Ian Rowe offers helpful ideas for teaching American history.
On September 12, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Centennial Commission at the centennial celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his remarks in New York City, Dr. King emphasized that the document that started the long process of ridding America of slavery was actually inspired by the core principle of equality embedded in the country’s founding document. “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being,” Dr. King said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”
What Dr. King so eloquently revealed was that slavery, far from being a particular American atrocity, was an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage. Yet it was America’s Enlightenment principles that allowed it to “uproot a social order” and liberate millions of enslaved people by recognizing their intrinsic and individual human dignity.
I share Martin Luther King’s words on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation because it is an example of how teaching African American history is one and the same with teaching American history. The two are intertwined. As someone who has led public charter schools in low-income communities for the past 15 years in the Bronx, I recognize the power of this historical anecdote as a teaching tool.
Curriculum that both acknowledges the horrors of slavery while also honoring the indispensable role of America’s founding principles to ensure its eradication is the kind of comprehensive and factual educational content that exemplifies the purpose of this hearing: to uphold curricula that teach America’s founding, present accurate information, and promote civic virtue in a self- governing society.