‘It’s about self-definition’: behind the early battle to teach Black history in US schools

In the decades before the second world war, the African American history taught in US public schools was remarkably backwards and racist. Black inferiority was assumed, with Africa seen as a primitive land lacking any great civilizations, slavery a necessary and benevolent institution, and Black people incapable of self-determination. The dismantling of these lies written to serve white people in power was the work of decades – in the first half of the 20th century, an entire generation of activists fought to transform the way Americans educated themselves about Black history, crafting what has been termed the “alternative Black curriculum”.

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