Let鈥檚 talk about race. This is the clarion call voiced by educators dedicated to social justice. But you don鈥檛 have to care about fighting the good fight to heed this command. It鈥檚 more than enough to just want students to be able to understand the world around them. From Ferguson, Mo., to Charleston, S.C., voter ID laws to Donald Trump鈥檚 build-a-wall immigration-policy platform, students will never make any sense of the United States today, so long as teachers adopt a colorblind approach.
One hundred years ago this fall, Carter G. Woodson, the 鈥渇ather of black history,鈥� incorporated the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Washington. His work affirms the centrality of race to American society and the U.S. history curriculum, but also challenges the assumption that the best way to teach race is through a social-justice lens.
Woodson was passionately devoted to racial justice, an active member of the NAACP鈥檚 Washington branch. He was equally committed to the pursuit of truth through rigorous historical research. The NAACP, in Woodson鈥檚 view, was a 鈥減ropaganda鈥� organization that used 鈥渇ire-eating agitation鈥� tactics to pursue vital policy initiatives such as anti-lynching legislation. In contrast, Woodson saw his own association as an , offering, in his words, 鈥渘o special brand for the solution of the race problem except to learn to think.鈥�
Woodson founded the association at a time of unprecedented popular and 鈥渟cientific鈥� racism. The film 鈥淏irth of a Nation"鈥擠.W. Griffith鈥檚 paean to the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy鈥攚as completing its record-breaking opening run at theaters across the country. Best-selling history textbooks damned blacks as eternally inferior and railed against the criminal outrages of 鈥淣egro rule鈥� during Reconstruction. Woodson鈥檚 own former professors at Harvard, where he had earned his Ph.D., turned out publications that referred to blacks as savages, strangers to the nation, and natural slaves.
As the only professional historian whose parents had been born into slavery, Woodson was determined to correct the historical record鈥檚 grotesque racial caricatures and biased accounts. The failure to 鈥渇athom the Negro mind鈥� was the fatal flaw of the standard American-history narrative, according to Woodson. His association set out to show what African-Americans had 鈥渢hought and felt and done,鈥� with the ambitious goal of formulating a new U.S. history free of 鈥渂ias, race-hate, and religious prejudice.鈥�
From a small row house in Washington, Woodson spearheaded a movement that reached all the way from the campus of Howard University to one-room schoolhouses in Alabama. The cause was greatly advanced by the creation of an academic journal in 1916, the publication of the flagship textbook The Negro in Our History in 1922, and the advent of Negro History Week (today鈥檚 Black History Month) in 1926. Black educators鈥攊ncluding college presidents and professors, elementary school librarians, and high school history teachers鈥攆ormed the backbone of the movement. They all shared Woodson鈥檚 conviction that the study and celebration of black history鈥檚 鈥渃old-blooded facts鈥� could reconfigure the racial landscape by building black pride and reducing white prejudice.
From [Carter G.] Woodson鈥檚 point of view, race was an essential element of U.S. history. To ignore it would be like teaching biology without mentioning carbon.
We can thank Carter G. Woodson and his colleagues for changing the tone and complexion of our history textbooks. They inducted black figures such as Harriet Tubman into our pantheon of national heroes and banished the most egregious racial stereotypes, such as the happy-go-lucky slave. The real power of Woodson鈥檚 movement, though, was the insistence that black history was our history. With the incorporation of African-American experiences into the nation鈥檚 history, the color line emerged as a principal theme. Following stringent scholarly standards, Woodson and his colleagues painstakingly revealed the racial divide that has prevented African-Americans from full participation in the social, economic, and political life of the country.
The 鈥淣egro history鈥� movement gave us a more accurate portrait of U.S. history, one that did not shy away from exploring the darkest corners of our past. Woodson and his colleagues wrote the first textbooks that addressed the history of racial violence, including the subjection of enslaved black women 鈥渢o the whims and desires of white men鈥� and the 鈥渁bysmal horror of lynching.鈥� Woodson himself used the word 鈥渢errorism鈥� to describe the brutal measures used to keep blacks in their place.
From Woodson鈥檚 point of view, race was an essential element of U.S. history. To ignore it would be like teaching biology without mentioning carbon. Even so, he would have some serious reservations about attaching the study of race in schools to the struggle for social justice. Woodson lived through a time when black activists and intellectuals had fierce debates about how to address the 鈥渞ace question"; answers ranged from Marcus Garvey鈥檚 call for African-Americans to 鈥済o back to Africa,鈥� to exhortations to join the Communist Party鈥檚 proletarian revolution. One individual鈥檚 dream of social justice was another鈥檚 dystopian nightmare.
Competing visions of social justice aside, Woodson was acutely aware of the threat that partisan views posed to academic scholarship. He used the term 鈥渉istory made to order鈥� to characterize the use of facile or shoddy historical arguments to prop up polemical positions. His worry was that history鈥檚 nuances and ironies would be lost in the rush to achieve a particular political objective. Taking sides, Woodson understood, would make the already elusive quest for truth downright unattainable.
Did Woodson want his students to go out and change the world? Absolutely. But he was convinced that they first had to grasp the 鈥渇acts underlying their present situation.鈥� And he was even more adamant that the primary job of an educator was to illuminate rather than to advocate. If the American public concludes that teaching race is merely an extension of left-wing social activism, it will never gain any real traction in our public schools. It will be to the right what creationism is to the left: propaganda masquerading as a curriculum. The most compelling reason to teach race, then, is not to make a difference in the world, but to understand it.
