On Juneteenth & History

When I first began teaching 8th grade Civics, the Summer reading assignment was an Annette Gordon Reed essay on Juneteenth and its history as a Texas-based celebration of freedom and Black joy.  That was followed with an essay written by historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, who discussed the history of Confederate memorials.  Brundage’s work pointed out just how many of those monuments had been built either in the 1920s, at the start of the Great Migration and amidst the resurgence of the KKK, or in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling.  The readings were followed by a writing prompt;  students had two options.  They could identify how the United States should memorialize and mark our history of slavery and consider how the nation should celebrate the end of formal slavery.  Or they could make a proposal about what - if anything - should be done with Confederate memorials.

President Biden’s declaration of a federal Juneteenth holiday in 2021 - a very welcome event to my mind - made for a teachable moment in class.  Now we read and learn about Juneteenth in our discussions of the Civil Rights struggle that commenced in Reconstruction and continues today.  I remind my students that there is no national monument or memorial to the end of slavery or, for the that matter, the lives of enslaved people.  We discuss that truth even as we consider the abundance of Confederate memorials that litter the nation.  I’ve watched as Juneteenth has become more and more mainstream - and, quite frankly - corporate.  I envision a time in our not-too-distant future when the same Republicans who expressed skepticism about Juneteenth embrace it with press releases and social media posts that imply they have always been on board with Civil Rights for Black Americans.  That is what has happened with MLK Day, where the Republicans who vigorously opposed making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday have come full circle and seemingly embrace King, even as they vote to gut the Voting Rights Act.

The blatant hypocrisy to be found in these GOP declarations highlights the path forward in my mind.  There is a continued need for a rigorous and mindful Civics education, one that truly wrestles with our history.  We must acknowledge that many of the good things about our nation’s story exist alongside the very worst sins of humanity.  Until we understand that, we cannot celebrate in good conscience.  I write this not to take away from the current celebrations of Juneteenth, which are a long-overdue, but to remind us that the story of our past must be told in full if we are to truly fulfill our potential as a nation and a people.

Hope, Fear and Everything in Between

I can’t be the only person who felt that the past few days have been 96 hours of time filled with a historical and political significance greater than such a small amount of hours can rightfully contain.  As long as I’ve taught, I’ve explained to my students that political time is different than regular time, in that significant political events can happen suddenly and that the conflagration and reverberation of them can consume our attention for far longer than the moment lasted.  At the same time, a hard month or a year can feel interminable as you live through it though as historical time such days can often amount to less than a hill of beans.

Both of these things are true, though rarely at once.  And then along comes January 2021 to shake all that what we think we know.  Today I remind myself that there are some things - important things - that we do know.  

Some - perhaps many - of the January 6 Insurgents were bent on ugly violence toward a democratically elected government.  They call themselves patriots even as they fly the flag of a racist - and failed - rebellion.  That is not patriotism.

Donald Trump, a man who won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote, deluded himself into believing that meant something.  After a lifetime of self-absorption he never once considered anything, least of all an oath to uphold the Constitution, more important than his own desires.  Our democracy will pay a price for this far longer than he will govern.

Courage, in the form of some members of Congress and their staffs, some Capitol Hill police officers, and some of our leaders, can inspire.

Other so-called leaders inspire only contempt as they wickedly flee the sinking ship that is the Trump Administration.  Worse yet are those who defend it, hopeful that their own ambitions can find fruition in what remains of the Trump coalition.  Shame on them.  

Cultivating democracy is hard work but the work of us all, undertaken with hope and sustained through our effort and engagement, even as that is hard.  Especially when it is difficult.  President-elect Biden says we can do hard things and we can.  Indeed, we must.

My Back Deck Desk

I am immersed in prepping my Civics and Citizenship class and rather than sit at my desk, I’ve taken operations outside whenever possible.  So it was that Sunday found me working on the back deck  in the afternoon, after spending much of my morning on the front porch.

Staycation is the name of the game this Summer and while I will miss the adventure of seeing someplace new, I am grateful for the blessings of this back deck, where I can enjoy the sunshine and the shade and even fit in a bit of a nap.

July 4

I love my country with a depth that has fostered a career spent teaching about its history and politics.  I am a patriot who named her only child after the man whose words we celebrate on this 4th of July day.  

But I am no “Love my country right or wrong” patriot.  I am an “I love my country enough to right the wrongs” patriot.  This year, a year determined to teach us some very important lessons, it seems appropriate to pause and think again abut the patriot I am.

I’ve taught it so much that I know the preamble to the Declaration of Independence by heart.  I read it several times a year; I think about it often.  I teach the Declaration in terms of that preamble and I never fail to be stirred by the claim that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  I think of the power of such a claim when it was made in 1776 and as we try to live by it now.  I teach my students that every right Americans subsequently demanded to have recognized, be it the right to be free from slavery, to vote, to marry whomever we please, was recognized in those words and was there all along.  

That’s not all that I teach because I know how often we fell short of that stirring claim; I know how often we still fall short of it.  I teach my students about both of those truths.  I teach Frederick Douglass’s words about the 4th of July.  I teach them about the racism baked into our founding and built into our firmament.

Then I remind them that we must be patriots who seek a better nation for all of us.  I remind them that all we need do is return to the words of the Declaration and let that truth guide our way.  

June Book Report: The Warmth of Other Suns

This month, I re-read Isabel Wilkerson’s splendid The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.  I first read the book when it was published in 2010 and the stories and history Wilkerson wove quickly inserted themselves into both my understanding of our national history and my teaching of it.  I never forgot the descriptions of the journeys that Wilkerson describes and when I began to plan the Civics and Citizenship class I will teach 8th graders in the coming school year, I knew that Wilkerson’s book would be a part of it.

At over 500 pages, it’s rather more than the 8th grade is ready for all at once.  But earlier this month I commenced a re-read to choose sections from the book to serve as the foundation for the summer reading I will assign the class.  In any setting, the book is worth reading.  In this moment of historical time, as the growing Black Lives Matter has absorbed our national interest to a greater degree than it ever has before, it was a particularly powerful re-read.

Wilkerson writes like a journalist but thinks like an historian and the combination ensures that the reader flies through the pages.  When I did put the book down, my mind was consumed with the arc of the story she was telling.

My Civics and Citizenship class will start with the second founding of the United States, the one accompanied by the Reconstruction amendments.  Though the Great Migration doesn’t “officially” start until the second decade of the 1900s, the seeds of it were planted by those amendments and our subsequent national failure at the task of rebuilding a national union with liberty and justice for all.  My class will take itself to the 1970s and the close of the Great Migration.  At every stop along the way, Wilkerson’s book will accompany the story we will learn.

Parts of the book will be required reading for my 8th graders.  I do this in the explicit hope that as they grow into their citizenship, they will read the rest of the book on their own.  

Juneteenth

I vividly remember the history class where I first learned about Juneteenth.  I was an undergraduate at UCLA - so it was the late ‘80s - and there was a passing reference to June 19 Black community celebrations in Texas in a collection of essays about the end of slavery.  I read them for a post-Civil War/Reconstruction American history class and the reference caught my attention.

I recall thinking that I had never heard of it before; that the professor in the history class never mentioned it himself.  At the time, I was a Californian through and through and that Southern history seemed distant from the world in which I lived.

Within a few years, I had moved to Nashville and Southern and Civil War history was everywhere I looked.  The more I explored the locations of historical events; the more I read the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the more Juneteenth stood out in my mind, as both an idea and a celebration.  It stood out as a cultural reflection of the history I was thinking about and sought to understand and it also stood out for its absence in the world of mainstream American culture.

In the last few years, Juneteenth has attracted more attention.  This year, in the explosion of real and, it seems, enduring interest in taking on the challenges of repairing the years of systemic inequality that is modern America, Juneteenth is at the center of our current dialogue.  If we want to make real the pledge that Black lives matter, and I certainly do, it’s long overdue that we think about our national history in terms of what’s been neglected, marginalized, or just plain left out.

For my Civics and Citizenship 8th grade class, summer reading will include a reflection on Juneteenth (this one, by Annette Garden Reed, which is both personal and historically rich), and some more readings around the idea of what history gets monuments, what gets ignored, and what that difference tells us about our national identity.

At minimum, my 8th graders will know and understand Juneteenth well before the age when I first knew of it.  At maximum, well, when you know that truth of your nations’s history, then you know the challenges that lie before you.  You learn what kind of citizen you would like to become.  That’s why 8th graders need to know our history.  And knowing about Juneteenth seems like a very good place to start.

Civics and Citizenship

For most of my time as a middle school teacher, I’ve taught at 7th grade history class that spans the time from the founding to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.  I know the period well and I like to study and teach it.  I’ve used the point at which the Constitution is adopted to insert some Civics into the mix but the focus has been more on early American history.

Last fall, as my colleagues and I were thinking about revisions of our curriculum, I knew that a change I wanted to make was to insert more civics education into the experiences of my middle schoolers.  We decided that we could revise 8th grade history to take on this challenge.

So I will be teaching a new course come the fall, a class to be called Civics and Citizenship.  We’ll explore American history from the vantage o=point of the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution.  The course is driven by the meaning of those amendments and the ways in which the ending of slavery and the requirement of equal protection of the law seeks to both fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and makes our Constitution a meaningful and important document.

Since I first conceived of the idea behind the course, I’ve been reading and thinking about it.  This summer, as I’m on the runway to the launch of the class,  I am organizing lessons, reading assignments, and pulling together the documents that will be the foundation of the course.  As I do that, I’m thinking about what Civics and Citizenship mean and for the next year, as the course is launched, I will record my thoughts here.

I’m excited to create and teach this course and even more excited to do it now, when thinking about our history and what it means to be American is as important a task as it ever was.