Drive racists out of public life forever, and other lessons from Black history

On a frigid Thursday afternoon in late January, in a now-viral video, employees at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park were captured removing interpretive signs about slavery posted at the President’s House Site—where George Washington and John Adams both lived, and where Washington enslaved nine people.

The outdoor exhibit, installed in 2010 after years of advocacy by Black activists and historians, was intended to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals of freedom, equality and democracy and the brutal system of slavery it maintained. When a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked one of the park employees why the signs were being removed, he replied, “I’m just following orders.” 

Months after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump directed national parks and museums to root out “divisive, race-centered ideology,” specifically targeting Independence Hall—where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted—in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary.  

“We’re living in a time…where people are really trying to constrain what we learn,” said Brian Jones, an author, longtime educator in New York City public schools and senior director of reading and engagement at the New York Public Library. “Sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the sensors come along and remind us how powerful they are.”

After nearly a decade as an elementary school teacher, Jones earned a doctorate in urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research there on “a really explosive chapter in Black education history,” the 1968 student uprising at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute—which Jones’ father attended—would become the subject of his first book and propel him to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, first as a scholar-in-residence and later as staff. The more Jones studied Black history, the more he came to believe that Black history was for everyone—the title of his latest book, published with Haymarket Books.

As America nears its semiquincentennial, February also marks 100 years of Black history commemorations, a tradition started by the historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926 and officially recognized by president Gerald Ford during the 1976 bicentennial.  

Some sixty years ago, in yet another period of social and political upheaval, the writer James Baldwin delivered an address to teachers in his native New York in which he concluded that the source of the country’s troubles was its own slippery sense of self, built on “a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” 

The role of education in such a time, Baldwin argued, was to produce free-thinkers capable of questioning these myths and willing to challenge society in order to save it. By teaching an inclusive and unvarnished view of history, and creating an opportunity for Black students to see themselves in the classroom, educators could liberate all students, he suggested. 

To better understand Black history, the liberatory power of education, and how ideas of race and nation shape American identity, I spoke with Jones in early January about Black History Is for Everyone—a book born out of the belief that Black history is an “invitation to rethink everything,” and that studying it “offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves, whether you identify as Black or not, in a new way.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“If history is any guide,” you write, “reconstruction is even more difficult than abolition.” Today, amid the rolling back of so many hard-won freedoms, the dilution of Black political power, and the erasure of Black history, what can we learn from past liberatory struggles about the path to building a more durable and equitable democracy?

I mean, that’s the million-dollar question. The idea that reconstruction is even harder than abolition, as you may recall, is an idea I get straight from [the abolitionist Frederick Douglass] and W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black scholar who wrote a masterful book called Black Reconstruction, against the idea that Reconstruction was a disaster filled with just Black corruption, and Black people shouldn’t have been able to do all the things that they were doing, voting and carrying on: [that] it was just too much, too fast. 

What Du Bois teaches us is that after the abolition of slavery, the process of reconstructing the South came to this moment in its most radical phase, when the social order got turned totally upside down, and we had this quite radical experiment in biracial democracy. You had people, Black people, elected to offices at all levels, not just state government, but to the Senate, to the federal legislature. You had, through voting, the creation of amazing new state constitutions, some of which banned racism, created, in at least two cases, interracial schooling—[and] in every case, prohibited racism in saying who could go to what school.

There’s a historian, Manisha Sinha, who writes about it as the beginning of social democracy, in a sense, in the United States. Black people at the lead of this process of building a new society with their allies, the radicals in the Republican Party, begin building, for the first time, free, tax-supported, public institutions that didn’t exist before—schools, hospitals. So you have white children, in many cases, going to school for the first time thanks to the advocacy of their Black neighbors.

What came afterwards, I think it’s helpful to think of it as a counterrevolution. That’s what explains the violence of the Klan—burning down schools, burning down churches, burning crosses on people’s lawns, lynching people, terrorizing elected officials, in some cases violently overthrowing elected governments. So it took a lot of violence to turn it all the other way around, and then what we get coming out the other end is a new system of Jim Crow. 

Is reconstruction even more difficult than abolition? Is building a durable democratic order more difficult than tearing down something that’s unequal? I think [Douglass] has proved correct that it is more difficult, and that often we are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It’s usually more the case that we didn’t go far enough to secure these democratic changes, and because the changes weren’t thoroughgoing enough, that’s why they become undone. 

In the case of Reconstruction, we can see it clearly, because after Lincoln’s assassination, our new president takes a shine to the Confederates and is doing everything in his power to reinstate them. And then that attitude unfortunately becomes the dominant attitude, even among the Republican Party. So instead of squashing white supremacy, instead of making it impossible for the former Confederates to ever raise their heads again, to ever take office again, to ever terrorize anyone again, instead of doing that, they encourage them.

They take their foot off the gas of social change. They back off, allow them to flourish, allow the violence to continue, and the nation is reconciled. There is a new unity between North and South. But it’s sacrificing the project of Black rights and progress and really the project of democracy in the interest of reconciliation. So yeah, we didn’t go far enough.

On the topic of revolution—what about how studying the Haitian Revolution sort of shatters these western notions of freedom and democracy?

This was a real learning curve for me, because I am not Haitian. I don’t speak Creole or read it, so I have tremendous social distance from this history and this event, and so I had to do and continue to do a lot of work to try to learn and understand and especially trying to get closer to Haitian sources, to Haitian authors and Haitian scholars. The more you get closer to the event, the more you realize how earth-shattering it was.

More and more people are on to the idea that this is a really seminal event, that this was a game changer, and putting it up next to the American Revolution is revealing, and the French Revolution, actually. Both of them were revolutions declaring, égalité, fraternité. All men are created equal, all of these very universalistic declarations that are bold. And in both the French and the American cases, they are still keeping people in chains at the same exact time. 

The Haitian Revolution, by contrast, is a revolution made by people in chains. It’s the people in chains rising up. And so what’s embarrassing is that the people saying all this universal stuff, not only do they have their own slaves, but then when these people in Haiti rise up and are gaining freedom, the very same kind of liberté that [the French and Americans] are talking about, as soon as it’s happening, they are against it.

First [the enslaved African people are] in a French colony, Saint-Domingue. They rise up to form a new nation. They give it the name [“Ayiti”] that the indigenous people gave to the island, an amazing callback, and they declare in their first constitution the abolition of slavery. That’s the first time anybody does that anywhere in the world in a constitution. That’s amazing. 

So the ideas coming out of the Haitian Revolution, the spirit of it, that this individual liberty, that this idea of liberty, that this idea of everyone being free, that we’re not going to have slavery anymore, that all of these ideas apply to the African diaspora, which is the test of universalism. Does it apply to these human beings over here? Haiti passes that test, and American and French Revolutions fail it.

You also write about “the silence of the archives,” and how difficult it can be to access the views of Black revolutionaries in historical documents that are mostly authored and maintained by their oppressors. How can researchers learn to listen to, and for, the voices of Black folks in these texts?

It’s a great question.  Sometimes that’s tricky, because the traces that people leave depend a lot on their status—especially, the further back you go in time, the less documentation you have for people of lower status, and those lower-status people often show up in really unpleasant ways in the documents of high-status people. So for rich people, and especially wealthy white people, we have their diaries, and we have their journals, and we have their letters to all their siblings, and we have all this rich material about their internal life. And then we might have a ledger where they’ve kept account of how many Black people they own, and that sort of thing, and who got sick and when. 

And we have to then read between the lines of the ledgers: This person disappeared, or this person got sick and then got sick again and then got sick again. Is this somebody who’s repeatedly sick, or is this a form of resistance, of work stoppage? What’s going on here? So there are new tools and new interest among researchers in asking these questions.  

On the other hand, there are also other cases where the archives and the ancestors get quite loud. It’s impressive. Like we do have poems and letters, and abolitionist speeches and newspapers. Sometimes we will have a Black newspaper, a Black journal, or the proceedings of a protest organization, but it’s all men, because that’s who got hold of the resources and was writing things down.

So we have to do some extra work to try to get access to the perspectives of Black women in those times, [or] the perspectives of Black folks who didn’t speak English or write in English, or were disabled or were queer, or just all of the ways that we know that archives tend to reflect the hierarchies that we live with. So too are they often unequal in the ways that they reflect people in the past. And that is a serious challenge for researchers.

In your experience, how do you go about deconstructing or challenging the American mythos around race and nation that’s ingrained in so many people from such a young age?

Patriotism is often taught as a kind of unquestioned substrate of the educational journey. It’s like you’re pledging allegiance to the flag in third grade before anybody’s told you what those words mean. And so the very act of posing the question seems radical, but from a kind of educational perspective, it’s not really. It’s just good teaching. 

The classroom is a space where all of these things should be objects of study, and in the grand sweep of human history, nations are new. They’re pretty brand-spanking new. So yes, we should hold them up as objects of study and ask the question, where did they come from? When did they form? How did they get made? And that might lead people to the idea that this is not an eternal thing to which one must just bow down, but is a construct of our world. 

I think that a lot of people have come around to this idea when it comes to race, but they might feel less comfortable with that kind of talk around nation, and so I’m trying to gently, in some ways, help people see that actually these two are cousins in a sense—that we construct ways of grouping ourselves as human beings, and we don’t have to believe in those constructs, to think through them and about them carefully. 

Can you also speak to the liberatory power of education, and what role public schools and libraries play?

These spaces, at their best, are spaces that are just chock-full of democratic possibilities, because they’re places where we might where we have the possibility of learning with and from each other, changing each other’s minds, learning about a different perspective that you’ve never thought about before.

We’re living in a time, as I think you well know, where people are really trying to constrain what we learn, and their fear of our reading lists is part of the answer to your question about the liberatory power of education. That they’re so scared of what’s going to happen if people learn the real history of the United States. If people aren’t allowed to pose these questions, that should tell us how high the stakes are for keeping our schools and libraries open as spaces of learning and possibility. So sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the censors come along and remind us how powerful they are.