Revamping Virginia History as Oppression Studies

Virginia schools do a poor job of teaching the history of African-Americans in the United States and Virginia, says Governor Ralph Northam. Black history is “difficult, complex and often untold,” he said yesterday when addressing the Virginia Commission on African American History Education, a body he created 10 months ago in the wake of his blackface scandal. Black history in schools is often “inadequate” and “inaccurate,” he said.

Reports the Virginia Mercury:

Northam said one of the most pressing issues he hopes the commission will address is casting the end of slavery as the end of oppression for black people. The Jim Crow Era, Massive Resistance and mass incarceration have followed, he said.

“My perception is that when we talk about black oppression, I think a lot of us need to understand that concept a lot better and this needs to start with the education of our children,” Northam said. “Black oppression is alive and well today, it’s just in a different form.”

After reading Northam’s critique of how Virginia schools teach state history, I thought I’d see for myself: What do the schools teach? What are students expected to master for their Standards of Learning exams? What I found surprised me. Northam’s description might have been an accurate representation of how history was taught when he was a pupil, but it bears no resemblance to what’s taught today.

The history of African-Americans is woven throughout the curriculum. Virginia students learn “Virginia Studies” in Grade 4, “U.S. History to 1865” in Grade 5, “U.S. History 1865 to Present” in Grade 6, and “Virginia & U.S. History” in Grade 11.

The following are excerpts from the Standards of Learning and Curriculum Framework documents on the Virginia Department of Education website.

Virginia Studies — Grade 5

• Explain the importance of agriculture and its influence on the institution of slavery.
• Describe how the culture of colonial Virginia reflected the origins of American Indians, Europeans (English, Scots-Irish, Germans), and Africans.
• Identify the various roles in the American Revolution of American Indians, whites, enslaved African Americans, and free African Americans in the Revolutionary War.
• In understanding the issues that led to the Civil War, describe the the roles of American Indians, whites, enslaved African Americans and free African Americans.
• In understanding the post-Civil War era, identify the effects of Reconstruction on life in Virginia.
• Identify the effects of segregation and “Jim Crow” on life in Virginia for American Indians, whites and African Americans.
• In understanding 20th-century Virginia, describe the social and political events in Virginia linked to desegregation and Massive Resistance and their relationship to national history.
• Describe the political, social, or economic impact made by Maggie L. Walker; Harry F. Byrd, Sr.; Oliver W. Hill, Sr.; Arthur R. Ashe, Jr.; A. Linwood Holton, Jr.; and L. Douglas Wilder.

United States History to 1865 — Grade 6

• Describe colonial life in America from the perspectives of large landowners, farmers, artisans, merchants, women, free African Americans, indentured servants, and enslaved African Americans.
• Explain how the issues of states’ rights and slavery increased sectional tensions.
• Describe the roles of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Frederick Douglass in events leading to and during the war.
• Describe the effects of war from the perspectives of Union and Confederate soldiers (including African American soldiers), women, and enslaved African Americans.

United States History: 1865 to the Present — Grade 7

• Analyze the impact of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States and how they changed the meaning of citizenship.
• Describe the impact of Reconstruction policies on the South and North.
• Describe the legacies of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass.
• Describe racial segregation, the rise of of “Jim Crow,” and other constraints faced by African Americans and other groups in the post-Reconstruction South.
• Examine art, literature, and music from the 1920s and 1930s, with emphasis on Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Harlem Renaissance.
• Describe the changing patterns of society, including expanded educational and economic opportunities for military veterans, women, and minorities.
• Examine the impact of the Civil Rights Movement, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the changing role of women on all Americans.

Virginia and United States History — Grade 11

• Analyze the cultural interactions among American Indians, Europeans, and Africans.
• Explain the impact of the development of indentured servitude and slavery in the colonies.
• Evaluate the cultural, economic, and political issues that divided the nation, including tariffs, slavery, the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements, and the role of the states in the Union.
• Evaluate and explain the multiple causes and compromises leading to the Civil War, including the role of the institution of slavery.
• Describe major events and the roles of key leaders of the Civil War era, with emphasis on Jefferson David, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Frederick Douglass.
• Evaluate and explain the impact of the war on Americans, with emphasis on Virginians, African Americans, the common soldier, and the home front.
• Evaluate and explain the political and economic impact of the war and Reconstruction, including the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
• Analyze the impact of prejudice and discrimination, including “Jim Crow” laws, the responses of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, and the practice of eugenics in Virginia.
• Evaluate and explain the impact of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the roles of Thurgood Marshal and Oliver W. Hill, Sr., and how Virginia responded to the decision.
• Explain how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the 1963 March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had an impact on all Americans.
• Assess the development of and changes in domestic policies, with emphasis on the impact of the role the United States Supreme Court played in defining a constitutional right to privacy, affirming equal rights, and upholding the rule of law.

If you subscribe to the New York Times view of American history, in which the nation’s history began not in 1607 when Jamestown was settled but in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia, and in which slavery, Jim Crow, racism and discrimination were the animating forces that drove the nation’s history and constitute the prism through which everything must be viewed, then, yes, Virginia’s curriculum is indeed inadequate.

But if you believe that U.S. and Virginia history were animated by many other factors — such as, to mention a few, territorial expansion, entrepreneurship and invention, industrialization, interactions with foreign powers, and above all the development of democracy and individual rights, the Virginia curriculum does a pretty good job.

Bacon’s bottom line: There are basically two approaches to teaching Virginia and U.S. history. One approach — the New York Times approach, the Ralph Northam approach — subordinates history to a branch of Oppression Studies. The history of Virginia and the U.S. is a study of oppression — of Indians, of women, of African Americans, of minorities of all sorts. The other approach teaches the animating ideals of the American Revolution and explores the long, painful struggle to apply them to universally.

At its root, the controversy centers on whether we teach our children that our nation was conceived in sin and oppression or whether we have ideals and institutions worth preserving.