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THE UPRISING MARCHES ON
Textbooks Watered Down the Civil Rights Movement. They Could Do the Same to Black Lives Matter.
Too often our schools gloss over the intricacies and struggles of Black liberation
This piece is part of The Uprising Marches On, a package on what’s next for the movement for Black lives.
If LaGarrett King were to write a high-school U.S. history textbook, he’d create a unit on Black Lives Matter. It would start with the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. “Then Black Lives Matter enters the lexicon,” King said. “The death of Michael Brown kind of explodes it all. George Floyd obviously will be in there.”
But that’s as far as King, a social studies education professor at the University of Missouri and founder of the Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education, would predict. “We’re smack dab in the middle of it,” he said — referring to this current 21st-century racial reckoning.
Post-2016 American seems tailor-made for “Mercury retrograde” designation: Outbreaks. Lockdowns. Volatile economic markets. White nationalists consorting with government officials. Police killings. Uprisings. The toppling of Confederate monuments across the country. Pushes for reparations.
“Sometimes I think about this, and I don’t understand how things changed, where [the ubiquity of] ‘Black Lives Matter’ is now feasible. I had someone say ‘Happy Juneteenth’ to me [who likely didn’t know of the commemoration before]. Now all of a sudden, everybody’s a revolutionary, which is really weird to me,” said King.
How deep and lasting such changes might be is anyone’s guess, but will they make it into textbooks that tomorrow’s young citizens will read?
King hopes today’s contestations about anti-Black violence and African American political power will appear in future classroom materials. He’s just not sanguine about just how they’ll be depicted in textbooks.
