Slave child manacles: American students should learn about history of slavery in the US
February is Black History Month. We would hope that historical knowledge might give all of us a better sense of who we are and where we come from.
I've taught history for 45 years now. The best way to avoid spin and bias is to offer students primary sources written in the historical eras they are studying. Since Americans have disagreed about many fundamental things from the country’s inception, we need to find documents that illuminate both sides of the arguments we've always had. Having done all that, we should hope that our students will feel things — sometimes intensely.
To say teachers should teach just the facts with no interpretation of their meaning or significance is an impossible and ridiculous notion.
Let's take the issue of race. I'm going to offer you two stories, both about Black girls, one from the recent past and one from long ago. Several years back, I took my American history students from Cape Cod Academy to Washington, D.C. One stop was the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
As you might expect, the museum had a floor devoted to American slavery. There were sample advertisements for slave auctions, lots of old photographs, and, in glass cases, artifacts from the period.
The whole exhibit featured very low light, which cast a kind of gloomy pall over the place. I was looking around to check on my students when my eyes fell on a young Black mother with her child, whose head just about reached her mother's belt. They were standing one aisle away from me and the little girl's eyes fell on a set of iron manacles so tiny they must have been made for a child of maybe 6 years old. A small length of chain connected the iron bands.
I looked up at just the moment when the little girl's eyes fell upon the manacles, and she froze for a second as she made them out in the dim light. Her mom was seeing the same thing. She looked up at her mother and in a shocked little voice said, “You mean they…” And then she dissolved in tears and buried her face in her mother's dress. The woman held her gently, one hand behind her back and one buried in her hair, and they just stood like that for the longest time.
The child may have heard about slavery before but seeing glass cases filled with implements of confinement and torture hit her like a truck. It made her cry.
Some critics of history as it is taught today are fretting about how the teaching of slavery might make white children feel. I don't hear them asking how the refusal to teach our history honestly might make little Black children feel.
I have a final story for you from back in the colonial days, something I remember reading long ago that stuck in my mind. Apparently, an English woman needed to get to the colonies in a huge hurry. It forced her to take the next available ship, a slave ship bound for the American Southland. The weather was decent, and she spent a good deal of time sitting on a deck chair, enjoying the breeze and writing in her journal. Thus, she became a witness to a tiny drama.
Slaves were brought up on deck periodically to catch a little fresh air and be fed. One female child clamped her jaws shut and refused to eat. Force was attempted with no result. So, the girl was informed that she would be tied to the mast and beaten if she did not eat. But she kept her jaws clamped — and was beaten with a whip.
Still, she would not eat.
The child was informed her mother would be beaten if the child did not eat. She wouldn't, and so the mother was also tied and lashed. The child was then offered a spoon and shook her head, whereupon the enraged captain seized the girl, dragged her to the railing and threw her into the sea.
All of this, the white English gentlewoman recorded from her chair in the sun. She ended her entry with these words: “If you had observed the mother's grief at the loss of her child, you might — for just a moment — have thought she was human.”
Had she acknowledged the humanity of the African child, she would have been forced to face the inhumanity of all who profited from slavery, including herself. That same reluctance still troubles us — even now. After years of reflection, I have come to believe it is the heart of our problem with race.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Black History Month: Students must be taught history of US slavery
