series that emphasized the importance of chattel slavery, that grotesque institution, in the founding and economic growth of the United States. In response, Trump assembled the 1776 Commission, a group of activists masquerading as historians, to attack the series. He vowed to ban the project from school curricula, claiming it taught students to “hate their country.”
His allies have followed with disruptions to classrooms across the nation. Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governorship of Virginia in 2021 after a campaign focused on banning certain school materials, including “Beloved,” a brilliant novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. When he was still running for the GOP nomination for the presidency, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to out-Trump his rival with a sweeping statewide campaign to ban books, silence teachers and even take over a public college deemed too progressive. Several GOP-dominated state legislatures have passed laws aimed at restricting “divisive” (whatever that means) content in the classroom.
Their ire is aimed not only at the real history that involves Black folk but also any teaching of the cruelty of white explorers and settlers toward indigenous people, who were ruthlessly exploited and exterminated. The nation’s founding and its growth as a fledgling democracy were built on violence and plunder as well as extraordinary promises of freedom and self-governance. That’s the reality, and schools should teach all of it.
According to the MAGA-addled crowd, though, any lessons that dare to touch on the truth about U.S. history leave white children cowering in shame. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, one of several Republican governors who have signed legislation outlawing the teaching of “critical race theory,” has claimed that such lessons were “running amok.” (Actual critical race theory is a college-level course not taught in elementary or secondary classes.) He said, “Children are dragged to the front of the classroom and are coerced to declare themselves as oppressors, that they should feel guilty because of the color of their skin, or that they are inherently a victim because of their race.” It should be noted that Reeves could not name a single school where such a thing had really happened — likely because that scenario was simply a figment of his imagination.
As a college lecturer who has also lectured in high schools, I have never seen any white students who seemed ashamed or felt guilty about the history of their ancestors. Rather, they seem to get the point of teaching history, which remains as true as when philosopher George Santayana wrote it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Students cannot continue the path toward a more perfect union without that full history. They deserve that instead of a whitewashed version that is more fiction than fact.
Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.
