Avoiding the Trap of Whitewashing the Founding Era: Teaching Black Liberation during the American Revolution

Although I have dedicated the last twenty-one years of my career to making history come alive to students in both urban and suburban schools, I am not dismissive or shocked when I encounter students or adults who argue that history is boring and pointless. After all, despite being awarded the 2019 National History Teacher of the Year Award by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the 2019 Outstanding Teacher of American History Award by the Daughters of the American Revolution for the District of Columbia, I was one of those students who on the surface could not wait to report to my eleventh grade US History class at the end of the day, because I knew it would be a place where I could rest my eyes and take a nap. I knew my teacher would not notice as he lectured for ninety minutes straight, praising the names of men who did not look like me or share a similar background, and who in many cases were the architects behind policies that hindered my ancestors’ freedom and opportunities.

In US History, I was bombarded with a narrative that began with the enslavement of Africans in the Americas and ended with Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, freeing the enslaved. We even skipped over the Civil Rights Movement. Thankfully, that class was not my only source of US history. My parents’, grandparents’, and great grandparents’ rich stories that highlighted life as descendants of enslaved Africans living in this country unleashed a fire inside of me that burned to know similar stories that never made it into my textbook or my US History teacher’s lectures. To this day I look back and reflect on the fact that my teacher’s inability to realize my love of history and challenge my visible apathy—which stemmed from my failure to see myself or anyone who looked like me in his lessons—deprived him of the opportunity to witness the rise of a future history lover and award-winning educator.

One period in US history to which I posed the most passive resistance in class was the Founding Era, specifically the American Revolution. I came of age in the 1990s, which was a period when teenagers like myself witnessed an explosion in Black Nationalism that expressed itself in many different facets of popular culture. I begged my parents to take me to see movies like Spike Lee’s blockbuster 1992 hit Malcolm X; Mario Van Peebles’s 1995 film Panther; the story of the Black Panther Party; and John Singleton’s 1997 drama Rosewood, which provided an account of the massacre of the residents of Rosewood, a Black town in Central Florida that was about a six-hour drive from my hometown. All these films told the story of Blacks fighting for their freedom. Hip hop music from trailblazing artists such as Public Enemy, Rakim, and Queen Latifah dropped beats we could dance to along with lyrics that swelled with knowledge from our past that was not being taught in history classes. Clothing lines such as Cross Colors and FUBU (For Us, By Us) paid tribute to Pan Africanism with their red, black, and green color schemes.

Everywhere around me Black American teenagers like myself were being urged to explore their history, everywhere except in the classroom. At the same time, in 1992 Los Angeles was burning from flames set by children and grandchildren of the Great Migration who were tired of the continued police harassment and brutality captured on camera during the Rodney King beating and the failure of our justice system to find the perpetrators guilty. In my mind, being forced to memorize and simply regurgitate on a test all the British acts that led to America’s decision to declare independence from Great Britain could not compete with what was happening around me. During my entire time in high school I was not introduced to one single Black person who lived during the American Revolution, fought for their own liberty, or fought for this country’s independence. Everything I eventually learned on that subject came from my own outside pursuits or from my reading lists in college. I was completely blown away by Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution (1961), Gary B. Nash’s Race and Revolution (1990), and Woody Holton’s Forced Founders (1999).

Twenty-five years later, as an educator, I make sure I do not fall into the same trap of whitewashing the Founding Era or perpetuate the erroneous belief that while White Americans pursued liberty, Blacks were passive in the pursuit of their own. I do this first by helping the students realize how little they actually know about the subject and how it has been misrepresented in history, next by using a variety of primary sources to explore the stories of men and women involved in the fight for their own liberation, and lastly by having the students reflect on the impact these stories have on their overall understanding of the nation’s founding, its present, and its future.

For example, I begin the unit on the American Revolution with a warm-up in which I present my students with Paul Revere’s famous 1770 engraving, The Boston Massacre. Almost all my students recognize the image and can describe in detail the major event it depicts. I then present my students with two additional images, Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770 (1855) by illustrator William L. Champney, and an illustration entitled “Crispus Attucks, the First Martyr of the American Revolution” from Colored Patriots of the American Revolution by William Cooper Nell (1855). I explain to my students that all three images depict the same event but were created at different periods in history. I then ask my students to look for key differences in the images. Sadly, most of my students have no idea who Crispus Attucks was, but perhaps the greatest tragedy lies in the fact that some students forgot Black people were still present in the colonies after 1619 and as a result never once asked themselves how they were affected by the Revolution or contributed to its outcome. It is important for students to know about Crispus Attucks—why he was not only present but at the forefront of the Boston Massacre—as well as to understand why they have never learned about him. After briefly exploring his life and the irony in his legal status at the time of his death, I ask the students the following question: “Can people who study the American Revolution gain a true understanding of its principles without including heroes like Crispus Attucks in the narrative?”

Yet exploring the story of Crispus Attucks alone is not enough. It is estimated that during the Revolution as many as 100,000 enslaved Blacks fled their owners seeking their own freedom. Thomas Jefferson estimated that Virginia alone lost 30,000 enslaved people.[1] Historians argue that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 Black men served in the Continental Army while around 20,000 served in the British army.[2] The stories of these Black men and women who chose to join the patriots, British, or nearby Maroon communities demand our attention. At the same time, teachers need to be cautious and resist the urge to simply inundate our students with names of Black historical figures of the Revolutionary era.

As educators, our ongoing effort is to broaden the existing narrative of this country. We must always remain purposeful and help our students to gain a more complete understanding of this nation’s history. We should also seize every opportunity to press our students to imagine experiences in someone else’s shoes. I achieve these goals by assigning each student an individual Black Revolutionary figure such as Prince Hall (1738–1807), Colonel Tye (1753–1780), Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), and Boston King (1760–1802). Students are given a one-page biographical summary for each figure. Most of these figures were enslaved, and some suffered great cruelty by their owners. I ask the students to conjecture whether their assigned figure ran away to join the British, supported the patriots, or joined a Maroon community. I then ask them to decide what they themselves would have done if they were in their historical figure’s shoes, and why. After our class discussion, we investigate the choice their figure made and how that choice impacted the outcome of the Revolutionary War. As in the Crispus Attucks activity, I encourage students to make the case for why the American Revolution cannot be fully understood without the inclusion of African Americans. This activity personalizes the study of Blacks during the Revolution, and the war begins to mean more to my students than simply a dispute over whether or not Americans should be forced to pay taxes. This activity vivifies those Blacks who served on both sides of the war, proving that Black people were neither invisible nor passive observers in the pursuit of their own liberty and the independence of this country.

However, if we restrict our discussion of Blacks in the American Revolution to Black soldiers, we neglect the discussion of Black women, who not only pursued their own liberty during the Revolution but forced this country to put into practice the ideals preached in the Declaration of Independence. No better example can be found than in the story of Elizabeth Freeman (1742–1829), also known as Mum Bett. Freeman was born into slavery in Massachusetts in 1742. Her story is remarkable because during the war she sued in court for her freedom. She used the very idea of freedom and liberty in the new Massachusetts state constitution as a basis for why she should also experience the freedom White men had been demanding in the streets. Not only did she win her court case in Brom and Bett v. Ashley, but she became the first Black American to be free under the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780 and to receive court-ordered payment from her owner. Her case set a precedent that later resulted in the eventual abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. Her fight for liberation was not on the battlefield, but her victory reverberated for generations.[3] Her interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the basic principles of the Revolution was on a level that her owners could never reach, for they were never truly enslaved in the literal sense like she was. After reading her story in class, my students discuss the following questions in a Socratic Seminar: (1) How did Freeman use the rhetoric and principles of the American Revolution for own her benefit? (2) Why was Freeman significant, not only as an enslaved person but also as a woman? (3) How did Freeman’s pursuit of justice push the state of Massachusetts to put into practice the ideals of the American Revolution? and (4) Why is the story of the American Revolution and the Founding Era incomplete without the story of Elizabeth Freeman?

Many of us are teaching in classrooms with students who may appear, like I did twenty-five years ago, to be apathetic or whose attention clearly lies outside of the classroom. Before we write them off, we must remember that the students in our classrooms have recovered from a summer when the murder of George Floyd was repeatedly broadcast on almost every major news channel on television. It is a traumatic image most of us cannot erase from our memory. Let us also not forget that three months prior to Floyd’s tragic death, Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down and Breonna Taylor was murdered in her sleep. Floyd, Arbery, and Taylor look like many of the students sitting in our classrooms. Forgive our students if they are not ecstatic to learn about the Stamp Act or Townshend Acts. Do not dismiss the student who meets your analysis of Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech with cynicism because they know that he was himself, despite his convictions, a slave owner. Instead, acknowledge the fact that you might be in a classroom of students who spent the summer marching in the streets, attempting to launch their own revolution with banners that read “Black Lives Matter” instead of “No Taxation without Representation.” It is our responsibility as educators to let them know that they are not the first, but are following in the footsteps of their ancestors who, like them, marched for liberty back in 1776.

Alysha Butler-Arnold is a social studies teacher at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC. She received the 2019 National History Teacher of the Year Award from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the 2019 Outstanding Teacher of American History Award from the Daughters of the American Revolution for the District of Columbia.

[1] “Maroons in the Revolutionary Period, 1775–1783.” PBS Resource Bank, “Africans in America.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p50.html.

[2] “Seven Black Heroes of the American Revolution.” HISTORY, “History Stories.” https://www.history.com/news/black-heroes-american-revolution.

[3] “Elizabeth Freeman (Mum Bett), 1742–1829.” PBS Resource Bank, “Africans in America.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p39.html.