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.
