Teaching: Desegregated History

"When I was going to school," recalls Author James Baldwin, "I began to be bugged by the teaching of American history, because it seemed that that history had been taught without cognizance of my presence." Baldwin's figurative forebears go back at least to 1513, when 30 Negroes sailed to the New World with Balboa. Yet the most widely used eighth-grade history text in the country today mentions only two Negroes by name as having lived since the Civil War, brushes off the Emancipation Proclamation in two sentences. Belatedly, educators are coming to...

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