Wealth of information available for enriching Black History Month lessons

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

While the School District of Philadelphia puts finishing touches on long-awaited African and African American history courses, teachers hardly need to feel impoverished for guides to making the most of the focus on African-American history this month.

In fact, PBS is unveiling a special series on slavery that it’s pitching to educators and the public for viewing this month, and crows about a “wealth of recent scholarship.”

Critics have also praised the valuable lessons that can be drawn from a quiz that is an offshoot of the recent award-winning publication, Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching: A Resource Guide for Classrooms and Communities.

“This short month is often reduced to Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and the summer of 1964, but everyday citizens struggled to make the dream a reality,” state its makers, Teaching for Change and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. “Where is their chapter in America’s history books? And how can we continue their legacy?”

The quiz is designed to provide not just “easy answers, but to inspire discussion and further inquiry,” the organizations state.

Meanwhile, in a column that appeared on blackcommentator.com, Jenice L. View, co-editor of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching, acknowledged the struggles inherent in trying to provide today’s students with an adequate grounding in such history.

“Elementary school teachers struggle to explain the Movement to young children without being simplistic about the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys,” View writes. “Humanities teachers wonder how best to use fiction, film, and art. And all teachers struggle with the demands and restrictions of state educational standards and testing.”

PBS’s four-part series, titled “Slavery and the Making of America,” premieres Feb. 9. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, it largely uses the lives of the men, women, and children slaves to tell the story of American slavery.

Its companion website, www.slaveryinamerica.org, offers visitors new materials that deal with such African American history topics as The Black Press in Antebellum America and Roads to Freedom, an “interactive exhibition that will allow students to explore the six routes most frequently taken by enslaved men and women who were seeking their liberty.”

“Combining primary-source documents, images, slave narratives, spoken narration, and original music, the exhibition conveys the enormity of the challenges slaves faced and the intelligence, courage, and persistence with which they attempted to surmount them,” the website states.

District officials had announced in January that the District would pilot a full course in African history and African-American history in four schools starting this month. While the District has since said that the programs will not begin in early February, a spokesman said the courses were likely to be put in place this school year. The schools will be Strawberry Mansion, William Penn, Carver, and Bartram (main campus).

“We have a multicultural population here, and I think it’s long overdue to have a course that is aligned with our standards to deal with African and African American history,” said Charles Bradford, who teaches at Bartram.

While Bradford already teaches African-American studies, he noted this course, “will be a more intense coverage of African history.”

Molefi K. Asante, professor of African-American Studies at Temple University, designed the courses, according to District officials. Renowned for pioneering the theory of Afrocentricity, Asante founded the first doctoral program in African American studies and is the author of more than 50 books.