How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

In 2015, the State Board of Education and publisher McGraw-Hill Education came under fire for providing students with a textbook that described how the transatlantic slave trade brought “millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” It seemed to many to be a deliberate obfuscation of the fact that Africans were forcibly and violently stripped from their homelands, not people who were just “workers” who simply agreed to come help cultivate North American land. In April 2018, eighth graders at Great Hearts Monte Vista North charter school in San Antonio were asked to complete a worksheet titled “The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View,” which had two columns in which the students were meant to write the “positive” elements of slavery in one and the “negative” elements in the other. A textbook that had been used at the school included a description of how slavery included “kind and generous owners” and enslaved people who “may not have even been terribly unhappy.” The Texas State Board of Education has since revised the standards so that, across the state, slavery is understood to have played a “central role” in causing the Civil War.