The Responsiblity of Teachers to Embrace History

Americans are a poorly educated people, if by educated we mean well-schooled in a liberal arts curriculum that includes knowledge of history, government, geography, economics, natural science, math, literature, and the fine arts. Knowledge of history is abysmal. This has consequences for the American body politic for every current issue that arises. So what about situations that abide in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Israel, or Syria? What historical events gave rise to the prevailing circumstances in those countries? What do we need to recall from history before determining the present course of United States policy in the context of those circumstances?

The reality is that we can recall very little, because we never learned very much. Within urban America, this absence of historical knowledge obscures understanding on the part of teachers who are thrust into situations that they are tempted to see strictly in contemporary terms, on the basis of what is right before their eyes, rather than from the vantage point of a history that always contributes powerfully to the present. Teachers of African American and other inner city young people would have a much more circumspect view of things if they had better knowledge of American history in general and the subset of African American history in particular.

Turmoil that characterizes a good deal of life at the urban core arose from distinct historical circumstances. Consider the following scenario. Most African Americans have roots to people who were brought from West and Central Africa as slaves. Slavery persisted until 1865, when involuntary servitude was made illegal by the 13th Amendment. After the Civil War, the United States embarked upon a hopeful period known as Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. Reconstruction was an attempt led by people in the Republican Party to bring African Americans full powers of citizenship; in addition to the 13th Amendment, these leaders oversaw passage of the 14th Amendment bestowing the broad rights of citizenship to all adults, and the 15th Amendment bringing the right to vote to all males, regardless of race (the 19th Amendment would do the same for females in 1920).

But in the Compromise of 1877, Republicans backing Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull back federal troops from the South, in exchange for contested votes in Florida that otherwise might have gone to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the presidential election of 1876. Thus, there was no mechanism for enforcing rights of citizenship for African Americans in the South. The United States Supreme Court reinforced the misery with its >Plessy v. Ferguson< (1896) decision, opening the way for Black Codes and other measures in a system of segregation known as Jim Crow. Many African Americans could find no work except under crop sharing arrangements with plantation and other agricultural property owners, so that much of the South regressed to a state of life for African Americans that was reminiscent of the days of slavery, with additional nasty features of life such as lynching and roaming mobs such as the Ku Klux Klan.

Under these horrid conditions of life, thousands of African Americans began the Northern Migration from the South to the North, intensifying during a period from 1915 into the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Another great wave of African American migration northward ensued during the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s Midwestern cities such as Des Moines and Minneapolis began to receive in-migrants from such northern cities as Detroit, Chicago, and Gary (Indiana). Migrants to the North had found work conditions better, but they were disappointed to find social and, especially, residential, discrimination that pointed them to certain communities, where they often settled alongside eastern Europeans, southern Europeans, and Jews, people whose residences were also limited under restricted housing covenants.

With the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, there was a notable exit by middle class whites and African Americans from the urban core toward the suburbs. Those left behind were often the poorest community members, who also had to make way for the arrivals from other northern and Midwestern cities who were seeking some relief from worsening conditions of life. They needed, though, the cheap rentals and some sense of cultural continuity offered by the areas of the city settled during the restricted covenant period. But the problems that often attend those mired in conditions of poverty abided and were made worse by the phenomenon of crack cocaine about 1980 and increased gang activity during the 1980s and 1990s.

White teachers dominated the public schools at the urban core. Having been accustomed to communities that had included many poor people with middle class values and aspirations, these teachers now had to confront the problems of people whose life circumstances were more clearly those of an underclass. These teachers were overwhelmed. The school systems in which they worked were overwhelmed. Neither has recovered to this day in 2011. Urban school systems have never responded to the needs of distinctly different populations that came to dominate the inner city by the 1980s.

Until teachers of inner city students get a better grip on the history that has created the conditions of the present, and develop means of addressing those conditions, they will be hard-pressed properly to educate the children for whom they have responsibility.