Tag: Civil War

Learning the Origins of the Civil War

October 31, 2017 3:08 pm October 31, 2017

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By now, most reformers have heard about White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s declarations on talk show host Laura Ingraham’s show that the American Civil War resulted from the…

By now, most reformers have heard about White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s declarations on talk show host Laura Ingraham’s show that the American Civil War resulted from the “lack of ability to compromise”, that “Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand”, and that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was “was an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state.” Nothing in Kelly’s remarks mentioned the reason for the war being fought: The desire by southern state politicians to preserve the enslavement and oppression of Black people.

Certainly Kelly’s statement, likely made as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to sway attention from yesterday’s indictments of key figures in the current Occupant of the White House’s successful presidential campaign, don’t square with facts or original texts. Given the Trump Administration’s comments in defense of White Supremacists in Charlottesville back in August — and the president’s own defense of Confederate monuments — it is also not shocking.

But Kelly isn’t the only person who holds such views. Thanks to the efforts of early 20th century scholars who advocated a romantic “Lost Cause” version of Civil War history that obfuscated the debate over slavery as the main cause of the war (as well as the erecting of statues dedicated to Lee and other Confederate war leaders that served as propaganda), generations of Americans have been misinformed about at least 618,000 Americans died during four years of fighting — and why President Abraham Lincoln was ultimately assassinated just days after the Confederacy finally surrendered to the Union.

Dropout Nation has spent the past three months discussing the steps teachers and reformer can take to overhaul civics and history curricula in order for our children to gain a more-honest understandin g of the nation’s history. This has included discussing how to use original texts, Census reports, and even genealogy to help children to know how their lives and that of their families interplayed with the seminal events and issues that have shaped our society. Thankfully, there are also plenty of original texts and books that can help teachers, families, and children fully understand the central role the battles over the continuation of enslaving Black people played in the Civil War.

By studying original texts, we can all fully understand how preservation of slavery was the foremost cause of the Civil War.

One important resource lies with the Civil War Trust, which offers a compendium of the Articles of Secession issued soon after Abraham Lincoln (who wanted to compromise on slavery) won the presidential election in 1860. As you read the original texts, it becomes clear that preserving the enslavement of Black people, an activity that was the underpinning of economies in the southern states, was the primary reason for leaving the Union. The secession ordinance issued by Florida, another one of the states that made up the Confederacy can also be read, as well as that of the Constitution of the Confederate States, which explicitly protected the ownership of African American people.

Even the matter of states’ rights, an argument often used by Lost Causers and others in their discussion about the causes of the Civil War was tied to slavery. One way to fully understand that states’ rights in the context of discussing the Civil War lies in reading through the Articles of Secession. In the case of South Carolina, seceders compained that abolitionists in the norther states, through the federal government “assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution”. When South Carolina and other states mention “property”, they explicitly meant the ownership of Black people.

You can also look at the Fugitive Slave Clause in the U.S. Constitution, one of the original passages in the Founding Document, which declares that “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour”. As Albany Law School Professor Paul Finkelman has noted, when states’ rights is mentioned in context of the Civil War, it is purely about the ability of slaveowners to enslave Black people.

Meanwhile there are plenty of original sources that teachers and families can use in helping children understand the compromises made on the question of slavery. This starts again with the federal Constitution. There is the Three-Fifths Clause, under which slaves were considered three-fifths of a person for the purposes of the Census and congressional representation of southern (and northern) states because they weren’t free people by law. Along with original documents from writers of the Constitution such as James Madison (who took notes during the Constitutional Convention of 1787), you can learn how the battle between those opposed to slavery and those who were slaveholders shaped this and other compromises on the evil that ended up in law.

Another key document is the Compromise of 1820, under which Maine was admitted as a state free of slavery in condition for allowing Missouri to be admitted as a slave state. The original document itself, along with Robert Pierce Forbes’ tome on the significance of the law, demonstrates how congressional leaders of the time felt compromise was necessary to keep together the Union even at the expense of the lives of human beings.

John Kelly’s misstatements about the reasons why the Civil War happened isn’t shocking. American public education has done a shoddy job of providing honest and comprehensive history and civics education.

Then there’s the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California into the Union in exchange for allowing slaveowners in southern states to hunt down enslaved Black people who dared to escape to freedom in the North. An entire compendium is available thanks to the Library of Congress. By studying the documents — including the Fugitive Slave Act that would figure in the infamous Dred Scot decision — children can learn how congressional leaders continued bartering the lives of Black people against a backdrop of increasing opposition to slavery.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed four years later, which upset the compromise by allowing voters in both new states to decide whether Black people can be enslaved, also illuminates how political leaders in northern states bent over backwards to accommodate slaveowners and their political representatives in the south. The Library of Congress also supplies the original text as well as the records of the congressional debates involved in its passage. Even as abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner convinced many Americans that slavery was evil, politicians such as Stephen Douglas (who authored the act as well as helped pass the Compromise of 1850) thought giving in on slavery was necessary in order to avoid secession. But dissent from Sumner as well as Maine Sen. William Fessenden (who argued that bowing to southern slaveholder demands should no longer be acceptable) foreshadowed the war that was to come.

Meanwhile there are other original documents to consider. There’s Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech in 1854 decrying the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the arguments would eventually be developed by the future president in his debate with Douglas for the U.S. Senate race four years later and in his campaign for the presidency. Douglas’ own first speech in those debates, which would serve as a state’s rights justification for preserving slavery, also deserves to be read. On the side of slaveholders and the south, there are the words of the Staunton Spectator (made available courtesy of the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow project) and James D. B. DeBow, a leading advocate for slavery who justified the Peculiar Institution on the grounds that it preserved the status of white men (including the vast majority who didn’t own Black people for profit).

Then there are Web sites and texts that can be read to fully understand how the defense of slavery (and opposition to it) led to the Civil War. There’s historian Kevin M. Levin’s Civil War Memory, which offers documents and perspectives on slavery and the conflict, and Finkelman’s Defending Slavery, a critical look at the varying rhetoric used to keep the enslavement of Black people status quo ante. The Civil War Trust‘s own Web site provides numerous documents and sources for children, teachers, and families to study, as does Yale University Law School Libary’s compendium of laws. There’s also Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as the Library of Congress and the National Archives, the later two providing online access to original documents for study and understanding. Even Robert E. Lee’s defense of slavery (as well as his mistreatment of them) can be read and considered thanks to the archive operated by his descendants, as well as Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s book about Lee’s writings.

Certainly the original sources won’t change the minds of Kelly, Trump and their allies, or even those defending Confederate monuments. After all, they have become invested in an idea of America that runs counter to the facts in evidence. But this doesn’t mean that future generations of Americans can’t get an honest, comprehensive understanding of how the enslaving of Black people has shaped our nation’s past and present. Reformers should advance this work, and ultimately, help our fellow Americans move towards a more-perfect union for everyone.

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The Weekend

The Legacies of Education’s Past Before Us

October 29, 2017 1:42 pm October 29, 2017

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The Rosenwald School Next Door: The legacies of America’s Original Sin run through American public education — and often leave their marks on the nation’s physical landscape even in plain sight….

The Rosenwald School Next Door: The legacies of America’s Original Sin run through American public education — and often leave their marks on the nation’s physical landscape even in plain sight. Your editor and his family sees one each day, as we drive from our home in Bowie to church, passing a humble building on Church and Old Stage Roads surrounded by an old Masonic lodge and trees on what is left of an old farm.

These days, the building is a duplex, a home for those who live in it. But from 1927 to 1952, it was one of many schools funded by the Rosenwald Fund which helped fund schools for Black children in rural communities where Jim Crow-controlled districts were unwilling to serve them with adequate classrooms.

There’s a long history of education on this site. The first school for Black children on this acre of what was then called Collington was built in 1875, a decade after the end of the Civil War. As with so many schools of the time, it was a simple one-room building that often served as many Black children as possible in spite of opposition from White men and women still upset by the end of slavery and the loss of the Confederacy during the civil war.

The first Collington Colored School did its job as well as its could as did the teachers who worked within it. But by 1927, the building was no longer adequate for the job. Even with a declining population of Black people in Maryland and Prince George’s County, many of whom fled to New York City and Philadelphia to escape from Jim Crow, there were still plenty of children in the area who needed to go to school. So the local parents-teachers organization (which, like many of those serving Black people, was separate from a National PTA that tolerated segregation), began agitating for a new schoolhouse.

Photo courtesy of Fisk University.

Being a Jim Crow district in a Jim Crow state, Prince George’s County Public Schools was of no mood to build a new schoolhouse for the Black kids in its care. So the Rosenwald Fund, established a decade earlier by the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., at the behest of Booker T. Washington to build schools for Black children, stepped in to help. In 1927, thanks to Rosenwald and the Black families in the community, this building was constructed, west of the old school (which has since disappeared into history). For the next 25 years, Black children in the are attended the school, getting as much of an education as allowed by a district uninterested in doing anything for them.

The Collington school would be one of the 5,000 school buildings the Rosenwald Fund would help construct between 1917 and 1931. It would do a lot of good. As Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago determined in a 2011 study, the construction of the schools contributed to Black children gaining an additional year of education compared to peers who had no access to school. Along with programs such as the Jeannes Fund, which recruited Black men and women to teach in those schools, the Rosenwald Fund reduced achievement gaps between Black and White children and help more African American attain high school diplomas and even college degrees. All of this despite the obstacles erected by White men and women who thought Black children didn’t deserve opportunities for better lives.

As for the Collington Colored School? It would operate until 1952, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that official segregation was illegal. that year, the Prince George’s County district shut down the school even though it wouldn’t desegregate its schools until two decades later, because it was too small to operate. This fate befell many of the other segregated Black schools built since the end of the Civil War. The old schoolhouse on Church and Old Stage was then sold to the Roman Catholic archdiocese and its Holy Family parish, which them used it to provide religious instruction to the Black children in its pews.

By the end of the 1960s, the building was sold again to Richard Spriggs, who converted the building into a duplex and whose family still owns it. Despite Bowie transforming from a place for the White landed gentry and their horses to a bedroom suburb of Washington, D.C., home to the wealthiest African Americans in the wealthiest Black county in America, the old schoolhouse still remains, one of many Rosenwald Schools still around, though without any historic medallion to signify its past.

As we fight to transform American public education as well as end the policies and practices that damage far too many Black and other minority children, we have to also remember that the dark past isn’t so long ago. In fact, the problems of the past and the solutions for the future can be seen right in front of us, often on little roads that we pass by on the way to fighting the present and shaping the future.

Another Way to Help Improve Civics Education: These pages have devoted part of the past few months to addressing how reformers and others can transform history and civics education so that all of our children gain comprehensive knowledge of the good, bad and ugly of our nation’s past as well as help build a better nation. One way can be seen in a high school in Fairfax County, where the Street Law program is teaching children about the workings of Congress and the nation’s municipal governments.

There in that school, a group of corporate lawyers take time with a class discussing how bills become laws and how celebrities such as talk show host Stephen Colbert participate in shaping how the nation addresses issues such as immigration reform. The high schoolers, in turn, bring up their own experiences in learning the consequences of laws. This includes a move by officials in Falls Church to end a special meal tax that was used to finance the traditional district’s sports activities.

Few in the school reform movement know about organizations such as Street Law and ThinkLaw, which use real-life examples to help kids think through issues in society. Even fewer realize their value. Street Law, in particular, runs annual professional development seminars that help teachers understand the inner workings of the federal judiciary as well as providing mock court sessions and other lessons for children from poor and minority backgrounds. Between 1995 and 2015, Street Law has given high-quality civics education to 300,000 of our youth, while ThinkLaw, run by Teach For America Colin Seale, works in charter and district schools in Nevada, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

But it takes money and bodies to provide more lessons to more children. Street Law, in particular, does this with the help of corporations and law firms donating pro bono time as well as cash. It will take even more money and bodies to expand what these organizations do. This is something the school reform movement and the organizations within it can do if those complaining about the quality of civics and history education wanted to help.

They can start by calling up Street Law and ThinkLaw to learn how they can help out. If they want to know more, they can call up one of Street Law’s past honorees, former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, or chat up Seale himself. And since some of the leading lights in the movement are Yale Law School graduates and have experience crafting and filing civil torts, they can also take some time out and reach out to these groups to lend a hand. Take the opportunity and become part of the solution.

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Why Common Core

Making History and Civics Personal

October 5, 2017 4:19 pm October 5, 2017

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The most-important way to learn and appreciate the fullness of American history, to fully understand how we have both lived up to its ideals and yet remain far from making…

The most-important way to learn and appreciate the fullness of American history, to fully understand how we have both lived up to its ideals and yet remain far from making them real, and to comprehend how the past shaped our civics, won’t from simply reading dusty history books. It comes from looking at the graves of people named John and Monica, from visiting the lands owned by women named Eliza and Mary, from reading deeds and Census records that detail their lives, and from understanding how our own family histories intertwine with the nation’s struggles towards progress and liberty for all.

This is a lesson our teachers, school leaders, and school operators must embrace in order to help all children gain the proper civics and history education they need to be the leaders and citizens their communities need them to be, as well as to continue bending the arc of the nation’s history towards progress.

Prompting this discussion was last month’s Dropout Nation essay on one of my ancestors, Sampson Moore, and how learning about the lives of enslaved Africans, as well as the oppression they endured, is critical to improving history, civics, and social studies. More than a few readers thought it would be interesting if children learned about American history through their own genealogies. Which makes sense. The more-relevant we make lessons to the lives of the children in classrooms, the more-likely they will gain the knowledge and understanding needed to be fully part of the great experiment called America in adulthood.

Making history and civics relevant and personal is especially important in a time as turbulent as those of the past. Even as think tanks and pundits such as the Brookings Institution and Chester (Checker) Finn, Jr. bemoan polls showing that some collegians have little understanding about the Bill of Rights and civil liberties (as well as the usual and often overblown complaints about freedom of speech on college campuses), they fail to grasp an important reality: That many adults have little understanding about American history and about the development of civil liberties. This is because they were never properly taught in the first place, and because such exercises such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance are mere propaganda exercises that don’t build proper appreciation. Proper teaching of American history – and ultimately, a strong appreciation of its past and present – begins with placing their lives and that of their families in the contexts of those developments.

The best part is that making history personal and relevant doesn’t take that much effort. Thanks to professional and amateur genealogists, the wide array of historic preservation efforts, the digital release of narratives such as those of former slaves recorded by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, and even works of scholarship from historians such as Wilma Dunaway, any teacher, school leader, or operator can craft history and civics curricula that make cold facts personal. This can easily be seen in Bowie, a city in Prince George’s County, Md., that is also the home of this publication.

Documents such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s schedules of slave ownership can be used along with other sources to make American history relevant to the lives of children.

A teacher at Samuel Ogle Middle School in Bowie, Md., the home base of this publication, could begin that education just by taking children to one of the many old churches and grave sites in the community. There’s the famed Sacred Heart Catholic Church. There, the teacher can tell children how it played a role in advancing religious freedom, especially as the site of the founding of the nation’s first Roman Catholic diocese in 1789, and the consecration of John Carroll as the nation’s first bishop.

She can also explain how the church and the priests who worked there maintained the institution of slavery that is at the heart of America’s Original Sin, as the centerpiece of the White Marsh plantation that financed Georgetown University and, through a series of sales, breaking up Black families and sending them as far as Louisiana, where they endured even more oppression. Thanks to Georgetown’s project on the slaves owned by the Jesuit order (as well as by the priests personally), the students even see if their ancestors were enslaved on that plantation.

At Sacred Heart’s cemetery, a teacher can go to the grave of John Hawkins, which sits separate from those of White men and women who passed on to the hereafter. She can talk to them about how to research Census data from 1870 into 1910, two years before John died, and they can learn how had a wife named Hannah, had eight children. They can learn why we know so little about his life before 1870 — because Black people enslaved weren’t considered human beings, and thus, unworthy of having their lives recorded for posterity.

They can learn how he started out being illiterate, but ended up being able to read by the 1900 Census. They will also find out that John eventually managed to own his own land. They will also learn that this was a rare thing. Because of Jim Crow segregation laws that emerged amid Reconstruction in the 1870s, most Black people were forced into sharecropping, a system of renting land, equipment and even feed from former masters that often deprived them of the ability to earn a profit.

A teacher can then travel around some of the areas in their communities where people once lived and what used to be there. The Samuel Ogle teacher can take her students to a stretch of Gallant Fox Lane (named after the Triple Crown-winning horse bred on the nearby Belair Plantation), and talk about how it was once owned by Eliza Isaac, who was one of the few women in her time to own property of her own, and about a woman named Mary Brown, who managed to do the same. Back in the classroom, children can look up the acreage on Prince George’s County’s online atlas, then compare the current land to old maps dating back to 1861, and see how the community was mostly plantations and farms.

By researching the U.S. Census slave schedule for 1860, the students can learn that Mrs. Isaac owned 1o human beings as part of her worldly goods — including three little girls aged 4, 5, and 6. Through other books, the class will learn how those little girls had only a 50 percent chance of living beyond age 15 because they were often malnourished by slaveowners, and their mothers were forced to wean them off breastfeeding so they can feed the children of those who enslaved them. The students would then learn that if those little girls made it to adulthood, they were doomed for lives in which they would be passed down by the slave master to their children or worse, sold to another slave owner as if they were common goods. And if not for the Union’s victory in the Civil War, those little girls would have never become free.

A trip to both historic places and land that has never been marked as historically significant such as this tract here can help children understand the development of American history over time.

But teachers and schools don’t even need to always go out in the field to provide children a comprehensive and personal understanding of American history. They can simply have children and youth trace their own genealogy to comprehend how the nation’s past affects their present.

During this exercise, a child may go on Ancestry or Family Search and learn about the life of an ancestor named Jacob. He will learn from the 1870 Census that he was born in Halifax County and lived in nearby Martin County. A search of Civil War records will tell him that Jacob fought for the 37th Colored Infantry, one of the first U.S. Army units that allowed Black people into the ranks, and that he likely fought in the Siege of Petersburg, one of the deadliest and most-important conflicts in the War Between the States. That child and his peers will learn in a personal way how Black men and women fought for their own freedom and for this nation even when it had no interest in making them full citizens.

Another child may research the 1860 Census and learn about an ancestor named Duncan, who was also born in North Carolina, but had arrived in Attala County, Mississippi by the 1850s. She will learn that Duncan was a White man who fought for the Confederate cause to keep Black people in bondage – and later helped enact Jim Crow laws that kept them from being full citizens for another century – even as he had 12 children with one of his slaves. Along with her schoolmates, the young woman will learn how the contorted, hypocritical situations in which more than a few White people owned their own relatives made slavery the peculiar institution. She will also gain an appreciation of how her ancestors (and even herself) benefited from institutions that oppressed enslaved Africans — including people who were also her family.

A third child may go to the passenger lists of immigrants arriving to the United States through New York City and learn about an ancestor named Francis, who arrived in this nation from Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845-to-1852. After learning about the bigoted policies that led to an economic and social catastrophe that included the deaths of one million people, he will learn how the lack of immigration laws allowed Francis and others were able to flee to safety in this country. The child will then learn how Francis and other Irish emigres were discriminated against by Protestant native-born Americans because they were Catholics — even when they volunteered and fought for the nation in the Civil War — and how bigotry towards them, as well as Chinese and Jewish emigres, led to the immigration laws and policies that deny people in situations just like that of Francis the ability to flee oppression and poverty.

Certainly there will be some who will object to such approaches to learning history. Some will say that such lessons are too harsh and traumatic for children to learn. Others will complain that it may paint a negative picture of the nation’s history. What the first group fail to understand is that children are incredibly capable of dealing with harsh knowledge about life. As for the second: The lack of honest knowledge not only contributes to their ignorance of history and civics, it even makes them unable to fully appreciate how far the nation has come (as well as how far it has to go).

What we owe to children as well as to our nation is history and civics instruction and curricula that makes the facts real and relevant to their lives. If we are to keep progressing as a nation, our education must also do better than be dusty and lifeless.

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Three Thoughts Why Common Core

Telling the Histories of Our Sampsons

September 14, 2017 12:01 am September 14, 2017

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There once was a man named Sampson Moore. He was an enslaved African American. He gained freedom after the Confederates, who wanted to keep him a slave, were defeated during…

There once was a man named Sampson Moore. He was an enslaved African American. He gained freedom after the Confederates, who wanted to keep him a slave, were defeated during the Civil War. He lived through Reconstruction and Jim Crow. He was a farmer who lived in what is now Staunton, Va. He was also my great-great-great grandfather.

The facts that we do know about Sampson’s life tell us the uncomfortable facts and truths of American history that often get unmentioned to our children while they are in schools. Which is why we must push for civic and history education that is as honest in tackling the bad and ugly of our nation’s past as it is in celebrating the parts that are good.

As with so many former slaves, there’s a lot about Sampson we will never know about. He died 16 years before the Federal Writers’ Project embarked on its massive collection of first-hand accounts about life in bondage from once-enslaved Black people.

His death certificate states that he was born sometime in 1840. But Census records also record him giving different ages, meaning that he could have been born in 1830 or even 1835. Given that slaves weren’t even considered human, and therefore, unworthy of a proper recording of their birthdays, we will never know when he was truly born.

For many slaveowners, selling slaves to buyers in places as far as Louisiana and Tennessee was a great business. But it led to the breakup of Black families.

If Sampson’s life before the Civil War was like that of the surviving former enslaved Black people who recounted their lives for the Federal Writers Project, it was especially brutal. Chances are that he grew up with little to no clothes (and definitely no shoes) because slaveowners were always looking to reduce the costs of keeping the people they enshackled.

Besides the brutality of the slavemaster, Sampson also likely saw death all around. Particularly in places such as Augusta County, a gateway into Appalachia, slavemasters saved more money (and kept their often lower-than-national average production of corn and other crops for themselves and horses) by ensuring that enslaved Black children were malnourished, often on diets consisting of just a mush of cornmeal and buttermilk. As a result of the undernourishment, 60 percent of enslaved Black children in the nine Southern States in Appalachia died before age 10, according to Wilma Dunaway of Virginia Tech, one of the leading researchers on American slavery. This was higher than even the one-in-two chance of survival for slaves nationally.

Put bluntly: Sampson was a survivor. Probably even outlived his brothers and sisters.

Sampson Moore lived on what is now Arborhill Road in a section of what was unincorporated Augusta County called Beverley Manor. The land is now occupied by several farms, including one called Berry Moore. He could not read or write in 1880, according to the Census taken that year. But he managed to learn how to read by 1910, the second-to-last Census he participated in before he left this earth. Sampson owned his own land, one of the few Black men to do so. That probably made him very happy.

He was married to a woman named Elizabeth, who he also called Lizzie, who was also born in bondage. They first appear as a married couple in 1865, but may have actually been a couple earlier than that. This is because slaveowners often sent over enslaved Black men to other farmers in order to mate with Black women in order to birth more Black children for enslaving. Given her possible year of birth (1835), Elizabeth may have been the 15-year-old girl listed by the Census Bureau in 1850 as one of the enslaved of Archer Moore.

Slaves were never mentioned by name in the U.S. Census. Because no one was supposed to know them.

Elizabeth was unusual. She knew her mother and father, Morris and Lucy (also named Moore) and got to see them for years after the end of bondage. In 1880, they lived next door to her and Sampson, along with their children (including Samuel, my great-great grandfather). Sadly, Morris and Lucy died three years later. But they at least got a chance to experience freedom — and Elizabeth got to see her parents out of bondage.

Sampson wasn’t so lucky — and the same was true for so many other formerly enslaved Black people like him.

Because slavery was a financial enterprise that extended beyond merely owning the lives and liberties of Black people. As Dunaway details in books such as The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, slaveowners in states such as Virginia and Maryland often sold and rented out enslaved Black people to other slaveowners in cotton-planting states such as Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The slaveowners counted on such revenues, often garnered during spring planting and fall harvesting seasons, to offset the cyclical nature of farming, especially tobacco (whose prices were in decline for most of the 19th century).

Particularly for slave owners working smaller parcels of land in parts of Virginia such as Staunton and Augusta County that are the gateways into Appalachia, selling slaves was more-profitable than working the fields. Dunaway estimates that at least 100,000 enslaved Black people from places such as Augusta County were sold away and left the Appalachian South between 1840 and 1860 alone. This included teenage boys and girls being removed from their families before they turned 15. Two out of every five enslaved Black children were permanently removed from their homes and sold to slaveowners in the Deep South, according to Dunaway.

As they pursued profit, these slaveowners broke up Black families. Broke apart bonds of love between Black men and women formed despite slavemasters having whipped them, raped them, and exploited them economically. Took children from the arms and love of their mothers formed despite the fact that their mothers often never got to wean their own children because they were breastfeeding the children of slave owners. Removed children from fathers who cared for them despite the degradation of oppression.

Slavery broke Black families apart. Few came back together. The legacy of the deliberate destruction of the building block of society resonates to this day.

Many of these families tried to find each other after the end of the Civil War. Most were often unsuccessful. This was the case with Sampson.

Three years into Reconstruction in January of 1868, Sampson mentioned his plight to an employee of the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known to us today as the Freedmen’s Bureau. He told the a worker at the Staunton office looking at his case that mentioned that his father died before the end of the war and his mother had been “sold away South”. Sampson also mentioned a son named Andrew, who was 11 years old at the time of the recollection.

It is hard to know what happened to Andrew. But there are no mentions of a boy aged three or younger on Archer Moore’s slave schedule for 1860, and he doesn’t appear on the 1870 Census, the first in which Sampson and his family were no longer enslaved. There is a chance that Andrew may have been with Sampson for a short time, then died before he reached adulthood.

Sampson was one of many formerly enslaved Black men and women who had found themselves seeking help from the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sometimes it was about being owned wages for work done for former slave masters. Other times, it was about disputes they had with White men under which they apprenticed. In many cases, the Freedmen’s Bureau offices set up the very first schools Black children ever attended, settled disputes, even interceded on their behalf in court cases.

White former slaveowners who worked slowly and successfully to bring about Jim Crow hated the presence of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the expansive role the federal government was playing in Southern States. But for Black people like Sampson, as well as for people such as Hiram Revels (the first Black man ever to serve in the United States Senate), the Freedmen’s Bureau was the one tool they needed to ensure that they had a chance to at least have their civil rights and liberties defended and respected.

Reconstruction would end with the emergence of Jim Crow with its brutal segregation and oppression of Black people. Despite this, Sampson would manage to raise 10 children, and see many of them, including my great-grandfather, Samuel, make it into adulthood. Samuel, in turn, would watch his daughter, Florine, leave the South as part of the Great Migration and settle in New York’s Nassau County, where she and her husband, Henry Stone, would raise my grandmother, the first person in our family to go to college. The story carries on today as my family and I live the life Sampson never had the chance to have, and fulfill the dreams he would never have a chance to see.

The least we can do for our Sampson Moores is teach our children about their enslavement and their fights to be free.

Certainly that is all well and good. But there is no way that the realities of Sampson’s life in bondage and oppression, along with those of other formerly enslaved Black people should be obscured with talk of happy endings. Especially since Black people of today, along with other minorities, are still fighting for their liberties and for their children to gain the high-quality education they need and deserve.

If anything, what we need now, more than ever in this time, is an honest discussion of how America’s legacy of slavery, segregation, and oppression continue to shape our politics and society. That begins with providing all children with honest, unflinching knowledge about what people like Sampson went through, from slavery to Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

As your editor pointed out in last month’s essay on Confederate statues, much effort has been dedicated, both by generations of segregationists as well as by academics embracing the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, to render the lives of enslaved Black people and their descendants invisible, and to forget that their talents and other contributions were to the overwhelming benefit of generations of White people. American public education has been complicit in this erasing of reality, especially through classroom instruction, (as well as curricula and standards, that have wrongly taught generations of children that the Civil War was merely a battle between two equally noble sides, and sidestepped, even minimized, the true brutality of slavery.

The consequences of this failure to fully educate children can now be seen everywhere, including a White House occupied by a historical illiterate embracing the kind of White Supremacy that would have been respectable in the 19th century. Even respectable discourse about matters such as reforming schools are clouded by the inability of some to fully understand why it is critical to transform systems that are living legacies of deliberate decisions by past generations of White people to deny liberty and freedom to enslaved and oppressed Black people.

This is where a strong, comprehensive civics education comes in. When all children are taught the full and honest facts about American history, they can deal thoughtfully with the issues facing the nation today.

The good news is that we now have opportunities to correct that failure to provide children with proper civic and historical education. Common Core’s reading standards allow for teachers to use original texts (including documents from Freedmen’s Bureau offices) as well as more-accurate books on the history of slavery. Thanks to sites such as Family Search and Ancestry.com, as well as other resources such as the Library of Congress (which houses the Federal Writers Project’s former slave recollections effort) teachers and even families can get their hands on these sources.

Another step lies in improving how we train teachers, especially those specializing in history, civics, and social studies. This is where organizations such as Teach for America, as well as university schools of education, come in. It is high time that those men and women who teach our children are fully knowledgeable about how America as much perpetuated denial of civil rights as it tried to fulfill the promise of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness espoused by the Founding Fathers.

Our children deserve a more-honest history. The Sampson Moores deserve to have their struggles and roles in American life acknowledged. Now is the opportunity to do both.

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