Out of the ghetto

When Otha Richard Sullivan asked the science class at his junior high school in Detroit to name four African-American scientists, he was shocked by the response. The class of predominantly black students couldn’t think of any. Mr Sullivan, whose own parents had brought him up on fireside tales of black mathematicians and inventors, decided to do something about their ignorance. He sat up all night writing factsheets for his students on people such as Elijah McCoy, the man whose runaway slave parents sent him to Scotland to learn engineering, and who invented an engine lubricator so superior to its rivals that would-be purchasers learned to ask for “the real McCoy”.

When Mr Sullivan’s teacher colleagues saw his sheets, they asked him to produce similar resources for English and maths. He researched stories of African-Americans from revolutionary times through black newspapers, the Library of Congress and oral history. When the Detroit education department found out what he was doing, it asked him to take a year out of teaching to run black history workshops for the city’s teachers.

The publisher John Wiley commissioned Mr Sullivan to write a schools’ series called Black Stars. Other writers got involved, and since 1998 Wiley has published seven volumes in the series: 200 mini-biographies spanning three centuries of African-American teachers, healers, writers, military heroes, scientists and inventors, entrepreneurs and musicians. The eighth, on women scientists and inventors, is due out this month.

So while Europe, the United States and Africa struggle to agree on atonement and redress for the suffering of black people in the slave trade, Mr Sullivan - now professor of education at Alcorn state university in Mississippi - is part of a growing movement among American teachers, schools and educational publishers that aims to teach a black history that goes beyond slavery. It focuses not on blacks as the victims in history but as achievers. “Many of the history books today don’t talk about the contributions of all people,” says Mr Sullivan. “They don’t talk about the black people who were architects as well as builders of the mansions in the antebellum (pre-civil war) South. They don’t talk about the inventors who couldn’t patent their inventions because they were slaves. They don’t talk about the fact that from 1866 to 1870 Mississippi had two black senators.

“My purpose has been to inspire, to educate, to share with young people, particularly young black Americans, the fact that for hundreds of years our people were in engineering, in maths, in chemistry, in physics, and that they too can aspire to be anything they want to be.”

But Mr Sullivan’s project has gone beyond raising awareness and esteem among young blacks. John Ryan, managing director of African-American Publications, a publisher and distributor of black biographical reference books to US schools, says the move to raise the profile of black history has found an audience outside the black community. “Almost every school in the country has our books,” he says. “I think that, as minorities have got into more powerful positions, they have been able to lobby schools more effectively to get this type of material into the library.”

Mr Sullivan is scathing of critics who say his “inspirational history” is not objective enough. “If you argue that this kind of history is subjective, you can also argue that traditional American history has been very subjective,” he says, “because it has left out the contribution of a lot of people who were not white.”

Salvatore Cellura, a social studies teacher who a year ago volunteered to teach an African-American history course at Edward Libbey high school in Toledo, Ohio, would certainly agree with that. Mr Cellura is a European history specialist whose own eyes were opened when he started teaching at Edward Libbey, an 1,100-pupil, 14-18 school with 40 per cent black pupils, 40 per cent white and 20 per cent Hispanic. “I had no idea that the Nubians controlled Egypt for 30 years,” he says. “I didn’t know that the Portuguese and Spanish empires initiated the slave trade from Africa to the New World; I didn’t know that there were 5,000 Africans in the American armies that defeated the British.

“Every student should do this kind of course, and we should teach Hispanic history too. The greater part of our society doesn’t like to hear that we built our country on the backs of other people, but we need to hear it.”

This point seems to be borne out by the fact that since the optional African-American history course was established three years ago, all of its students have been black. Among the white students who cluster in the top, academically successful courses, it has little prestige, a trend noted by the school’s head of social studies, Marsha Dunaway, who plans to teach the course next year. “My honours (top stream) students were laughing at me, saying, ‘Mrs Dunaway that’s too easy a class for you to teach’.”

Among black students, having a white teacher is also a deterrent, says Colleen McBride, 17, who has just finished the course. “When I said I was doing the course, a lot of my friends said, ‘but the teacher’s white’. But Mr Cellura read Martin Luther King’s speech to us and he started crying, and after that I didn’t have no doubts. Nobody else in our class cried, and everybody was black, but he sat there crying.”

She found the course inspirational. “I wrote about Queen Nzinga of Angola. She caught my eye because back in those days (the 17th century) women didn’t mean too much and she protected her country for 30 years and didn’t let the slave traders in.

“When I took the ordinary history course, they talked about racism and cruelty to the slaves, but they did it from the outside. It was like the whites wanted the blacks to be free but nobody could do anything about it. But in African-American history it was almost like the book was written by the slaves. You feel more in touch with it. I wished I was living back then; I wanted to do something about it.”

All students would benefit from learning black history, but black students particularly need this kind of history, says Edward Libbey’s headteacher, Howard Brown. “This generation wasn’t here for Martin Luther King,” he says. “They have been able to come through the front door of this school and nobody ever stopped them. Whereas when my mother graduated from here in 1931, blacks had to use a side entrance. They were not allowed to be in clubs or activities, just classes.

“These students haven’t learned what slavery meant, what it meant to come up from that situation. It’s just something they read in a book. They don’t understand what people have done and sacrificed so that they could come to school and walk through the front door.”

The British experience Britain’s only real equivalent to America’s shelves of inspirational black history is a series called Black Profiles, written and produced by Verna Wilkins, whose publishing company, Tamarind Books, recently won awards for a life of Stephen Lawrence (see Friday, April 20, 2001). She started the series in 1999, after trying and failing to persuade larger educational publishers to include black British or European historical figures in a set of biographies they were producing for primary schools. She says the only black figure they were prepared to consider was Nelson Mandela.

“What are you saying to the black European child in the classroom when you do that?” she demands. “What context is that for a black European child growing up, being told they have no role models worth writing about?” British teachers she meets are wary of buying American black history books for similar reasons, she says: the cultural differences between children who grow up in Britain and those who grow up in America are huge, whatever their colour. But teachers buy American stuff, she says, “out of sheer desperation, because there isn’t anything else”.

Her Black Profiles series for Tamarind contains six A5 hardback books aimed at nine to 12-year-old readers. Each concentrates on one living person: the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, novelist Malorie Blackman, IT entrepreneur Jim Braithwaite, politician Lord Taylor of Cheltenham, barrister and baroness Patricia Scotland and orthopaedic surgeon Samantha Tross. Each costs pound;6.99.

A number of British publishers have produced one-off books about black historical figures, though no British one, according to Letterbox Library, the multicultural book distributors. They include a biography of the Crimean nurse Mary Seacole by John Malam, published by Evans, a biography of Nelson Mandela by James Riordan, published by Belitha Press, and Multicultural Britain, by Paul Wignall, published by Heinemann.

This last was included in the autumn 2001 Letterbox Black History catalogue, which is dominated by American books, to meet the unsatisfied demands of British teachers for books specifically concerned with black British history. Letterbox also runs displays of multicultural books in schools.

This month, Franklin Watts publishes The Diary of a Young West Indian Immigrant, a fictional diary of Gloria Charles, who travels from Dominica in 1961 to live with her parents in England. Hodder amp; Stoughton’s Livewire series for teenagers with a low reading age includes biographies of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

Hidden History, published by the Development Education Project, focuses on the lives of African and Afro-Caribbean people in Greater Manchester and is aimed at pupils at key stages 2 and 3.

The seven hardback books in the Black Stars series cost pound;17.50 each. They can be ordered through bookshops, or direct from John Wiley, Baffins Lane, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 1UD. Tel: 01243 779777Tamarind Books: PO Box 52, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 1UN. Tel: 020 8866 8808; fax 020 8866 5627; email: info@tamarindbooks.co.ukLetterbox Library: 71-73 Allen Road, London N16 8RY. Tel: 020 7503 4801; fax 020 7503 4800; email info@letterboxlibrary.comHidden History is available for pound;1 plus stamped A4 envelope from DEP, 801 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester M20 2QR. Tel: 0161 445 2495; fax: 0161 445 2360; email: depman@gn.apc.org

INVENTORS, EDUCATORS AND PIONEERS

Faces from the Black Stars series

Daniel Hale Williams (1856-1931) was a pioneering surgeon. In 1893, he performed the first open-heart surgery by removing a knife from the heart of a stabbing victim. Williams sutured a wound to the pericardium, from which the patient recovered. He was the first surgeon in chief to divide the Freemen’s Hospital in Washington, DC,into separate departments to treat specific conditions. He was the only African-American in a group of 100 charter members of the American College of Surgeons.

George Washington Carver (1864-1943) was one of the greatest educators and agricultural researchers. He became the first African-American to enrol at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. As assistant botanist for the college experiment station, he contributed to rural economic improvement by offering alternative crops to cotton such as peanuts, which improved the soil and, according to Carver, had an awesome number of uses. He created “moveable schools”, bringing practical agricultural knowledge to farmers.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was an educator and architect of the African-American women’s movement. In 1935, she founded the National Counsel of Negro Women, which still exists. She served as an adviser to four US presidents. She founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College) in 1904. Served as consultant to the USsecretary of war for selection for the first female officer candidates.

Garrett Augustus Morgan (1877-1963) was a businessman and inventor. In the 1920s, he invented the first traffic signal, and in 1916 made the news for using a gas mask he had invented to rescue several men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel beneath Lake Erie. His traffic signal was the basis for modern traffic signal systems and an early example of today’s intelligent transportation systems.The Morgan gas mask was refined for use by the USArmy during the First World War.

Dr Mae Jemison (1956-) was the first African-American woman in space (aboard Endeavour in 1992). She was science mission specialist (a Nasafirst) on the STS-47 space lab J flight, a joint USJapan mission. She conducted experiments in life sciences and material sciences, and was co-investigator in bone cell research. She resigned from Nasa in 1993, founding the Jemison Group, which is responsible for health and environmental projects around the world.

TEACHING RESOURCES ON THE NET

The roots of racism lie in prejudice, fear and ignorance, and the only long-term solution is to try to understand the story in all its confusion and complexity, writes teacher and author Ben Walsh. Teachers and students should find the following sites interesting and educational.

The Story of Africa

(www.bbc.co.ukworldserviceafricafeaturesthestoryofafrica) is an impressive BBC World Service project that is a must for anyone who wants an overview of the continent’s history. You can listen to the programmes, get written summaries and hear clips of interviews. The level is high, but enthusiastic upper primary and lower secondary students should be able to manage.

Channel 4‘s Black History Map (www.channel4.comblackhistorymap index.html) is an interactive site with the emphasis on stories, questions, ideas and evidence submitted by the audience. The search engine is organised into categories such as “biography”, “family history” and “literature”. Click on your locality and the map will take you to a list of sites in that area. The sites are accessible, the navigation is simple and the focus on multimedia appeals to all ages.

Windrush (www.bbc.co.ukeducationarchive windrush) supports the recent BBC series Windrush, which looked at the experience of black people in Britain. The site uses the metaphor of a voyage on the “SS Windrush”, and can take you to oral histories, poems and literature, timelines and learning resources. With guidance, pupils of all ages should manage.

Generation’s Journey (www.batley.org.ukgenj) is an excellent and accessible archive of the experiences and achievements of Afro-Caribbean people in Kirklees, Yorkshire.

Homebeats: struggles for racial justice (www.homebeats.co.uk publicationsrom.htm) accompanies the excellent CD-Rom Homebeats, published by the Institute for Race Relations. The CD-Rom and website are accessible to a wide range of students. The main vehicle for exploring the CD is the life stories of people who have fought racism. The CD delivers a worthy message without appearing pious.

There’s a wealth of web resources on black American history, most of which address the issues of slavery and civil rights. Others take a more comprehensive approach, highlighting the cultural achievements of black writers, musicians and political leaders.

Gale Group Resources for Black History Month (www.gale.comfree_resourcesbhm.htm) is a free resource with clear indexing. Even the none-too-subtle sales pitch for non-free resources is interesting. Students can access biographies of important black Americans and samples of black literature. There are timelines, links, activities and quizzes.

The King Center (www.thekingcenter.com) is dedicated to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who was assassinated in 1969. It contains a useful biography of King, along with a chronology and photo album. The pitch is accessible for most upper primary and lower secondary school students.

Some Missing Pages (www.qesn.meq.gouv.qc.campages) is a venture involving social studies teachers in Quebec with the black community there to examine some of the “missing pages” of the province’s history. It is a wonderful concept and educationally focused. There are great stories, fascinating individuals and good lesson ideas. UK teachers will have few problems making the necessary adjustments.