Desegregated History

"When I was going to school," recalls Author James Baldwin, "I began to be bugged by the teaching of American history, because it seemed that that history had been taught without cognizance of my presence." Baldwin's figurative forebears go back at least to 1513, when 30 Negroes sailed to the New World with Balboa. Yet the most widely used eighth-grade history text in the country today mentions only two Negroes by name as having lived since the Civil War, brushes off the Emancipation Proclamation in two sentences. Belatedly, educators are coming to see that it is high time to desegregate the teaching of U.S. history.

Last year in Detroit the elementary schools (47% Negro) began supplementing courses with a 52-page paperback on Negro history that ranges from ancient times to Martin Luther King. Last week the schools of Washington, D.C. (86% Negro) introduced The Negro in American History, a 130-page teacher's guide that can be drawn on by all grades and read by eleventh-graders as part of their regular course. Armed with a rich bibliography, it brings out that:

> The biggest slave-trading American colonies were not Southern but Northern--Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island. > The first American casualty against the British was a Negro--Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770.

> George Washington barred Negroes from the Continental Army until the British began recruiting slaves. Alarmed, the Americans then enlisted more than 5,000 Negro soldiers, used them in integrated units.

> Contrary to folklore, slaves hated slavery so passionately that thousands joined bloody revolts. The biggest was led in 1831 by Nat Turner, a Virginia slave preacher, whose rebels killed 60 whites before he was captured and hanged. Also contrary to folklore, the U.S. had 488,000 free Negroes by 1860, almost half of them in the South.

> The first successful suit in the U.S. against school segregation occurred not in the South of the 1950s but in Boston in 1849.

> In the Civil War, more than 210,000 Negroes fought in the Union army and navy, won 20 Congressional Medals of Honor. More than 38,000 Negro soldiers were killed in 449 battles.

> Negroes contributed key inventions to 19th century U.S. industrialization---for example, the mechanical laster that revolutionized shoe manufacturing.

Granville Woods, holder of 150 patents, developed the third rail for electric trains in 1890, as well as induction telegraphy for communicating with trains in motion.

> The first Negro to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate (1875-81) was able, cultivated Blanche K. Bruce, son of a white Virginia planter and a slave, who was educated by a tutor, escaped to the North, studied at Oberlin College, and after the Civil War became a Mississippi planter.

> The first American woman to earn more than $1,000,000 on her own was "Madame" J. C. Walker, a St. Louis laundress who in 1905 developed a "hair conditioner" that created "a new world for Negro women in America." > The first American who actually reached the North Pole (1909) was Matthew Henson, a Negro who accompanied Admiral Robert E. Peary. > West Point graduated its first Negro in 1877 (but no Negroes got through Annapolis until 1943).

> In World War II, the Red Cross at first refused to accept blood from Negro donors, and later took it only on a segregated basis. Ironically, it was a Negro, Plasma Expert Charles R. Drew, who set up U.S. blood banks.

As the new text notes, the four-century history of the American Negro is a grim tale of "enforced isolation from the mainstream of American life." That a few remarkable Negroes have nonetheless managed to write "a record rich in achievement" does not balance the unhappy fact that most have not. Yet now the isolation is breaking down; Negroes may see that color is disappearing as an excuse as well as a barrier. Washington's history students may well conclude, as a top official hopes, that "there is no telling what a young Negro of today can do."

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