Are you prepared to put a primary source in context when teaching Black histories? I am asking this question because guidance on how teachers should respond to racially charged moments is an overlooked part of teacher training.
One vivid memory from my years teaching 9th grade African American history in Philadelphia comes from the first day of my Abraham Lincoln unit. Students read a 1855 letter from Lincoln to his close friend Joshua Speed. “You know I dislike slavery,” Lincoln wrote, “I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the Constitution, in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down.”
Every year I taught the course, more than one of my Black students squirmed in their chairs and protested, “I’m not a creature!”
I often used this challenging moment as a teaching opportunity by asking my students, “Wait, but he said he hates slavery, isn’t that a good thing? Wait, then again, isn’t referring to Black people as animals racist? What y’all think? Is Lincoln being racist in this jawn or is that just how people talked back then?”
What I did in that moment was start to racially contextualize the source. What do I mean by that? I define “racialized contextualization” as using racial-literacy skills to understand a primary source in its original context. An important part of this context is the problem of primary sources in Black history: While there are valuable archives of Black perspectives throughout American history, the voices that shape our historical record are disproportionately those of powerful white people.
Social studies teachers are familiar with contextualization and encouraging students to think like a historian. Indeed, in recent years, I started to keep the Digital Inquiry Group’s Historical Thinking Chart next to my desk. Separated into categories of sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading, this chart guides teachers on what to consider when using primary sources.
Some teachers, too, are familiar with racial literacy and have the ability to foster productive classroom discussions about race.
What I am interested in is where these two skills—contextualization and racial literacy—meet when using primary sources in teaching Black history specifically. How can we effectively teach Black history when there is a dearth of available primary sources from the Black perspective? How do we discover the undiscovered?
Teachers must explain how the lack of easily accessible primary sources makes it difficult to fully corroborate the primary sources we do have (contextualization) and discuss Black emotions that would possibly exist within the voices missing from our historical archive (racial literacy).
Back in that Philadelphia classroom, I used to ask my students who Lincoln sent that letter to and when. These standard questions about perspective and historical circumstances prompted my students to discuss Lincoln’s overlooked racism and moral compass.
Yet, questions solely around historical thinking never fully led me to where I wanted to take students: the history of power and racism. To racially contextualize Lincoln with accuracy, we need to include the voices of Black people who supported him—and those who did not. (Even Frederick Douglass changed his mind about Lincoln over the course of his life.) I was prepared on how to counter my students’ reaction because of my own regular practice of what Howard Stevenson calls as racial mindfulness.
Black historical contention—the principle that to effectively teach Black history, we must acknowledge conflict within and in-between Black communities—requires that we also teach the voices of everyday Black folk. What was the Black mom at home saying about Lincoln while her husband fought in the Civil War? What did people like Emilie Davis, a free Black woman attending anti-slavery meetings in Philadelphia, think? Most of the time such perspectives have not been preserved, at least not in sources readily available to teachers.
I was recently reminded of the need for this racialized contextualization when designing a lesson plan about the story of Isaac Woodard Jr., a veteran who was beaten blind by a police officer several hours after returning home from World War II.
After spending several hours searching online for primary sources and example lesson plans that included Black perspectives, I discovered that most existing resources included public statements from President Harry Truman and Orson Welles’ radio coverage of the beating at the exclusion of first-person accounts, following the attack.
Teaching these two perspectives alone would not reflect the full picture of what happened after he was beaten, instead shifting the focus of a lesson to the moral concerns of “white saviors” rather than on Isaac Woodard Jr. as a person with his own feelings or on the Black activists who publicized the injustice. Not one of the lesson plans I found online included a source from the perspective of the Black community’s rage or sorrow at the violent trauma. As Brittany Jones describes, these racialized emotions “can also influence how educators teach history and how students engage with and understand history.”
In addition to learning about Black activists and their allies, it is important to me that students learn about how Black folks felt, including Woodward himself, about such an event or how they supported Black men like him. Who taught him to live his life as a blind Black man? Who in the Black community helped him in the next five decades of his life?
These stories of resilience are just as significant as the actions taken by prominent white figures—but they are often missing from the primary sources readily available to teachers. To fully racially contextualize a primary source, teachers should highlight for their students the missing artifacts in Black history. Discussing the imbalance of whose voices were preserved and elevated in history will help Black students express their own emotions today.
Read more from educators on advancing Black history education.
