If you’re like me, you were taught that slavery ended with Emancipation Proclamation. Then Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and the Civil Rights Movement began.
It wasn’t until adulthood when I realized that I had only a vague understanding of a large part of our history, and that what I was taught regarding slavery in this country was only a part of the story.
Slavery by Another Name, a documentary produced by Twin Cities Public Television and based on a book of the same name by Douglas A. Blackmon, fills in many of these blanks. The film challenges the notion that slavery ended with Emancipation Proclamation by exploring the varied uses of forced labor—including convict leasing, peonage/debt slavery, and sharecropping—that occurred for a period of eighty years after the Civil War.
I accepted the wonderful challenge to develop educational materials based on Slavery by Another Name. The curriculum, aimed at high school students, introduces this little known history and encourages students to recover, explore and document shared histories. We also developed a teacher training workshop to empower educators to teach this history to their students. As I’ve traveled the country facilitating these workshops, most teachers wonder: 1) How could this happen? and 2) Why didn’t they know about it?
Read the entire post at the OSI-Baltimore blog, Audacious Ideas.
