.png)
The history we have seen unfold around us in the past couple years has revealed, more than perhaps anything else, how we as a nation have disconnected from the truth of our past. False but comforting narratives have lulled us into a state of acceptance and complacency with the injustice built into our institutions. But the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the unlawful deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others have shaken the very foundation of this country.
The nation trembles with the same seismic waves that shook the world when the Civil Rights movement overthrew the racist Jim Crow laws and when the abolitionist effort was successful in bringing about the end of slavery.
Our students can feel these vibrations, too, and we owe them a chance to develop an accurate historical awareness so that they can understand where we must go from here and how they can be a part of it.
And while it is vital that our students have an accurate grasp on how dehumanizing slavery was, we must also prioritize teaching about the resistance that fought against this oppression. If you have never sat back and allowed yourself to be in awe of just how truly monumental abolition was, take a minute.
Slavery was a colossal institution that cast its towering shadow over our country for over 200 years. It was a central component of a world-wide economic system, and the insurmountability of dismantling it was so suffocating that only a select few believed it was possible.
The abolitionists were fighting for something considered absurdly far-fetched by most of the United States, yet they were ultimately victorious. That this triumph is not presented as one of the greatest underdog stories in our nation’s history is a mystery to me.
But as educators, we have a chance to present this story in a way that changes how the next generation connects to this content. For if we are to learn anything from this historical chapter it is this: the Black past is the key to an equal future.
Bettina Love has taken the spirit of the abolitionist movement and conceptualized it into a pedagogy we can take into our classrooms.
She claims that abolitionists embodied the “imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness“ that we as educators need to take up today to fight injustice. Each of these skills played an important role in dismantling a system that was thought to be untouchable.
And these same qualities are important for our students to not only see, but learn to embody themselves! For schools are a place where students should be able to develop a vision for the world, one that is free for all people. With a blueprint for such equality, they can build off the knowledge of the people who came before us, bringing the skillset they honed in school to aid in this great cause.
Learning from the resistance of the African-American community should be central to our time in the school system because it was only through their struggle that an expansive federal institution that was deeply entrenched in our economic stability was uprooted and ultimately destroyed.
Critical scholar Joe Kincheloe reminds us that “the black past holds out great kinetic insurgent energy because it served the political function of destabilizing the existing order by revealing its social construction and its horrors.”
Just as federal institutions seem impossible to overcome today, so did slavery to the abolitionists. They did not know what we know now—that their hard work was worth it, that the risks they took for liberation were not in vain. Developing in our students a moral North Star to help them choose the path that leads to justice is part of our duty as educators, and uplifting these revolutionaries in our classrooms could play a part in solidifying their conviction to pick up the baton of the movement.
This call for Americans to face the realities of our painful history is not a new one. Kincheloe traces the history of W.E.B. Du Bois and his life-long battle to educate the U.S. population on the spirit and power of the Black community.
He notes that in 1903, Du Bois saw ”the African and African American past as a storehouse of insight for individuals struggling for equality....The blueprints for the black future, he theorized, must be built on a base of our problems, dreams, and frustrations: they will not appear out of thin air or be based exclusively on the experience of the other.”
This black future will liberate each of us from the dehumanizing force that race has been shaped into in our world today.
And so, with these tenets shaping my philosophy, I created The Case of the Absent Abolitionist for elementary students.
This FREE mystery centers around a story where the History Hacker wants to use the problem-solving skills of an abolitionist to fix a problem he’s having with the government— the pothole in front of his house. He decides to kidnap an abolitionist using his Time Machine!!
It is clear the Hacker does not realize the dire consequences of such a decision, but fortunately, the Learning League recognizes this gap in his knowledge! The League vows to stop the Hacker, but they first must determine which abolitionist he is targeting with this villainous scheme.
Your students will have to help them solve the clues related to the lives of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and more! Already sold? (It is free after all.) Get your copy here!
I consciously chose to feature more abolitionists of color to showcase the fact that African-Americans played the largest role in gaining their own freedom, a narrative that gains far less attention than the one where Lincoln swooped in and saved the day. There are also more women than men represented in this lesson largely because the movement for suffrage and abolition ran alongside each other, and there are important lessons to be gleaned from the relationship of these struggles. But more on that later!
As familiar as we are with the activism of leaders like Tubman and Douglass, our students still need to hear their stories so they can understand both the oppression these figures faced and the resistance they engaged in to save themselves and their people. It cannot be understated how much of an accomplishment dismantling slavery was, and our students need to understand that on a deep level.
While there are countless other lesser-known Black abolitionists (some of whom I certainly will feature in future lessons- stay tuned), the lived experiences of Sojourner, Harriet, and Frederick shaped the United States too drastically to be ignored.
But I still want to open your classroom up to the stories of all those who fought the good fight, so is a list of more Black abolitionists you can teach about:
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Henry “Box” Brown
Robert Hamilton
Sarah Parker Raymond
David Ruggles
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
An extensive database of Black abolitionists can be found here.
When deciding which White abolitionists to feature, I used Bettina Love’s concept of co-conspirator to guide my way because she argues that being an ally is not enough.
Love argues that ally-ship is less about standing in solidarity with people of color and more about how White people are benefitting from the ease that comes with being an ally. We’ve all shared a post about activism on social media, using the precise justice hashtag. Then, we sat back to enjoy the inevitable satisfaction that comes with each dopamine-releasing notification.
Let me be clear: this is not resistance. I’m probably being far too generous, but the chances that your post on social media makes a difference instead of being just a self-gratifying exercise are like 1 in 500. I don’t claim such things are entirely meaningless; I participate myself! But White people in particular should be very aware of the ratio of self-satisfaction to impact, especially if they are truly committed to racial justice. Love gives us reasons why we should aim higher than ally-ship:
Allies do not have to love dark people, question their privilege, decenter their voice, build meaningful relationships with folx working in the struggle, take risks, or be in solidarity with others. They just have to show up and mark the box present; thus, ally-ship is performative or self-glorifying.
She urges us to try to rise above mutually beneficial acts when standing with the oppressed and instead promotes taking on the role of a co-conspirator, a label that ”functions as a verb, not a noun.” Resisters who put the movement before themselves can be found in the present, but it is a legacy that they carry on.
In her book, Love specifically uplifts William Lloyd Garrison as a co-conspirator, one of the abolitionists featured in my freebie, and recognized how he refused to moderate his language to appease his White colleagues. (Learn more lessons from his resistance here.) His tireless work for the movement made him a great example to showcase for students, so I just had one abolitionist left to choose.
Ultimately, I went with Sarah Grimke, an abolitionist whose story I first came across when reading the fiction novel, The Invention of Wings.
Her story was especially poignant to me, not only because she walked away from the privilege she was born with in the name of justice, but also because her name is Sarah, too. I love an inspirational Sarah.
And inspirational she was— walking out on her slave-owning family, writing fiery anti-slavery pamphlets that had her run out of town, and becoming the first intersectional feminist to tour the country, speaking out against both slavery and the unequal treatment of women.
Sarah would not have become a women’s rights activist, except that the male abolitionists kept trying to keep her down, arguing that a woman speaking out for abolition hurt the cause. She realized that the fight for equal treatment of the races would have to also prioritize gender equality as well.
Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass both actively fought for both causes alongside her, which The Case of the Absent Abolitionist goes into. Your students can begin to get a sense of how different types of oppression affect people in unique ways, and they can see how people from all kinds of backgrounds used what they had to fight against such injustice.
I’m excited to be able to share this lesson with as many people as possible, so please share this post and get this freebie to all of your teacher friends! All of my lessons have been crafted with the intentionality and pedagogy that you can see in this post, and I know you care for your classroom in a similar way. Check out more of my posts and products to bring more meaning to your students today!
References:
Kincheloe, Joe L. 2008. Critical Pedagogy Primer. p. 63
Love, Bettina L. 2019. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. p. 2, p. 117
.png)
Comentários