As an English teacher in 2016, I spent a summer in the archives of the Brooklyn Historical Society learning about abolition and the efforts for women’s suffrage. I had in my hands the original sales receipts of young black girls from the 1840s and came away inspired to teach high school students about the legacy of slavery.
Another summer, I observed 160-year-old whip prints on the sides of live oaks in Savannah, Georgia, and learned how the Gullah/Geechee people have protected their African linguistic, culinary, and spiritual traditions since the days of slavery, due to their relative isolation in the Sea Islands, off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The NEH Summer Teacher Institutes helped me explore how Black people fought to create a future for themselves.
I had these opportunities through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supports universities and museums across the United States in creating courses for K-12 teachers in which they learn historical concepts that they can bring back to the classroom.
The institutes gave me hands-on experiences and a lot more context for books on the American Literature list, like “An Account of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” I fear that other teachers will not benefit from such opportunities, as these transformative programs are now in danger.
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Along with a series of drastic cuts, the NEH announced funding for a new round of grants linked to more conservative thinking, and The NEH website recently announced that she was only interested in “general U.S. history.” He noted that NEH-funded programs cannot promote a particular ideological viewpoint or “privilege certain groups over others.”
Gone are popular race-based teacher training programs, such as “Sailing to Freedom: New Bedford and the Underground Railroad” and “The Immigrant Experience in California through Literature and History.”
The Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) cut the NEH’s budget by $210 million and redirected that money to the federal government’s proposed project. Garden of Heroes, where future visitors will stroll through lush lawns to admire 250 life-size sculptures.
The irony? One of Americans should be in the spotlight in the Garden of Heroes is located Araminta Rossbetter known as Harriet Tubman. Even though her image is created with a hammer and chisel, the U.S. government has quietly undermined the history she represents by cutting off funding for people to learn about some of the people it hopes to engrave into monuments. Honoring him with a statue means little if we simultaneously erase him from classrooms and public memory.
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Some state legislatures and local school boards in the United States are taking a page from the federal government in limiting discussions of race and black history in classrooms, under the guise of avoiding “divisive topics” or protecting the comfort of white children. Teachers in these districts will no longer have access to federally or state-funded professional development on broader histories, even though teachers like me can attest to how the federally funded NEH Summer Institutes have helped us deepen our students’ understanding of historical events.
These cuts and changes are ill-advised and dangerous. They erase America’s diverse and complex history, undermine democracy by silencing marginalized voices and misinforming the public, and harm Black and Latinx students through a lack of representation in their programs. They also condemn future generations to repeat the mistakes of the past, because if we do not wake up to the harms of anti-Black structures like Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration, we risk reincarnating these legacies under different names.
In the absence of NEH support, we must find our own ways to enrich students’ understanding. Teachers — especially Black teachers — have long found ways to show their students the importance of understanding complex histories so that we can move from an audience that profits from Black suffering to an audience that invests in Black lives.
As an academic researcher, I study how Black teachers who teach social justice often find themselves teaching in fleeting ways, employing subversive ways of talking about histories that are ignored or erased in mainstream teaching. Professor Jarvis Givens formulated this concept in “Fugitive Pedagogy.” He opens the book with the story of history teacher Tessie McGee, who in 1933 was assigned by the all-white Louisiana Department of Education to teach from the required curriculum, which was to be openly displayed on her desk. Instead, McGee often taught passages from a book hidden in his lap. This book was by Carter G. Woodson, the father of black history..
As the federal government continues to defund, we look for hope and resistance. Last summer, several of the canceled NEH Summer Teacher Institutes mobilized for private funding or delivered their seminars virtually, refusing to let the federal government erase these stories. Today, university groups, including the American Historical Associationfight NEH budget cuts in the courts.
Building monuments does not replace responsibility. A statue can neither teach nor inspire growth, but education, especially the history of black resistance practices, can do both.
Historical figures like Harriet Tubman don’t just need monuments; they need people to understand why they are monumental.
Jessica Lee Stovall is an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of The SoulFolk collective.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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The article OPINION: Teachers are being deprived of the opportunity to learn black history and bring lessons back to the classroom appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
