Teaching the 1619 Project

Teaching the 1619 Project in California

by Nicole Gilbertson
Director, UCI Teacher Academy

The Black Lives Matter protests this summer underscore the responsibility we as teachers have to provide students with opportunities to learn about the history of racism in our country. While discussions of race, particularly in this time of political polarization can be challenging, the California Department of Education’s initiative, “Education to End Hate,” passed in September, explicitly invites teachers to engage in these conversations in our classrooms. At the center of this initiative is the relevance of history instruction.  State Superintendent Tony Thurmond asserts,  “It’s time to double down on our efforts to combat all forms of hate, bias, and bigotry. By digging deeper into the complexities of our diverse and difficult histories—not denying or ignoring them—I believe education can provide the pathway to healing, understanding, and racial and social justice.” As we provide learning opportunities for our students to have the knowledge they need to be changemakers in our society, our classrooms should be places where young people consider, discuss, and analyze the history of racism in our country.  To aid in that effort, teachers will find many relevant and high-quality lessons from the California History-Social Science Project that offer teachers ways to make the history of African Americans in the US an important component of their curriculum.

In addition to teaching resources, there is an ever growing number of online materials that we as teachers can use to deepen our own content knowledge. One important resource to study the impact of African Americans on our society and culture is through the public programming offered by the UCI Humanities Center and that explores the The 1619 Project, originally published in the magazine of the New York Times and awarded a Pulitzer Prize. These recorded webinars offer current research from interdisciplinary scholars discussing relevant topics, such as health, education, and art to consider the significance of The 1619 Project as a vehicle to reframe our understanding of U.S. history and our contemporary society.  Complementing this timely dialogue, the UCI History Project hosted an event, Teaching The 1619 Project in November and will host another event in winter 2020.

The 1619 Project touches upon many facets of American history and includes articles that investigate the past, explore the impact of racism, and illuminate the lived experiences of Black Americans. Teachers can employ these resources to develop many relevant connections for their students’ and deepen their understanding of American history.

As Californians, we may think that the history of slavery occurred someplace else – in the American South – at a time when our state was in its infancy. While plantation slavery did not extend to California, historian Tiya Mills in her article, “Chained Migration: How Slavery Made its Way West,” writes, “Even as most Western states banned slavery in their new constitutions, individual enslavers held onto their property- in people until the Civil War.”  During that time, African Americans in California, free and enslaved, advocated for themselves and their community to be recognized as individuals who deserved the same rights as white Californians. The remarkable project by the ACLU of Northern California, Gold Chains: The Hidden History of Slavery in California, offers extraordinary case studies of men and women who fought for their civil rights through California’s court system, successfully gaining their freedom. Teachers can invite their students to explore this website to learn about these remarkable individuals and how they used the courts to secure civil rights for themselves while at the same time creating precedents that Americans would use in the struggle for social justice and equality. As students explore The 1619 Project and the Gold Chains website, they can consider the relevance of The 1619 Project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, claim that, “Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.” As teachers it is our responsibility to create space in our classroom for students to investigate the many voices of the past who actively engaged in freedom struggles so our students can better understand the rights that they have and how to advocate for themselves and their communities now and in the future.