The last entry crabbed about what I felt was an unfair review of our book. After rereading it, I can still feel the sting of that careless review. But, much has happened since so it’s time to move on. It’s been quite some time since I last posted here, but I’m really excited to be a Goodreads author. Both of our books have been finding homes with social studies teachers, so it’s time for a fresh start.

Over the past several years, Mark and I have traveled to Birmingham, Morgantown, WV, Harrisburg, PA and to schools in the Rochester area to present our on-going research and conduct workshops for teachers and teachers to be. We feel strongly that the work we’ve done and included in our book is an important addition to understanding the African American experience. It may sound obvious, but African American history IS American history. In order to understand our past, we have to strive to know, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”

We’ve also again turned our attention to helping teachers by adapting our book as a student edition. It follows the teacher edition but addresses students directly in the narratives. When I wrote the high school level American history text for the National Migrant Education Assoc.’s PASS (Portable Assisted Study Sequence) curriculum, the text needed to reach students with all levels of learning abilities, reading levels, and learning styles. We took that to heart in our student edition so that any student using it would find it accessible.

As we continue to find new ways to share the work, we’ll make sure to pass our progress along.

I’ve rarely been as upset, annoyed, furious, or sad as I am today. Yes, I’m as mad as a wet hen. I just read a supposed “review” of our book. From the first sentence it was clear that the reviewer had completely missed the point of our work. First he called it a book about Jackie Robinson. It’s not. Then with a sneering undertone wondered, what could we possibly add to the already crowded field of works about him. So, from the get go it was obvious that he hadn’t even carefully read the title. Our book is about what came before Jackie Robinson, ergo the title: Before Jackie. From that point on, he quibbled about everything we worked so hard to include so that teachers could use our history in their classrooms. No, it’s not the last word on the time period between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the modern day civil rights movement. It wasn’t meant to be. 

Teachers themselves do not have the time to do or read exhaustive research, locate sources, and craft teaching strategies. That was our goal; to do and read exhaustively and then synthesize the literature into a usable volume. We wanted to offer enough background information to aid their interest in bringing African American history into their classrooms, compile oodles of resources, and offer teaching suggestions. There is little to no African American history woven into the majority of social studies textbooks, although there has  been  some improvement seen over the past decade. But, it is not enough. My experience with the teacher candidates with whom I work confirms that they themselves know very little about African American history and are, therefore, as new teachers, unprepared themselves to compensate for their textbook’s omission of this important part of our past. And, it’s important to note that teachers are eager for just such a volume. At presentations to teachers locally, at state-wide conferences, and at national conferences, our most frequently heard reaction to our work is, “This is just what I need!”

As James Oliver Horton ended his tenure as president of the Organization of American Historians, he used his farewell address, “Patriot Acts: Public History in Public Service,” to talk about the responsibility historians have to “provide a critical context” for our contemporary conversations that are grounded in a firm understanding of our national past. In today’s political climate, what could be more important than taking tangible steps to expand our collective understandings about the ways and extent of African American participation in the national story. Without it, African American kids feel left out of American history and wrongly assume there probably isn’t any or it would be taught. Conversely, the rest of our students draw the same conclusion, giving them the impression that everything of consequence that’s ever been done, has been done by people like them. They have a past. African American kids often acquire an undeserved sense of irrelevance or bravado while white kids acquire an undeserved sense of  entitlement and arrogance. Neither is good for the country.

The review then goes on to quibble about whether or not teachers would have the class time to use our teaching suggestions. In this, he also misses the boat. They are suggestions — meant to get teachers started with enough possibilities included for them to pick and choose what elements they want to use, which ones they will use later, what they may modify, and what they can add to. To complain about too many options is like going into a restaurant and complaining about too many entrees to choose from. And, just for the record, throughout, we encourage further exploration of the topics we highlight. We include a wide variety of “for further reading” suggestions as well as on-line materials to explore. As to the comment that it wasn’t clear to the reviewer what grade level we were targeting, had he read more carefully, we offer suggestions with each teaching strategy on how teachers can use it at a variety of grade levels.

Here’s a handy-dandy little set of guidelines for peer review that would have helped, had it been used.

The one saving grace is that it was published in an obscure journal teachers are unlikely to read, so we’ll focus on the very good reviews we received from professional education journals instead. It is my opinion that the reviewer did a lousy job of reviewing our book and my greatest hope is that should he ever write a book himself, that someone review his work as carelessly.

Mark working with students

It takes a certain amount of courage to use a book you’ve written with your own students. But, because one of the most important reasons Mark and I wrote this book was to reach pre-service social studies teachers, it would have been silly to neglect my own students. The results have been, so far, encouraging.
The layout of the book does two things: 1st it covers a broad range of African American history, from the end of the Civil War up to the modern Civil Rights Movement. This is a time period that James Loewen has called “the nadir” of race relations in this country. During this period the efforts to move a civil rights agenda forward were necessarily limited by the pervasive and often violent repression imposed on African Americans. All this means is that even small gestures and actions need to be appreciated for the enormous courage they required. For students, the evidence of this answers the question: why didn’t they fight back? The evidence shows that fighting back in overt ways was out of the question if you hoped to survive. So we looked closer to find the ways, within the system of Jim Crow, African Americans did struggle for every available inch of freedom. We characterize these struggles as “sacrifice bunts.” Not as impressive as a home run, but every bit as important.
The 2nd important element of the layout is the inclusion of lesson suggestions and resources that accompany each chapter. Anyone who is in the classroom on a daily basis knows that it’s very difficult to fold in new material if it means starting from scratch to develop lesson plans. Knowing that, we felt that in order for the book to have the best chance of being used, we had to lend a helping hand. It also gave us the chance to introduce artifacts, webpages, blogs, and films that teachers might otherwise not be aware of.
After assigning readings from the book to my students, we used one of the artifacts highlighted in Chapter 4, Victor Green’s The Green Book. Here was an artifact from the Jim Crow era that demonstrated African American ingenuity in action. Between 1936 and 1964, Green published his guide for “Negro Motorists.” Students using copies of the guide were tasked to take a trip in the Way-back Machine and plot a trip around the Mid-Atlantic states looking for places where they could lodge overnight, get a haircut, eat in a restaurant, use gas station restrooms. This hands-on experience left an indelible mark on them. Rather than just reading about the limitations imposed on African Americans, they were able to experience those limitations in an authentic way. They felt the frustration of not being able to locate restaurants or lodging.
Because the class is designed to help pre-service teachers understand a wide range of what it means to teach inclusively, this experience gave them a chance for authentic understandings about the history of their own students whose past includes these kinds of experiences. This heightened sensitivity was reflected in their written evaluations of what they would need to consider as they prepare lesson plans of their own.
During this class we welcomed Justin Murphy, a reporter from our local newspaper, The Democrat and Chronicle. His article helped spread the word about what we were doing and our special mission. We want kids to come out of social studies classes with a sense of their own legacy and empowered to make a difference.”