NPR Segment on Teaching About Slavery Features Zinn Education Project

On February 19, the NPR 1A radio show addressed the question of “How Do You Teach Slavery?” with Adam Sanchez, Zinn Education Project curriculum writer/teacher organizer. Sanchez, who has written extensively about teaching people’s history, is a high school U.S. history teacher and Rethinking Schools editor. Also on the show were Hasan Kwame Jeffries, chair of the Teaching Tolerance “Teaching Hard History” Advisory Board and associate professor of history at Ohio State University, and Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance, Southern Poverty Law Center.

The 1A show focused on a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center called “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.” The one-hour show is streaming online.

The 1A show tweeted quotes throughout the program. Here are a few:

.@ProfJeffries: “We teach slavery out of context. You introduce heroes like Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglas, but they’re divorced from the context they lived in — so it doesn’t make any sense.”

— 1A (@1a) February 19, 2018

“Textbooks tend to use the passive voice when it comes to discussing slavery,” says @MCostelloTT. “They’ll say, ‘slaves were brought over from Africa’… without saying who brought them. You have slaves without slavers.”

— 1A (@1a) February 19, 2018

“Too often we end talking about this issue at the Civil War,” says teacher Adam Sanchez. “We need to keep going, at least into the Reconstruction.”

— 1A (@1a) February 19, 2018

HS teacher Adam Sanchez: “For different regions there are different issues that come up. In the South, a big issue is the idea that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. In the North, it’s the myth of the ‘anti-slavery north.’”

— 1A (@1a) February 19, 2018

Learn more by listening to the full program.

Find lessons and other resources for teaching about slavery and resistance on the links below. In addition, Adam Sanchez is preparing a new collection of lessons for the Zinn Education Project on teaching about slavery, the abolition movement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The lessons in development and those listed below are available for free download by classroom teachers.