As an English teacher in 2016, I spent a summer in the archives of the Brooklyn Historical Society learning about abolition and women’s suffrage efforts. I held original bills of sale of young Black girls from the 1840s in my hands, and I left inspired to teach high school juniors about the legacy of enslavement.
Another summer, I looked at 160-year-old whip indentations on the sides of live oak trees in Savannah, Georgia, as I learned how the Gullah/Geechee people have protected their African linguistic, culinary and spiritual traditions since the time of enslavement, due to their relative isolation in the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. NEH summer teacher institutes helped me explore how Black people have fought to carve a future for themselves.
I had these opportunities thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supports universities and museums across the United States in creating courses for K-12 teachers in which they learn historical concepts they can take back to their classrooms.
The institutes gave me hands-on experiences and far more context for books on the American literature list, like “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.” I fear other teachers will not receive such opportunities, as these transformative programs are now in danger.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
Alongside a series of drastic cuts, the NEH has announced funding for a new round of grants linked to more conservative thinking, and NEH’s website recently announced that it is only interested in “U.S. history more generally.” It noted that NEH-funded programs cannot promote a particular ideological point of view or “preference some groups at the expense of others.”
Gone are popular race-based teacher education programs such as “Sailing to Freedom: New Bedford and the Underground Railroad” and “The Immigrant Experience in California Through Literature and History.”
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has slashed NEH’s $210 million budget and redirected that money for the federal government’s proposed Garden of Heroes, where future visitors will stroll through lush lawns to peer up at 250 life-size sculptures.
The irony? One of the Americans slated to be featured in the Garden of Heroes is Araminta Ross, most commonly known as Harriet Tubman. Even if her likeness is created with a hammer and chisel, the U.S. government has been quietly undermining the history she represents by removing funding for people to learn about some of the very people it hopes to carve into monuments. Honoring her with a statue means little if we simultaneously erase her from classrooms and public memory.
Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times? Here’s what it looks like in 3 cities
Some state legislatures and local school boards throughout the U.S. are taking cues from the federal government by curtailing discussions of race and Black history in classrooms, under the guise of avoiding “divisive topics” or protecting the comfort of white children. Teachers in these districts will no longer have access to federally or state-funded professional learning about more expansive histories, even though teachers like me can attest to how the federally funded NEH summer institutes helped us deepen our students’ understanding of historical events.
These cuts and changes are misguided and dangerous. They erase the diverse and complex history of the United States, undermine democracy through silencing marginalized voices and misinforming the public, and harm Black and Latine students through a lack of representation in their curriculums. They also doom future generations to repeat mistakes of the past, because if we do not learn about the harms of anti-Black structures like Jim Crow, redlining and mass incarceration, we risk reincarnating those legacies under different names.
In the absence of NEH support, we must find our own ways to enrich students’ understanding. Teachers — particularly Black teachers — have long found ways to show their students the value of comprehending complex histories so that we can shift from a public that profits from Black suffering to one that invests in Black life.
As a research scholar, I study how Black teachers who teach social justice often find themselves teaching fugitively, employing subversive ways of talking about histories that are ignored or erased in mainstream teaching. Professor Jarvis Givens framed this concept in “Fugitive Pedagogy.” He opens the book with the story of history teacher Tessie McGee, who in 1933 was instructed by Louisiana’s all-white Department of Education to teach from the mandated curriculum, which was required to be openly displayed on her desk. Instead, McGee often taught passages from a book hidden in her lap. That book was by Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history.
As the federal government continues removing funding, we look for hope and resistance. Last summer, several of the cut NEH teacher summer institutes either rallied for private funding or taught their seminars virtually, refusing to let the federal government erase these histories. Today, academic groups, including the American Historical Association, are fighting the NEH budget cuts in the courts.
Building monuments isn’t a substitute for accountability. A statue cannot teach or inspire growth, but education, especially the story of Black resistance practices, can do both.
Historical figures like Harriet Tubman don’t just need monuments; they need people to understand why they are monumental.
Jessica Lee Stovall is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the director of The SoulFolk Collective.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about teaching Black history was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask.
If you believe stories like the one you just finished matter, please consider pitching in what you can. This effort helps ensure our reporting and resources stay free and accessible to everyone—teachers, parents, policymakers—invested in the future of education.
Thank you.
Liz Willen
Editor in chief
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
