Introduction
The history of slavery IS the history of the United States. As such, it is imperative for our students to learn, even while being challenging to teach. Students participating this unit will use biography in the form of oral histories to investigate the history of slavery and the experience of enslaved persons. Rather than rely on textbooks and what other people want students to learn, I want students to develop their own learning by reading and hearing the words of enslaved persons themselves, in their own words. However, the words students often read in biographies are not necessarily the direct words of the people in question. Sources can and should be questioned for accuracy, context, bias, and more. While on the one hand an important resource and a source worth studying, the WPA Slave Narratives - created by the United States government in the 1930s to record the experiences of slaves directly from former slaves themselves – are in fact not necessarily the words of former enslaved persons. How and why this came to be is worthy of study as well.
I currently teach at Hoover Middle School in San Jose, California. Students from the downtown area make up a diverse student body of approximately 1,100. Roughly 67% of our students are from low-income families and approximately 30% are identified as English Language Learners. The majority are students of color with Hispanic students making up roughly 80% of that total and ~10% are other students of color. Although this unit is written with my students in mind it is broad enough to be adapted for other classrooms looking to learn about the history of slavery and the use and analysis of primary sources.
Because my students are predominantly from minority and immigrant families they are especially attuned to the idea of individual rights and the inequality of the society in which they live. University of Northern Iowa Professor Paul Horton notes that students at this age group are especially receptive to the history of struggles in others because they are developing “their own moral compass.”1 I see this in my students as well. Because of this, exploring part of the story about how our current unequal society was created will increase student engagement. Slavery of course played a huge role in creating that unequal society. The idea that my students are looking at real people, speaking (more or less) directly to them, will also increase engagement over and above what a traditional textbook driven approach would.
My students will be investigating both the historical record of and about enslaved persons and also the issues surrounding the use of historical sources. In taking part in this unit my students will strengthen their ability to use multiple historical thinking skills, focusing mainly on historical significance (how and why do we decide to focus on certain events), change and continuity (how issues can evolve over time and yet remain relevant), and the ethical dimension of historical choices and events (how does a study of history help us to live in the present). These historical thinking skills will be practiced throughout the unit as students interact with a number of primary and secondary sources.
There will be two main sections to this unit. Initially, students will focus on the slave narratives created by the federal government during the New Deal in a program known as the Federal Writers Project (part of the WPA, I will refer to these sources collectively as the WPA Slave Narratives). These narratives attempt to show the experience of enslavement in the enslaved persons’ own words, and focus on learning about history through the lives and words of the participants themselves. After we have looked at several narratives and done some comparisons together as a whole class, I will then ask the students what they really know about the sources they are using. This will lead into the second main idea of the unit, which focuses on examining sources with a critical eye. I often tell my students they are developing historians, and all historians must practice and learn the skill of examining a source with a critical eye and understanding the context of its creation.
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