The Huffington Post reported that a Tea Party group in Tennessee is lobbying to remove references to slavery, and any mention of the fact that the some of our country’s founders owned slaves, from public school textbooks. This denial of our our country’s racist history is on the same spectrum of behavior as Holocaust denying. Children need to understand our darkest historical truths if they are to stand up for civil rights in the future. The emotion we convey as we tell our children about the history of African Americans, whether it’s pride, shame, anger, or admiration, is a powerful force in shaping their world view.
February is Black History month, and I’d like to tell my 5-year- old daughter about The Little Rock Nine, the brave African American high-school students who faced down racist mobs and the Arkansas National Guard in order to integrate the Little Rock Central High School over the course of a year in 1957. It’s easy for me to tell my children an allegorical story about prejudice in the tradition or Dr. Seuss’s The Sneeches. It’s much more challenging for me to make this true story work for a 5-year old. My children are white and live in an affluent, multicultural community: I’m not sure they grasp what racism means, let alone segregation.
That’s why I’m so glad I stumbled upon Becky Birtha’s Grandmama’s Pride in the Montclair Public Library’s Civil Rights display.
Ms. Birtha’s wonderful book tells the story of two black sisters who go to visit their grandmother down South in the summer of 1956. The story’s young narrator notices that her mother steers her to the back of the bus, pulls her away from the lunch counter and the water fountain. Her aunt teaches her to read and as her literacy burgeons so does the realization that “Whites Only” signs forbid her entrance to bathrooms and restaurants. My daughter was outraged as she sounded out the signs and made this realization along with Birtha’s protagonist. Ms. Birtha also convey’s her narrator’s pride in her grandmother’s peaceful resistance to segregation.
Showing your child segregation through the eyes of child makes it real for them, and keeps it developmentally appropriate. I’ll take this lesson from Ms. Birtha into my storytelling. Even history requires literary devices! I will tone down the violence of the white mobs because it’s just too much for my 5-year-old. One of my story’s protagonists will be Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, as she grows up in segregated, inferior black schools. I’ll also point out that at least one white student at the school had the moral courage to befriend the young black heroes.
How do you talk to your children about America’s history of racism? How do you tell the stories of Black heroes and Civil Rights leaders? Which African Americans are your heroes?
Jennifer Dorr is a Montclair mom of two, a poet, marketer of children’s books and literary programming and lifelong student of folklore and mythology. She blogs about parents who tell their children homespun stories on Storygins that’s co-owned by Suzanne Aptman.
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There will be no more white history unless white people are allowed to say no to mass immigration and “assimilation” like all the non-white countries are allowed to do.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.