Oyster River middle school students tour the kitchen at the Moffatt-Ladd House in Portsmouth as part of a discovery-based learning tour focused on slavery (photo Rick Beauchesne, Seacoastonline)
By Hadley Barndollar
Posted Aug 3, 2019 SeacoastOnline
PORTSMOUTH — In a typical New Hampshire classroom with 20 students, statistically 17 of them are white.
Because 90 percent of the state is white, according to census data, their teacher is most likely white too.
It begs the question: How does the third whitest state in the country teach slavery and black history in its public schools?
Amidst a polarizing climate where candidates for president are openly discussing reparations for enslavement while at the same time the country sees a surge in white nationalism, school districts are increasingly discussing the idea of producing “culturally-competent” citizens. A lot is at stake in classrooms, advocates and educators say.
Eighty-five percent of New Hampshire’s 178,328 students enrolled in public schools are white, while their black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and mixed-race counterparts all come in under 10 percent, according to the Department of Education.
While New Hampshire’s lack of diversity draws concern around the tenor of classroom conversations when speaking about communities of color, and the nation’s most painful history, there is a unique but underutilized opportunity for local connection — the long-hidden legacy of black lives in the Seacoast region, which have since been illuminated by the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire (BHTNH), formerly the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail.
The region is rich with its own black history, and laden in connections to slavery. Twenty enslaved men in Portsmouth signed the 1779 Petition of Freedom, one of its authors owned by a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The petition was thought of as a Declaration of Independence by the enslaved community on the Seacoast, and some historians argue the historic documents should be taught with the same weight.
BHTNH Executive Director JerriAnne Boggis said teachers struggle, especially in a homogeneous state, to teach about African enslavement. Part of the trail’s goal is to develop school curricula for the communities they work in.
“Ignorance is not bliss,” said Boggis. “The repercussions of enslavement, of Jim Crow, of de facto segregation, of red lining, have practical, financial, and emotional results on where we are today.” But if not taught with special care, Boggis said, a lot can go wrong.
Last fall, a Dover High School teacher was placed on leave after a class assignment on the Reconstruction Period resulted in students singing, “KKK, KKK, let’s kill all the blacks,” to the tune of Jingle Bells.
After a student in the class videotaped the performance and posted it online, it went viral — meriting a scathing response from both the local and regional NAACP chapters. The district has since embarked on a soul-searching of sorts, something Superintendent William Harbron acknowledges has included an examination of teaching through a lens of white privilege.
“I think we’re at that infant stage where we’re just learning to crawl,” Harbron said. “We have some (staff) that are just beginning to understand and others who are now willing to open up their minds. It’s a long journey.”
Capitalizing on honesty, Portsmouth Middle School teacher Erin Bakkom acknowledges to her students her sole experience as a white woman, and outside of school, commits herself to learning opportunities to bring back to her classroom. She’s traveled to Alabama and Mississippi for National Endowment of Humanities workshops on the Civil Rights Movement and the murder of Emmett Till, for example.
“You have to teach the hard stuff,” Bakkom said. “You have to look at all of the history.”
The state DOE does not set curriculum, and rather, provides a framework to local school boards. At the end of this summer, a revamp of the state social studies framework is scheduled to get its first public airing.
Schools failing to teach the ‘hard history’
Keondray Lucas, a 2019 graduate of Portsmouth High School, can only recall one other person of color in his social studies classes throughout elementary, middle and high school.
“Whenever black history got brought up, no matter what it was, some members of the class would always stare at me, look at me like I was different,” Lucas said. “In reality I was, but I do have to say that it never quite felt good being looked at like an alien.”
Lucas said his education in slavery and black history in Portsmouth schools was “quite repetitive and a bit sugar coated.” They learned about “heroic” black figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Barack Obama, he said, but not others who played momentous roles in history, like 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose lynching murder made him a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement posthumously.
“I do not think it quite prepared my white counterparts for a world beyond New Hampshire, and truly I do not think it prepared me either,” Lucas said.
Jubilee Byfield, a 2015 PHS graduate and now an intern for the BHTNH, said she acquired the majority of her black history education outside of the classroom.
“I wish I’d learned more from Portsmouth schools,” said Byfield, a person of color. ”(They) would only benefit from having more teachers of color and incorporating black history, which is everyone’s history, into all teachers’ lesson plans. This would also help to support a more inclusive environment for everyone.”
Both Byfield and Lucas noted the late Rev. Arthur Hilson once taught a class at PHS on race called “Another View,” with the sole purpose of educating students on black history that may not be taught in a standard history class.
Now through her work at the BHTNH, Byfield wants students to hear the stories of Ona Judge and Prince Whipple, important black figures in Portsmouth’s history.
A 2017 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, thought to be a first of its kind, showed schools nationwide are failing to teach “the hard history” of African enslavement. The report examined how slavery is taught in K-12 classrooms, and the impact on how students view the world and its distribution of power.
The report states while teachers are serious about teaching slavery, 58% find their textbooks inadequate. Even worse? Only 8% of the high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
“Teachers need well-constructed tools, well-curated materials, guidance and professional development to deal with this sensitive and charged topic,” the report reads. “More importantly, they need the courage that can only come with a national call to teach this history.”
In Dover, Harbron said his district is “just beginning” to realize what it means to teach through a “white lens.”
“Our journey has just begun, and I think the majority of the staff are motivated to say, ‘Let’s do this right,’” Harbron said. Since the KKK jingle incident last fall, Harbron said some students of color have raised issues with curriculum in regards to teaching slavery outside of the Civil War context and how to incorporate black history all year long, rather than “for a week or month.”
The district is continuing its work with New Hampshire Listens, a civil engagement facilitation group out of the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
Boggis, who was previously director of diversity programs and community outreach at UNH, said before individuals can teach about race, they need to understand their own implicit biases and place in the conversation. “It’s turning the mirror on the self,” she said. “Until we face our history as it was, as it is still, we cannot heal.”
When teachers focus on only the inspirational stories of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, for example, they’re ignoring the generations of black Americans who have been unable to move beyond the chains of slavery’s legacy, Boggis said.
Too often, the SPLC report states, “the varied, lived experience of enslaved people is neglected” in public education, and they are rarely taught as main characters of the story.
Boggis thinks schools should capitalize on the local story of Ona Judge, George Washington’s runaway slave whom he sent slave catchers after when she fled to Portsmouth. “We’re talking about racism at the highest level of the land, the president,” she said. “If we start there, we’re rethinking immediately America’s history, that notion of the founding fathers as paradigms of virtue.”
Teachers, Boggis said, have the ability to “create a kernel of change,” for good, or for bad. “They hold those impressionable minds right here, and there’s so much they can do with that, on either side of that line we walk as humans.”
Teachers ‘have to not be afraid to do this’
A partnership between Portsmouth’s historic Moffatt-Ladd House and the BHTNH aims to further educate teachers on utilization of local history in curricula — how to have difficult conversations in classrooms while encouraging thoughtful, appropriate discussion, and not tokenizing students of color.
The third annual educator workshop, which explores slavery during the American Revolution, will be held this month. The Moffatt-Ladd House, now a museum, was home to Gen. William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who died in 1785. He was also a slave owner.
“One of the first things we do is take people on a tour of the house from the perspective of the slaves,” said museum director Barbara Ward. “It’s the history of Portsmouth. We need to tell the history of all of the people who lived in Portsmouth. Not just the few it’s easy to talk about. That’s what we’re trying to impart to the teachers. People in schools have to not be afraid to do this.”
Prince Whipple, an enslaved man who lived in the home, signed the 1779 Petition of Freedom with 19 other enslaved men, asking the New Hampshire General Assembly to abolish slavery.
“John Hancock wrote his signature so big on the Declaration of Independence so King George could read it,” said Jennifer Belmont-Earl, Moffatt-Ladd’s education coordinator. “On the Petition of Freedom, they were possibly signing their death warrants. Prince Whipple helped pen this amazing document that should be taught with the Declaration of Independence. All those men who signed it are heroic.”
Teachers have previously attended the workshop because they felt unprepared or uncomfortable teaching certain material. Moffatt-Ladd partners with the BHTNH’s Boggis and Valerie Cunningham, its founder, for the workshop.
“We’re profoundly conscious of the fact that because we’re white, we can’t do this alone,” Ward said. “Some people make that mistake. They feel like they can do it as the white interpreters alone, and they can’t. We can do the best we can, but I think the important thing is that we are aware of the fact we will never fully understand, and to be always conscious of that.”
Fifth-grade teachers at Oyster River Middle School, Diana Pelletier and Erin Bobo-Caron participated in the educator workshop last year, furthering a continuous effort to improve their curriculum. In June, they brought their students on a field trip to the historic house.
“When we were in high school, we learned a lot about slavery when we got to the Civil War, when really, the first slaves were brought to Virginia in the 1600s,” said Bobo-Caron. “I was learning that just through research, trying to make what we were doing richer. I was never taught that progression.”
Bringing their students to the Moffatt-Ladd House, where enslaved Prince Whipple slept in the unheated portion of the house, fulfilled the teachers’ query of, “How can we make this more alive for the kids so it’s not just something they’re reading in a book, but something they’re experiencing?” Bobo-Caron said. These themes have naturally led to their 10 and 11-year-old students discussing racism, Pelletier added, though they may not be able to name it yet.
“We were talking about people of color being treated differently and I had one student say, ‘They were treated so poorly,’ and another said, ‘Well do you think it’s any different today?’ And then that started this whole conversation.”
In Portsmouth, teachers Bakkom and Allison McGrimley are not blind to their Caucasian race when teaching these topics. Bakkom, at Portsmouth Middle School, teaches an eighth-grade unit on the black experience in America, while McGrimley, at the high school, teaches a Civil War and Reconstruction unit in a semester-long class.
“New Hampshire struggles when there’s not much diversity,” Bakkom said. “I think teachers are afraid to make a misstep. For students who don’t understand this history, they really don’t understand the depth of the experience of other people.”
At the eighth-grade level, Bakkom said her students have a “big investment in what’s fair,” so she capitalizes on that in the beginning. She uses the example that some local businesses “don’t allow more than one-eighth grader in at a time,” which angers her students, because it’s “unjust.”
“Do all kids steal? No,” Bakkom says to her students, connecting directly to racial stereotypes.
She touches upon the KKK, Emmett Till’s murder, and use of the “N-word.” In years past, her students have discussed Colin Kaepernick, Black Lives Matter, and the governor of Virginia dressing in blackface.
“It’s hard history at times, and with current events, it’s very polarizing right now,” Bakkom said. “I’m also cautious for students of color that this may not be their direct history either. Some are comfortable, some are impassioned, some are not.”
Bakkom said students are always shocked of the local factoid she teaches that James Barker Smith, former owner of the Wentworth by the Sea 10 minutes down the road in New Castle, segregated blacks from the resort’s dining room in the 1960s.
When McGrimley starts her Civil War unit, she said, most of her students have the perception that the North “were the good guys,” and that slavery only existed in the South. “Students at that age still have vast generalizations and misconceptions,” McGrimley said. “This was specifically a race-based slavery, and that is a really important thing that I work with the kids to understand further.”
On the October day in 2003 when a city infrastructure project surfaced the remains of 13 people, Bakkom and her class were on scene within 20 minutes of the discovery, at what later became the city’s African Burying Ground memorial. Not only did students get to witness the historic moment, Bakkom said, but they were able to follow the community conversation that followed, around how to properly honor and acknowledge the remains of enslaved people.
“This is all part of our history,” she said. “You don’t get to pick and choose.”
