TOPIC 2.6 Slavery in the British Colonies

From historians: the missing PIECES of americas education on slavery

Some of America’s leading scholars on the topic of slavery, their views are not reflected in common textbook accounts of the institution.

Some of America’s leading scholars on the topic of slavery, their views are not reflected in common textbook accounts of the institution.

AP KC-2.2.II.B As chattel slavery became the dominant labor system …new laws created a strict racial system that prohibited interracial relationships and defined the descendants of African American mothers as black and enslaved in perpetuity.

Objective: Students will identify central claims and supporting evidence from secondary source material about the institution of slavery in order to critically assess the textbook’s coverage of the topic.

This key concept in an antiracist classroom:

“We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.” Dr. David Brion Davis

Slavery played a central role in the formation of both modern American society and the modern American economy. It cannot be confined to one topic of our curriculum. To accurately teach the impact of slavery, the institution must be prevalent in our study of the colonies, the Revolution, the Constitution, the early Republic, the Market Revolution, and so on.

Students must learn the truth about slavery. Slavery was not natural and people knew it was wrong but decided to chose profit over humanity. While the American economy grew, rape was legal in the United States and protected by the Constitution. Selling a child away from his mother was legal and protected by the Constitution. Human-Trafficking was legal and protected by the Constitution.

Notes

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Tolerance Project polled 1,000 High School students. This is how we are doing at teaching slavery:

  • one-third of the respondents knew that the 13th Amendment ended slavery

  • less than half knew about the Middle Passage

  • and only eight percent answered that slavery was the primary reason the South seceded from the Union. (Nearly half the respondents selected, instead, “To protest taxes on imported goods.”)

A Warning from the experts at the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Instead of learning about the horrors of slavery and the impact of slave labor on this country, it argues that textbooks and teachers have contributed to a sanitized understanding of history by focusing on "positive" stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and the abolitionist movement. "Learning about slavery is essential if we are ever to come to grips with the racial differences that continue to divide our nation.”

This lesson provides students an opportunity to learn history directly from the experts. They will identify central claims in a historical argument and make a presentation to their classmates.

Many historians suggest that students learn the stories of individuals who were enslaved. Dr. Leslie Harris encourages us to seek out personal historical narratives to help us better understand the large institution of slavery, “these big concepts in terms of individual lives … can (help students) better understand what these things mean.” Therefore, the day after this lesson, we watch the HBO film, Unchained Memories. The film shows Hollywood actors reading slave narratives recorded during the 1930’s by the WPA.

Not contained in this lesson is the powerful work by Dr. Edward Baptist. My students read a section from his book on slavery and capitalism for 4.5