Teachers and students gathered at the Robinson-Shuba statue for a Youngstown, Ohio Teach Truth Rally on August 28, 2021 as part of the national Teach Truth Day of Action.
Remarks by Michael Charney
United States senator C. J. Prentiss and former president of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus would have been inspired by the two young Black women who spoke about the March on Washington because she attended that March 58 years ago. And I know, I know her well. She would be crying because she would know that the next generation was taking the torch, fighting for equality and freedom. Thank you very much.
Today, there are over 40 events across the United States. And I’m representing the Zinn Education Project. And they call it from Anchorage, Alaska, to Athens, Georgia. These 40 events were yesterday, today, and tomorrow at places that represent either places that been buried in history, or in this case, buried in history but a real positive development. One of the more interesting ones is in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, where hundreds of educators are going to gather where slave ships left Rhode Island to remind people slavery and white supremacy aren’t only part of the South but were also in the North.
I would like to especially thank Heather and all of the organizers. It took a lot of guts to stand up and be willing to put in the work for that. I hope you had a chance to read her op-ed in the Youngstown Vindicator. It was really interesting and historically accurate. . . Read it and send it to as many people as possible because as the struggle begins to get rid of these two bills, there’s gonna be a lot of lies.
And the more people who can understand what we’re really about by reading this editorial op-ed and a whole bunch of other stuff, we can win the day because we know that what motivates these people through these laws, if you’re afraid of the 26 million people who rose up to support an end to police brutality in the wake of George Floyd, the largest protest in the history of the United States, scared those people committed to white supremacy. We can really make a difference.
I want to tell a story to talk about the truth. I was walking my dog this morning. So, I really didn’t plan this a long time ago. His name is Thurgood Marshall, named after the first attorney for the NAACP, in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and also the first African American Supreme Court justice. We were walking my dog and ran into someone. And the fellow mentioned that he was Cherokee, almost complete Cherokee. He told us a story about truth. In the casinos in Oklahoma, they will not take a $20 bill. Does anyone know why? Why won’t they take a $20 bill? Anyone know why they don’t take a $20 bill? Why?
Speaker from Audience: It has Andrew Jackson on it.
The Trail of Tears. Wonderful, a teacher, finally someone who knows. And so isn’t that amazing as a way of teaching the next generation, we won’t accept the $20 bill. In reference, I want to tell a few more stories, especially in light of this interracial tension.
We all heard about John Brown. He’s not erased from history. But up until recently, he was just seen as a fanatic. Just how can any white person really want to liberate slaves if you’re not crazy? Now historiography has changed and he’s pictured as a real fighter for racial equality. But there was something called the Lost Cause. In the 1890s, the South freaked out about the fact that Black people were making progress through Reconstruction, and so they had to justify why the Ku Klux Klan should beat them all up and pass all these laws. And so they invented stuff. One thing they invented was that slavery was pretty good. Black people were incapable of actually changing things and improving life. But what they also did is erase history.
And there was a man who was born eight miles from my house in Kingsville, Ohio. His house is still there, with a marker on it on State Route 193. His name was Albion Tourgée. Albion Tourgée fought in the Union Army and then decided he wanted to fight for African American rights. So he left Ohio, went to North Carolina, and became — a derisive term but an accurate term — a carpetbagger. And there, he wrote the North Carolina Constitution that included free public education for everyone through college. He became a judge. He was run out of the state by the Ku Klux Klan, then became an advisor to the presidents. I’m sure no one heard of him because he’s been erased. Then he became the lawyer for Homer Plessy in the Plessy v. Ferguson case and develops a theory: equal rights under the law.
He was so threatening to the white supremacists and the believers in the Lost Cause, that in this famous movie called Birth of a Nation, which basically said, the Klan saved the South, the white South, was shown in the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, they had a whole — it was a silent movie — they had a little section about how bad Albion Tourgée was. But he was so influential in the 19th century, that he was one of the people who gave a eulogy for Frederick Douglass. But he’s been erased from history. And that’s what the fight for truth is. It’s not only to deal with things like the fact that the U.S. Constitution allowed the slave trade for 20 years, the Declaration of Independence had a clause that said, “We gotta rebel against the king because he’s stirring up the savages.” Right in the declaration, in order to attack white settlers. And these are the types of things that these two laws did. They want to make a certain kind of history so that children won’t grow up to be future John Browns or Albion Tourgées or Martin Luther Kings or some of the organizers in the South. They want them to grow up and basically say, “White cops are always right no matter what the situation is” and “Teachers who want to teach the truth should be fired.”
So we are part of a national resistance movement, not just saying this is wrong, not only standing up, but saying we might even have to encourage teachers to cause civil disobedience by teaching the truth and getting arrested for actually teaching the truth if these laws in Ohio pass. Personally, I don’t think they’ll pass because they’re done by the Looney Tunes people in the State House. These are real crazy. You know, not all Republicans are crazy. They’re all wrong. But they’re not all lunatics. And so I don’t think the lunatic faction will succeed. But we have to stand up, fight back. And thank you for coming today because it’s your presence here and people around the country who will inspire students and teachers to have a backbone to not cave in because what these laws will do is make teachers stop and think: Should I really teach this lesson that’s true? Will I back off? And what did Andrew Jackson do that would anger the Cherokee people?
Speaker from Audience: He made them march on the Trail of Tears.
And so we have to have a critical mass of educators who say, “Not only teach that, but more people should learn and become the educators we all need.”
NEWS COVERAGE: Youngstown educators protest Ohio bills changing what they could teach via WKBN27
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