Education Week - February 3, 2021 - 10

The Violent History of White Supremacy
Is Rarely Taught in Schools. It Should Be
Searing images from this month's mostly white insurrection in Washington, D.C.-including a hangman's
noose on the Capitol grounds and the Confederate flag
carried inside the U.S. Capitol-harken back to another
era when both were tools and symbols of white supremacy across the country.
But relatively few students have learned about previous sordid moments that foreshadowed this year's efforts to instill terror and violently overturn an election
such as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, widely
thought to be the only successful coup in U.S. history,
and the Tulsa Race Massacre.
New attention to what is taught in history class has
sparked debate over the approach that schools should
take.
" In secondary education, we tend to sidestep the controversy, the trauma, the pain, the suffering that's embedded in history, " said Karlos Hill, an associate professor and chair of the Department of African and African
American studies at the University of Oklahoma. " For
some to tell the truth about American history, in particular to tell the truth about Black history, would run counter to what history is supposed to do, which is to make us
more patriotic, more flag-loving and flag-waving. "
Hill created and leads the Tulsa Race Massacre Institute, a professional development program that helps
Oklahoma teachers craft lesson plans to teach about the
white mob that in 1921 stormed a Black community in
Tulsa, Okla., ravaging a thriving business district and
leaving dozens of people dead in their wake.
Oklahoma officially incorporated the massacre into
the statewide school curriculum in January 2020.
" We're trying to make sure that we don't have a whitewashed version of history, " said Amanda Solivan, the
social studies content manager for the Tulsa school district. " Clearly, our country is struggling in terms of how
we have some critical conversations about race. "
In the waning months of his presidency, Donald
Trump used his platform to warn of a " crusade against
American history " and threatened schools that adopted
a curriculum based on the New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines how slavery shaped the United
States and highlights the historical contributions of
Black Americans.
On the final full day of Trump's presidency, the White
House released the report of the presidential 1776 Commission, which argues that schools need " pro-American "
curriculum because American heritage and principles
are under attack from revisionist history. Trump did not
appoint any professional historians.
Pushing back against Trump's call for " patriotic education " well before the report's release, scholars argued
that students should learn a complete version of U.S.
history and be empowered to debate the nation's virtues
and flaws.
As soon as he took office, President Joe Biden revoked
the executive order that created the commission to promote " patriotic education " in schools.

Mike Simons/Tulsa World via AP

By Corey Mitchell

Teran Tease, 5,
watches at Oaklawn
Cemetery during a test
excavation in the
search for possible
mass graves from the
1921 Tulsa Race
Massacre on July 21,
2020.

States debate what and how to teach about
America's racist past

Teaching U.S. history has long been politicized and
racialized. What students learn and how textbooks present history varies from state to state, school district to
district, and even school to school.
The politicization ramped up last fall when Trump
threatened to cut the funding of California schools that
teach a curriculum based on the New York Times' 1619
Project.
Trump lacked the authority to cut the federal funding,
but he was not the only federal official who ranted against
the framing of the project and its use in schools.
" They want you to believe that America's institutions
10 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 3, 2021 | www.edweek.org

continue to reflect the country's acceptance of slavery
at our founding, " U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
said in a speech in July 2020. " It's a disturbed reading of
history. It is a slander on our great people. "
In a year that brought a national reckoning on the
country's history of racism and white supremacy, the
debate over how to frame history is ongoing in some
states.
In North Carolina, some Democratic members of
the state board of education are pushing to make the
social studies standards more inclusive, with more
focus on how government and economic policies have
denied opportunities for some people. The suggested
changes were sparked by the national protests over the
police killings of George Floyd and other Black people.
" When you're arguing for more inclusive standards, what you're really saying is that there are
groups of people whose stories have not been adequately told, " said James Ford, a Black man and
member of the state board.
Ford, a former social studies teacher, was the 2015
North Carolina State Teacher of the Year. He is currently the executive director of the Charlotte, N.C.based Center for Racial Equity in Education.
The North Carolina debate over the social studies standards has split along partisan lines. Board
members, including Ford, who were appointed by
the state's Democratic governor, largely support the
draft standards, which encourage American history
classes to " explain how systemic racism, oppression and discrimination ... have impacted equality
and power in America. " The current version of the
standard focuses on how groups sought to expand or
restrict access to freedom and equality. Republican
board members have raised objections.
Republican State Lt. Gov. James Robinson, who also
serves on the board of education, has labeled the efforts
to reframe the social studies standards as " divisive. "
" We need to be teaching students about their common experiences as Americans, and in order to do that,
I don't think we need to separate into groups, " said Robinson, the state's first black lieutenant governor, during
a state board meeting in early January.

The debate is ongoing.
Last January, North Carolina decided to reduce the
number of U.S. history courses required for graduation
from two to one to make room for a mandated personal
finance course. The change will condense the last 270plus years of U.S. history into one course, possibly making it more difficult to cover historical incidents such as
the Wilmington coup, when in 1898, white supremacists
violently overthrew the city's elected, racially integrated
government. It's been described as the only successful
coup d'etat in United States history.
Some historians consider the Wilmington coup a
turning point in the state and across the South that
marked a rigid return to racial segregation and widespread disenfranchisement of Black residents across
the region.
" It often is not taught because it disrupts the American narrative of meritocracy, of unfailing guaranteed
freedoms, " Ford said. " It's a desire to crop other people
out of the historical picture. "
The lasting images of the coup are of a white mob,
posing in front of the charred ruins of Wilmington's
only black newspaper.
A teacher asks her students to compare and
contrast history

Whitney Coonradt, a social studies teacher at New
Hanover High School in Wilmington, has taught her
students about the city's coup for years.
In the days after the mob stormed the U.S. Capitol,
Coonradt had her students look at images from the
riot and write about how it made them feel and what
it made them think.
She saw parallels between images of the mob in
the District of Columbia this month, with people
livestreaming the chaos and posing for pictures in
congressional offices and the congressional chambers, and the mob that posed for pictures to record
their devastation of Wilmington.
" That kind of white entitlement and justification and
overwhelming confidence in doing something that is
so blatantly illegal and against our principles. How

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - February 3, 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - February 3, 2021