Beyond Victimization: African Americans

Abstract

Statement of Purpose My United States History survey classes at BHS are quite heterogeneous in terms of both ability and ethnic background. Approximately one third of my students are African American. I am constantly seeking ways to make the survey course relevant to their past so as to engage them more fully in their study of American history. A continuing problem has been a tendency on the part of most texts to portray minorities merely as victims, a process that inevitably leads to a not so subtle dehumanization of their role in our history and makes more difficult explanation of the sudden outburst of black protest in the so-called Civil Rights Movement. My approach in the classroom, therefore, is to portray a long and ongoing black freedom movement, a history of African-American protest that has a long, long history. Until recently, the weakest part of this portrayal has been the colonial and revolutionary period. Two valuable works began to interest me and move me into a search for materials that could more realistically illustrate the actual nature of the African-American experience during this period. Gary B. Nash's Red, White, and Black includes this assessment: were not merely enslaved. Indians were not merely driven from the land.To include Africans and Indians in our history in this way, simply as victims of the more powerful Europeans, is hardly better than excluding them altogether. It is to render voiceless, nameless, and faceless people who powerfully affected the course of our historical development as a nation (Nash, 2-3). Sidney and Emma Kaplan's The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution first gave me some tools to provide voices, names, and even faces for the revolutionary period. In the fall of 1989 I began to make use of some petitions for manumission presented in this work. These petitions were offered by New England slaves to their colonial legislatures, and they powerfully point out the paradox of white colonists who were demanding their freedom from England and at the same time continuing to condone slavery. My brief use of this source consisted merely of my reading some of the petitions aloud and conducting a discussion as to their contents. The discussion was followed by a short writing assignment.