How the Struggle to Preserve Black History Is Repeating Itself
Author: Michelle Russell
The Association for the Study of African American Life, the association that founded African American History month more than a century ago, is using its annual conference to once again take up the charge to ensure history is taught truthfully in the face of current “anti-woke” efforts.
When Sen. Chris Murphy questioned President Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, during the Senate’s Feb. 13 confirmation hearing, Murphy asked how McMahon would expect public schools to interpret the Trump administration’s executive order commanding federal agencies, including the Department of Education, to eliminate grants to organizations and entities that support DEI. “My son is in a public school. He takes a class called ‘African American History,’” Murphy said, adding that the class has been taught for decades. “If you’re running an African American History class, could you perhaps be in violation of this executive order?” That was a question, McMahon replied, that she would need to look into.
For the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) — established 110 years ago by Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month — questioning whether African American history should be part of public-school curriculum is a matter of history is repeating itself. “You can see mirrors of what’s happening now at different points in history,” Augustus Wood, a member of the ASALH executive council, told Convene. “When Dr. Carter G. Woodson first founded the association, he was facing similar threats that we’re facing. When Dr. Woodson first proposed African American scholars taking hold of African American history, it was at a time when he was combating this very whitewashed history that often depicted African Americans as being childlike, docile, and uncivilized” until Americans enslaved them and gave them skills, he said, “that they otherwise would not have gotten — that kind of stuff, misinterpretation and miseducation.”
An African American history scholar and author of the soon-to-be-published book Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression Under Gentrification, Wood is assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spoke with Convene in his role as program chair for the ASALH’s 110th annual conference to be held Sept. 24-28 in Atlanta, Georgia.
“We’re going through the exact same thing today because the similarities between both moments is that those in power in the current administration, as well as multiple groups in the local and state levels, are adamant about removing African American history — a ‘war on truth’ is what I call it,” Wood said. “The idea that learning African American history is detrimental to the empowerment of people is one of the grossest lies that we’ve ever been told. In fact, the studies show that when African Americans, when Latinx Americas — even white Americans — learn true history, it gives them a better sense of self, it gives them a better sense of community, and it gives them a better sense of pride in [understanding] the history of the world.”
Wood said that he thinks “the biggest challenge we face right now is a redistribution of resources away from African American history as well as federal, state, and local spaces that belong to the public to either [provide] African American history or to open spaces for people to be able to learn about their own past, to study about it.”
Planning for Atlanta
Confronting that challenge is helping to inform the agenda for the upcoming conference in Atlanta, which is themed around African Americans and labor. “Our conference is about both celebrating and learning history,” Wood said, “but also using that history as a functional tool to understand our present-day predicament.” ASALH opened the call for session proposals in January, and “since then, we’ve gotten a flurry of panelists who are incredibly excited about, not just labor, but talking about and collectivizing our issues around African American history — how to protect it, how to expand it. We are engaging in a Freedom School movement at ASALH right now, which has got a lot of different groups around the country incredibly excited that we’re essentially going back to the roots of what Dr. Carter G. Woodson wanted — which is to control our own history and use our resources to deliver a history that empowers people.”
The ASALH Freedom Schools, patterned after the Freedom Schools first established in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, are free, community-based Saturday programs dedicated to teaching “the truthful history of Africans and African Americans in the founding, formation, and development of American society and culture” to any child in kindergarten to 12th grade, according to the ASALH Manasota branch in Florida, a state where six new ASALH Freedom Schools recently have been added. The ASALH Freedom Schools — more new branches are emerging in Dallas, Indianapolis, and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois — help fill educational gaps for Black students, according a recent post in Word in Black, a collaboration of 10 Black news publishers.