Teaching ‘honest history’ from Douglass to King

Joanne Jacobs:

Daniel Buck describes how he teaches “real” American history — no white-washing — in National Review. There’s no need to teach “anti-racism” to get real about slavery, writes Buck, who’s denounced the “ubiquity and radicalism” of critical race theory.

His students read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, which “paints in every graphic detail the torn-skin and broken-body reality of American slavery,” he writes.In a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, students read poems and short stories and “listen to Strange Fruit performed by Billie Holiday, a poetic description of a lynching, before reading Claude McKay’s poem If We Must Die.”