Americans: in what grade did you or your children learn about slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement.

For myself, I don’t remember.It was a long time ago.

My daughter started learning about slavery in second grade. She’s in third grade now and their studying it again in time for black history month. She’s doing a book report on Harriet Tubman.

I have no problem with it. It’s taught at an age-appropriate level and I’m a big believer in being honest about life and the world from day one.

My only rule is that the information should be (as I said) age-appropriate.

We’ve discussed this topic at home and I answer any questions she has about it honestly. I’m also careful not to offer more information than she’s seeking. I answer what she’s asking and (essentially) wait for the next question.

This is our basic system for all “sensitive” subjects.

Oh… and we live in Massachusetts. My daughter is Chinese and I’m a big, goofy white guy.

My daughter seems to see this as something that happened a long time ago that has little impact on her reality.

In 2nd and 3rd grade during current events and watching Huntley-Brinkley. Seeing civil rights marchers get their heads beat in, and the use of dogs and fire-hoses against them.

There was never a discussion of civil rights in my text books all the way through high school, it was all too new. Now a days it begins on kindergarten with an explanation of who Martin Luther King Jr. was, and why there is a holiday.

I grew up during the civil rights movement. I think it is was in the air we breathed at the time. I don’t remember any specific ages or grades for anything in particular. My children are almost 16 and 12. They go to school in a major city. The issues of race and poverty and discrimination are covered every year. Are we breathe, I think.

It’s kind of odd because I get the sense that they think just noticing race, as in labeling someone black or white, is racist.

“What color was he?”
“Racist!”

Unfortunately, we live by stereotypes, for better or for worse. There is a lot of crime in my neighborhood. A neighbor sends emails out to a list every day. The alleged crimes are always reported as being perpetrated by people described as “African-American.”

My wife always goes to meet my daughter to escort her home from the trolley. She drops my daughter off at the trolley in the morning, as well. She won’t walk three blocks to her yoga class. She insists on taking the car, for safety reasons. Race and the implications of race are aspects of daily awareness, I’m afraid, where I live. People who aren’t wary can end up as victims of theft, beatings, or homicide.

As to history, again, that is covered in many different years of school.

Elementary school for sure, but I can’t remember the exact year. Possibly third grade. As I recall, we sort of did it in reverse. That is, the lesson was about Martin Luther King Jr. and his role in the civil rights movement, which required some explanation of slavery, the Civil War, and segregation. We received more details in subsequent years, of course, relative to what they thought we could process.

School was just a place where I learned new and interesting things every day, so I wasn’t particularly surprised by this. I wasn’t raised with the idea that the US was perfect or with the idea that it was evil, so this was just more information about the gray reality in which we live. I don’t think it changed my feelings about white people or black people, either, because those divisions were too foreign to me at the time. I had grown up surrounded by people of three different races, so these lessons weren’t race-defining moments for me.

This was Upstate New York in the early 1990s. I am now in my late twenties. I am white and male.

I don’t remember :/ I taught myself about it after high school when I actually cared about things.

If I remember correctly, we were taught bits and pieces of it from 3rd grade through 8th grade. I think we did it the was @SavoirFaire mentions, starting with Martin Luther King Jr. and working backwards. This was in Delaware.

My son in in 4th grade now and has been taught bits and pieces as well. He started learning about it earlier than I did (1st grade). We moved midway through 1st grade to Texas and he didn’t mention it anymore there. He was in Kansas for all of 2nd grade and most of 3rd grade and had bits and pieces as well. All of it has mostly focused on Martin Luther King Jr. so far. This year, we are in Pennsylvania, they hadn’t discussed it yet, but I’m sure it’ll be coming as it’s usually around this time of year that they start talking about it.

Ha, are you kidding…maybe mentioned superficially in high school…but most people never learn, really…that’s why they come to college (if they’re white) kicking and screaming about white guilt or lack thereof or whatever…

1st grade, had an amazing teacher then.

Personally I don’t remember learning about slavery and segregation until high school. My children starting learning about the Civil Rights Movement in kindergarten when they first began learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. and why we have a national holiday in his honor. Beyond studying Dr. King and his contributions to our country, I do not believe the topics you mention are in our state’s curriculum until eighth grade.

I remember learning about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. It is surprisingly hard to remember how old I was but I think it was in Grade School, maybe 6th grade. I went to a Catholic grade school. I heard the “I have a dream” speech. I saw the Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges first day of school in New Orleans accompanied by 2 U.S. Marshalls.
http://humanrightsdoctorate.blogspot.com/2011/01/four-freedoms-by-norman-rockwell-at.html.

I am a woman from the mountains in Virginia with the blood of Cherokee, German and English. When I was in second grade an excavation unearthed a Cherokee Indian burial grounds about 20 miles from our school. Anthropologists were brought in and for about three years, digs were going on there. We went to the site for many a field trip there during my elementary school years. We were there when they uncovered the grave of a mother with an infant on her chest. Her arms were crossed over the baby. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.

We were actually taught more local history until fourth grade when we went deeply into Virginia history. Slavery wasn’t the main emphasis in any of our studies because slavery wasn’t part of our local heritage. With the local history we learned about the true history of the hunting grounds that were within the county, the Native Americans and the Scotts/Irish settlers.

Junior high is when we read books about social justice issues. I remember reading “The Autobiograpy of Miss Jane Pittman” and then watching it with other 7th grade classes. You have to remember this was the days when wheeling a television into the classroom and watching an educational program through closed circuit TV was a big deal.

We also read “Lilies of the Fields” in 7th grade. We learned more about stereotyping than slavery even then, come to think of it. In high school were were taught government and world history.

The approx. of 3rd grade, I guess. I learned about slavery from my grandparents before going to school, I embarassed them by asking if a black man was chocolate.

I lived thru the last of the active discrimination against African-Americans. I grew up seeing the segregated drinking fountains & the whites only signs on restaurants. My Mother taught us that this was wrong & when I went to work at my first full time job working as a waitress, it was during the time when the African-Americans first began to insist on having equal rights & started showing up where I was working. Many of my fellow employees would not wait on them, but I was certainly willing to extend my hand in service & in friendship.

My daughter learned about it last year in 1st grade around the time of Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday.

I don’t think I really learned about it until my high school American history class. I was surprised/shocked by how much of our history is glossed over and sugar-coated.

Sorry that my answer was incomplete. I inadvertently sent it because I am still not used to my laptop’s track pad being so sensitive! I learned my lesson not to Fluther in the middle of a photo shoot,lol.

To continue…
I wasn’t surprised to learn about slavery. I knew about slavery from the Bible. I knew about the Israelites being kept in bondage in Egypt, so the idea of slavery was with me from a very young age. I knew people could be brutal to their fellow man.
If it was in the distant past in my country it didn’t seem so shocking. Inequalities still existed but I didn’t witness these inequalities and injustices. The suburban neighborhood I lived in in the Northeast had very few African-Americans. There was one boy who was friends with the big Irish-American family down the block from me. One day he got on the bus with them in the morning to go to school. The bus driver did a doubletake and then one of my neighbors (his friend he hung out with) said, “It’s ok, he’s my brother”. We all laughed including the bus driver and everything was ok.

What I did find shocking was the idea of Jim Crow laws. I couldn’t understand how anyone could treat another person that way. How could this be allowed in my country? My country was founded on the principle of equality! We fought a war to free the slaves! (I know this isn’t exactly accurate but that is how the Civil War was taught) Another thing that was shocking was the Ku Klux Klan and lynch mobs. At a young age I was very angry that people got away with these terrible crimes against humanity and I was surprised that it happened in my country.

I didn’t just learn about these things in school. There were movies that contained stories of slavery. There were socially conscious movies that my parents allowed us, maybe even encouraged us to watch.

Did learning about the history make me feel differently about black or white people? No, I think I was taught to look at people based on their individual selves and not to generalize and stereotype.

I find it surprising that parents would rely on the school to teach their children this history. Why are we trying so hard to shelter children from the truth? How do we expect them to become good citizens without educating them about the real world they are going to become citizens of? I am not a parent but I think the trend has been to shelter children more and more and to overprotect them..

I am white and I grew up in the Northeast.

@Earthgirl What do you think influences someone to treat all people equally, growing up with a family who always treats all people equally and explains to their children not to hate or discriminate? Or, teaching a child just 50 years ago black people were still not allowed to go to the same schools or eat in the same restaurants as whites in the American south. It was not long ago at all.

JLeslie It’s funny that you ask that. I was going to go into how my mother was brought up but my answer was too long already! Since you asked, I think abstract principles of the way to treat people are great but real life examples have a very great impact with children. This is why Jesus taught in parables. It was easier for people to see the ideas he was trying to get across by hearing a story that illustrated it. The stories were based on situations that the people could understand based on their life experience. They could relate to it. By telling children that if they were a black child in the Jim Crow south they would not be allowed to drink from the white drinking fountain they feel in a very real way what it must have been like. So I think they need to know the history.

My own mother was raised with a certain amount of prejudice but she did not become that way herself. She told me that it was one of the most important things she learned working as a nurse. In dealing with people of all races who were sick and in pain and needed help she saw firsthand that we are all more alike than different. We need the same things, have the same fears, hopes etc. That cemented her belief that prejudice was wrong, then she instilled that value in her children.

OP: I’m not sure, but it was 3rd grade at the latest. I grew up in MI. We studied the underground railroad in connection with local history. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was a school holiday for us several years before it was a national holiday (for our city, not statewide), and we would typically see films of his speech or little old ladies getting firehosed or something along those lines. I think the issue was handled ok, mostly. There was a fair amount of anti-racist indoctrination, but I don’t think that was inappropriate.

@JLeslie asked me to share my experience with our Holocaust education in Germany.

If I remember correctly, I was in 8th grade when the Holocaust was part of our history classes. And again in 10th, 11th and 12th grade. Almost every senior of a German high school makes a field trip to one of the former concentration camps. In my case it was Dachau near Munich. When I was in the German army our company also visited Bergen-Belsen near Hannover. I also remember when our kids first talked about it at school and when we discussed it at home. Again and again it was about why, why, why did this happen. And whether Germans will ever be allowed to love their country again. I told my kids that they can be proud of today’s Germany if they help sustaining and improving a Germany that is totally different from the Germany of 1933–1945. I also told them that there are still many countries out there which glorify their past and hide their crimes, whether that is Japan or Russia or Turkey or Spain. Even today there are street names in Spain named after Franco, the fascist. Turkey suspended diplomatic relations with France just recently, because Turkey still denies the Armenian genocide and France is very outspoken about it.

Here’s a good overview of the Holocaust education in Germany. You might want to compare it with the slavery and segregation education in the US.

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/germanEducation.html

The concluding statement is this:

“The German government has in the past established bilateral textbook commissions in cooperation with education specialists from a number of foreign countries (including the U.S. and Israel). These joint commissions examine the school textbooks of both countries with reference to the treatment of the other country, and issue recommendations. The German-Israeli textbook commission, whose findings were published in 1985, has had a considerable influence on the treatment of Jewish life and Jewish history, including the Holocaust, in school textbooks in Germany. Recently, the Israeli education expert, Chaim Schatzker, who has examined German textbooks since the early 1960s, stated that although he was not entirely satisfied with everything he had read, the treatment of antisemitism as part of German history was adequate in general, and exemplary in some textbooks. He also noted that the Holocaust is treated extensively and in an uncompromising way in all textbooks. He added that the large majority of textbooks addressed the issue of responsibility and co-responsibility of German citizens during the Third Reich seriously and in detail.

Teaching social values and imparting the knowledge of the achievements and crimes that human beings are capable of are essential for nourishing a commitment to tolerance and democracy in young people. Holocaust education alone, however, like any ethics teaching, is not enough to eliminate the crime and intolerance that are bred by social dislocation. If the teaching of ethics were a panacea, there would be no thefts, no homicides, and no bias-related crimes—because all perpetrators were once taught not to steal, not to kill, and not to hate.”

@mattbrowne Thanks so much. Do you have any opinion on whether earlier learning on the topic in school would be a negative or positive thing? Many people here say their children start learning about it in 3rd grade. Also, does Germany have holidays in honor of those who helped try to stop the mass murders? Or, since it was other countries who put a stop to the war in the end, I guess that would not be the case? Many people on the Q said their young children learn a little about black history when Martin Luther King’s holiday comes around, or during black history month. But, that is a little different because all the players in the history are American.

@JLeslie – Yes, I do have an opinion. The material presented in a school curriculum must reflect the developmental stage of a child. Learning about the Holocaust in 3rd grade doesn’t make sense. Children cannot grasp the magnitude of this. They also lack the maturity to process pictures like Link

When I was in 3rd grade we learned about WWII in general with aspects of it that an 8-year-old child could handle and make sense of. The same applies to slavery and segregation. The widespread raping of slave women by white masters is beyond what an 3rd grader can grasp. They need to get older first.

Yes, there are several days of honor and the most prominent one is Stauffenberg on July 20. The whole of Germany is full of schools and street names in honor of those who helped try to stop Hitler and stop the mass murders, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

One of Yad Vashem’s tasks is to honor non-Jews who risked their lives, liberty or positions to save Jews during the Holocaust and they received a certificate of honor and a medal and their names are commemorated in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, on the Mount of Remembrance.

Several hundred Germans were hiding Jews in Germany or smuggling them to other countries like the Netherlands where Dutch people could hide them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Righteous_among_the_Nations_by_country

My brother, adopted as I was, is one-half Native American. When I was little I thought he was only ¼. My great-grandmother told me that. I was always curious why the tribe his father was a part of could demand he was returned to the tribe! Then, one day he told me that it was ½. I guess back when she was growing up anyone whom wasn’t white was looked at as someone white people would not marry. It just wasn’t done, and having an affair with anyone like that was “unthinkable.”. Of course, now, that point of view is unthinkable. I guess we are shaped somewhat by the culture we grow up in.

Wow, college has me out of the loop lol.

I was in 6th grade when I learned about slavery on a academic level, but I first heard about it in church like when I was 7 or something (negro spirituals). I didn’t learn about the Holocaust until the same, I remember a week dedicated to learning about Auschwitz. I also remember my US History teacher in high school getting SUPER mad when he asked the class if slaves or Jews had it worst and I said the Jews did. The inside debate was “is being a slave for 400 years worse than being tortured for 10 years”.

Being from Washington DC, we all tend to have a bias versus Latin races. Blacks and whites get along pretty well. The learning phase I learned about racism was little-by-little, so I guess it wasn’t a big impact on us. Different regions have their own way of teaching, and I wouldn’t know since I was raised in only one, and stationed in only one. I’ve never had any racial incidents until I came down into the south, but it wasn’t the parts I was expecting, it was ONLY in texas.

I’m also black as when you close your eyes, lol.

@JLeslie What you said reminds me of what Morgan Freeman said to an interviewer about Black History Month. He said “Why should my history be relegated to one month?”. We are all Americans whether it’s Asian, African, Native, or just plain American. If you were to take a look at a random amount free blog sites, you see people around the age of 16 using racial slurs, they weren’t even a thought in their mothers womb when racism was rampant and they are showing signs or it. That’s because schools now a days are teaching history at a staggered rate, only teaching the “nice” tid bits.

A little lesson for the class (lol), did you know Peanut Butter was NOT invented by an African-American? Well it wasn’t, it was invented by a white male who didn’t want to get it patented because he thought a patent for food was worthless. He kept the recipe but through out the product and a “black man” found it, then replicated it perfectly. Why do you think they let him have the credit? Just a little something to think about, this has happened a lot in history.

About 8th Grade, but long before that there were black demonstrators being bitten by police dogs, fire hosed into submission, and beaten by cops and dragged into police buses on the nightly news as far back as 1961, when I was in 2nd Grade. By the time I was thirteen, I knew well the names Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, Jim Folsom, Ross Barnett, Bull Connor, and George Wallace.

I remember when the three little black girls, one 11 year old and two fourteen year-olds, were killed in the dynamiting of the church in Birmingham, and I remember the disappearance of the three white northern students, civil rights workers, murdered by the KKK for assisting black citizens to vote in Mississippi. I remember when Medgar Evers was murdered and exactly where I was when King was murdered. I remember the Selma March, and watching live King’s incredibly inspirational speech at the Reflecting Pond during the March on Washington.

I grew up in the lily white suburbs of Sacramento and went to private schools. I never actually saw a real live black person until I was 11 years old. My parents were passionate about civil rights, Kennedy liberals to the bone, and they explained it all to us as we asked questions about the brutality we saw in the tube. By the time they covered the evolution of Civil Rights in our 8th Grade American History class, I could have taught the course.

@Moegitto I wonder if it was called black history in school? Like a chapter on black history? I don’t remember it that way. It was all history to me. We learned about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, although I would say we lacked learning about some of the great black inventors in science, but I didn’t learn about very many inventors anyway.

I don’t think we should separate out black history, black inventors, black activists, but just treat each person as individuals who have a place in history. I don’t mean we should gloss over the truth, I just mean I think we have come along enough that black Americans are simply Americans.

Although, I know black people who talk about black culture, there are black awards in TV, and Hispanic ones too for that matter. The groups kind of separate themselves don’t they? That could be another question. Who is really doing the separating? Like my husband says, “I don’t even think of Obama as black.”