How We Remember: The Struggle Over Slavery in Public Spaces

I currently teach U.S. History I and II to 10th and 11th graders, respectively. We wrapped up our semester this week by holding midterm exams. In lieu of a traditional exam for one of my U.S. History I classes, I had them complete the Zinn Education Project activity “How We Remember.” I had read Clint Smith’s book last year and was blown away by how the history is handled at many of the highlighted locations and his extreme attention to detail.

I’ve since used excerpts from Smith’s book in class, but this activity really had the students use the text in a way that required them to interact with the sites, as well. The commemorations were thoughtful and the students did an incredible job bringing justice to the history of enslavement at those locations. Here are some examples:

The students who were assigned New York City created three works of art to display in Central Park as a way to commemorate work of Black abolitionists and Seneca Village.  One work of art was a 3-D rendering of a bed with turned down bedding and a doll on the floor.  It was meant to signify the upending and displacement of the Seneca Village community.

The students who were assigned Angola created a script for a guided tour. They included images and provided visuals to go along with the script. The brutal facts of Angola as a plantation and as a prison were presented. In the end, “visitors” were encouraged to sign a petition to close Angola. The plan was to make it a museum that focuses on the history of Black Americans’ struggles both during and after enslavement.

The students who were assigned Monticello created a sculpture which highlighted a number of the enslaved at the plantation. The sculpture included silhouettes of mothers and fathers and beads to represent their children. The purpose was to highlight family separation. On the top of the sculpture was a representation of Monticello; placing it on top of the enslaved was meant to demonstrate the fact that Monticello and Jefferson’s success came at the expense of the enslaved.

Thank you for such an engaging and important activity. I look forward to using it again in the future.

I used the How We Remember: The Struggle Over Slavery in Public Spaces lesson in a course titled Civics, Citizenship, and Civil Rights. Using the materials, student groups were tasked with researching one of the several sites for the purpose of reflecting on what commemoration means, how sites of oppression or violence should be acknowledged in public discourse, and considerations on the propriety of “dismantling” or “destroying” sites of historical significance.

The students presented thoughtful considerations on both the history and the memorialization processes of each site. Some of the students took a position that historical preservation — regardless of the traumatic experiences of the site or the painful memories it evokes — is essential to teaching and learning our country’s complicated past. Others, recognizing that these sites of oppression could evince painful reactions amongst the viewing public, promoted a variety of alternatives including the removal of painful imagery or texts, or outright destruction of the site.

Little consensus was achieved, but the discussion proved eye-opening for all involved in terms of the potency of public memory and why memorialization can be such a loaded debate. For students that had already studied some world history, the reach of these discussions expanded to sites of enslavement in West Africa, hagiographic memorials to colonizing figures in Britain, and Nazi extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.

And of course, the discussion returned to the question of Confederate monuments across much of the American South and what exactly was being valorized or memorialized.  It was one of the most meaningful discussions on history and memory that I’ve ever witnessed in a high school classroom.

With teaching U.S. history in a different country, we are always striving to find connections and impacts that apply to our local contexts. With Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, our class found a wonderful way to connect contested histories both in the United States and Canada. 

In using the How We Remember lesson plan, our students engaged with Smith’s writing and started to explore the spaces he visited where the history of enslavement is either remembered or forgotten. 

The Métis Walking Tour

Our students became ‘curators of difficult knowledge.’ They were tasked with coming up with a way to both uncover the hidden histories of a particular place, while also creating a site of remembering that honours true history, and invites learning and community. 

As a wrap up to their projects, the students connected their learning by travelling to The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba (a contested historical site) to see how the past is remembered in a Canadian context. Leading our workshop was an Indigenous Education Leader from Louis Riel School Division. He compassionately led our team through the Métis Walking Tour. We learned about the rich Indigenous histories as well as the history of colonization in the area. The message was clear, first we must learn what has been deliberately forgotten, then we must find a way to move forward, collectively for a better future. Thank you to Louis Riel School Division!

The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba

As a rural K–12 school, we rarely get opportunities to connect with students and teachers from urban schools in our province. In order to bridge that divide, we collaborated on this project with Mr. Jared Suderman from Glenlawn Collegiate in Winnipeg. Our students met up prior to the tour and were able to share a meal together and create community prior to engaging with the tour.

In my opinion, this was a rich learning experience that taught the whole team about the complexities of presenting history in public spaces!

As an AP African American Studies educator at an all-boys school in Southeast Queens, I’m always looking for resources that don’t just teach history — but challenge it. That’s exactly what the Zinn Education Project does. This year, I used the lesson How We Remember: The Struggle Over Slavery in Public Spaces in my classroom to frame our deep dive into Chapter 2 of How the Word Is Passed. We focused on the Whitney Plantation and the 1811 rebellion of the enslaved — one of the largest in U.S. history, yet barely mentioned in textbooks.

What made this lesson even more powerful was that I had actually been to the Whitney Plantation. I shared personal reflections and short video clips from my visit — the haunting Field of Angels memorial, the children’s statues, and the sugar kettles that sat like ghosts in the humid Louisiana air. It moved my students in a way no textbook could. The lesson prompted them to ask: Why haven’t we heard these stories before? Why is rebellion framed as violence when freedom was at stake?

The lesson gave my students the chance to become “public historians” themselves, as they designed their own commemorations of the Whitney. Some created digital exhibits, others proposed walking tours. But what I appreciated most was how this work made space for the humanity of the enslaved — especially the children. We paired the lesson with Clint Smith’s Crash Course videos on African American history to bring academic rigor and accessibility into the discussion.

Just like Corey Winchester said, it invigorated their desire to learn and disrupt the status quo. These young Black men — so often underestimated — saw themselves not just as students of history, but as stewards of memory. They wrestled with how slavery is remembered, erased, or repackaged, and why that matters today.

As a school, every high schooler taking U.S. history went on a field trip to Gettysburg this spring. Students had read several chapters from Zinn’s A People’s History dealing with the Civil War and Reconstruction. While at Gettysburg, we saw several tour vans celebrating both the U.S. flag and Dixie.

Upon our return to campus and reflection, we used the How We Remember lesson and discussed specifically Thomas Jefferson, how he is remembered and what is being glossed over. Seeing the large number of artifacts celebrating war at Gettysburg — so many displays of guns, weapons, and tactics — really brought home how focused U.S. history tends to be on “war guys” and the weight placed on this narrative as opposed to the realities of why young men were dying, and why human beings had been enslaved.

While certainly not a pleasant discussion, seeing how focused this National Park was on celebrating war was sobering in contrast to the plight of enslaved people. While approximately 700,000 died during the Civil War, estimates are that over 4,000,000 people were enslaved.

I used the Zinn Education Projects lesson How We Remember: The Struggle Over Slavery in Public Spaces, which utilizes Clint Smith’s book as a point of reference. This lesson helped prepare my students for their upcoming state assessment that seeks answers to the question “To what extent should leaders be commemorated?”

I combined the resources from this lesson with past events students could recall such as the tearing down of confederate statues of Robert E. Lee — particularly in Richmond, since we are in close proximity to that area — as well as the move to change the name of Jefferson Davis Highway to Emancipation Highway, since our school sits on the intersection of that highway. The lesson was a perfect way to tie together current events and the past to help students better grasp modern social movements — like how we commemorate leaders and how we remember slavery in public spaces.

The lesson features facts about Monticello and Jefferson’s relationship with those he enslaved, which aligned seamlessly with our state standards. The opportunity for students to examine the past, and move forward with commemorations for how the enslaved should be remembered, was the perfect social justice learning experience. I look forward to using this lesson in my future Black history and U.S. history courses!

Below is an example of a student presentation following the lesson.