'Amistad' effort keeps the story of struggle alive

Nine months out of the school year, students learn “history.” During February, students get to learn about the accomplishments of certain “notable” Black Americans, read speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass, and learn a little something about slavery in America.

 

With February — Black History Month — now past and Women’s History Month upon us, the expectation might be that the lessons particular to Black History Month will give way to lessons about “notable women,” and in April, schools return to “normal” studies. No more having to include African-American or women’s perspectives or historical participation in any significant way for another year.

 

In 2002, New Jersey lawmakers concluded that there was a need to move beyond Black History Month. They passed the Amistad Bill, thereby codifying into law the statement that “Black history IS American history.” The bill establishes the Amistad Commission, making New Jersey the first state to mandate a shift from simply including African-American history sometime during the school year — embodied by "Black History Month" — to infusing it throughout the curriculum, throughout the school year. The creation of the Amistad Commission honors the enslaved Africans who gained their freedom after overthrowing the crew of the Amistad ship in 1839.

“We have a tendency to hold all of our African-American facts until February, but when we’re talking contextually about the Revolutionary War, we wouldn’t hold a lesson about Betsy Ross until March,” says Stephanie James Wilson, Executive Director of the Amistad Commission.

According to Wilson, African-American history is “not a subset. It is what we are today. It is American history. It happens every day. So it should be taught exactly that way. It is an unnatural fit when we separate it out.”

At a meeting in October, Wilson told the crowd, “The way we teach our U.S. history has been monolithic and a ‘feel good’ story. The story, even if it’s bittersweet, should be realistic for our students… This is a revolutionary change in how social studies is taught throughout the country.”

Over the last three to four years, Wilson said, “the major thrust was to supply a methodology, a blueprint for what an infused program would look like. We spent the better part of three years creating curriculum.“

Teachers from districts throughout the state have participated in trainings offered by the Amistad Commission and, as of September 2009, have access to a full Web-based curriculum. The curriculum user’s guide outlines how each unit meets the New Jersey curriculum standards for content, and includes such units as “Indigenous Civilizations of the Americas” as well as units dealing with independence, the Constitution and Continental Congress, the Civil War and Reconstruction, “Emergent Modern America,” the New Deal, industrialization, the various wars, and developments up to and including the present.

 

The curriculum not only makes use of guided readings and lesson plans, but provides “literature connections,” where students discover that historical figures and events also influence the creative arts. The Griot section — named for the West African storytellers — uses "audio and video such as newsreel footage, re-enactors, professor presentations, field-study trips and/or music,” according to the user’s guide.

In November, Wilson was invited to present to the Middlesex County Superintendents’ roundtable with curriculum people from all over the county. She says she hopes “to go back and revisit the districts and see how it’s working out and what else they need.”

In Highland Park, according to Assistant Superintendent Karen Lewis, who is in charge of curriculum for the district, “Teachers were trained with it at the state level, and it [the curriculum] is threaded throughout our social studies curriculum and our reading series at the primary level. All of the important people in American history are discussed.”

Additionally, in February, Lewis said that the school would focus “on specific things because it’s Black History Month, just as we do with Women’s History Month, and the presidents’ birthdays.”

In addition to access to the Web-based Amistad curriculum free-of-charge, teachers can participate in trainings during the summer, an annual conference, or a week-long summer institute hosted by the Amistad Commission.

During the school year, Wilson has been invited to professional development sessions already scheduled by the districts. She says, “We have worked as collaboratively as we could with the schools. Whatever way the districts are asking, we’re running all over the state to do it.” Wilson says they are trying to make sure that they target all 630 districts.

As important as it is to have teachers and district administrators on board, Wilson emphasizes the role of parents. She says, “It always helps when parents are in your corner… The last course of it is when you see the change in what your kids bring home. I’m a parent of two elementary public school children in South Jersey, and re-entering second and fourth grade through their eyes. Parents know what their students are studying. They become the best advocates for this curriculum.”

 

Although the use of the Web-based curriculum is not mandatory, African-American history incorporated into the teaching American history became a part of the new statewide social studies standards in 2004 and 2009.

 

Dr. Carter G. Woodson attempted to address the absence of Blacks from the study of American history in the early 20th-century by starting the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the Journal of Negro History, and Negro History Week (in mid-February, later to became Black History Month). In 2002 in New Jersey, the Amistad Bill made infusing American history with Black history law. By 2012, the new social studies curriculum standards should be fully implemented.

So how are we doing?

“In some situations, it’s has been realized; in others, we’re still making strides,” Wilson says. “Change is sometimes a long time coming.