03/17/2014
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PROVIDENCE — The fifth graders asked: Why didn’t the slaves fight back? Why did people choose to kidnap black people? And, “Wait, I thought there wasn’t slavery in the North?”
At a packed House hearing last week, student teacher Lindsay Robinson said these questions raised by Central Falls charter school students just days before, underscore the need for weaving black history into public school curricula across Rhode Island.
“They were astonished to hear how deeply Rhode Island’s economy was intertwined with the slave trade, in addition to the fact that people were bought and sold here in Rhode Island,” said Robinson, who launched the special social studies unit “on the experiences of enslaved people” as part of her master’s thesis. “The students want this knowledge. They are really thirsty for it.”
House bill 7490 seeks creation of a 15-member commission that would spend a year developing guidelines for comprehensive African-American history curriculum for all K-12 public schools in Rhode Island.
The bill’s sponsors, Representatives Joseph S. Almeida Jr. and Anastasia Williams — both Providence Democrats, said it is time to stop devoting just one month a year to African-American history. Sen. Harold Metts, D-Providence, has introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
“This will enable many, many of the kids, not only in the African-American community but Rhode Island kids as a whole, to know about the great, great attributes African-Americans contributed to the state, and continue to provide to the state,” Williams said at the Health, Education and Welfare committee hearing.
“It should be woven into the educational process,” Almeida said. Within the African-American community, “black children need to know who they are; where they came from. We are not an invisible people — African-Americans have helped build the country,” he said, “whether it was with a whip or with a vote.”
Rhode Island law [Title 16; Ch. 22, Sect. 22] requires that students be taught about the period of transatlantic slave trade (as well as the Holocaust and Armenian genocide).
But individual districts determine their own curriculum to meet those standards, and those who testified last week described the teaching of African-American history as uneven, and scattershot.
The Rhode Island Superintendents Association and the Rhode Island Department of Education back the bill.
State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist said Friday, “Basically the standards are there so we have a good starting place, and having curriculum available as an optional tool — as a resource for schools and districts — would be great, and we would look forward to participating.”
Other states requiring substantive black history curriculum, or multi-cultural curriculum in their public schools, include South Carolina,Illinois, Tennessee, New York, New Jersey and Florida.
While some support black history curriculum, others say that’s only a small part of what’s needed.
Among them is Dr. James P. Comer, of the Yale University Child Studies Center and an appointee to the new President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African-Americans.
“The (black history) curriculum is fine but the problem is much more complex, and it’s created through the economic exploitation, the abuse of slavery and the exclusion of blacks from the political economic and social mainstream,” Comer said in a phone call Saturday.
“And the consequences of all that impacts the belief systems of blacks and whites, and contributes to the feelings that black kids struggle with; that black people struggle with, and white people struggle with,” Comer said. “So that’s what I mean about the complexity — when I say a curriculum alone won’t help enough, but it can help some.”
The youngest person to testify at Wednesday’s hearing was Isaac Barros. Mustering the courage of his 11 years, Barros said his fifth-grade teacher “likes to talk to us about black history,” including “some of the good black leaders” who furthered the cause of African-Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Jackie Robinson.
Those lessons make him want to learn more, Barros said. But if other classrooms don’t have that same exposure, “they won’t learn from our leaders like Doctor King.”
Keith W. Stokes, of Newport, the former executive director of the then-Rhode Island Economic Development Commission, said the understanding of American and Rhode Island history “is incomplete without understanding the many contributing African-American experiences.”
Including a black history curriculum will provide a “much-needed opportunity to instill knowledge and self-worth in all of our Rhode Island youth, particularly those of African heritage,” Stokes said.
Kristin Dart, chair of the Providence NAACP’s political action committee and granddaughter of a Tuskegee airman, said, “I went through an entire high school curriculum with only seeing a paragraph about the first all-black fighter squadron in World War II,” a squadron “that never lost a bomber in all their missions.”
Dart said, “We, as a branch, feel that is important for students, regardless of color, to hear the rich, diverse history of Rhode Islanders,” and to learn the facts “about Rhode Island’s participation in slavery, and also positive impacts of African-Americans in Rhode Island today.”
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