Watching the news over the past several weeks, I have felt a mix of outrage, sadness, and horror. Since early December, federal immigration enforcement has intensified in Minneapolis, and by January, the escalation of violence became impossible to ignore. As a mother, educator, and counselor, I keep returning to our children, who are seeing and hearing much of the same things we are, but without the tools to make sense of them. In moments like these, I find myself pondering the role of educators.
Dr. Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy
While some Americans have expressed shock at what has transpired, my generation has seen this before. I came of age during the early wave of school integration in Hampton, Virginia, and I have lived through periods when state violence was justified, communities were treated as threats, and children endured the hateful wrath of adults simply for going to school. What we are witnessing now is not an aberration. It is history repeating itself within my own lifetime, and an attempt to reverse hard-earned progress, not only for Black Americans, but for all of us.
As February begins and we turn our attention to Black history, it feels necessary to situate these events in context. Black History Month itself is only fifty years old, and Black history remains omitted or marginalized in many American classrooms. Today, amid book bans, curricular restrictions, and political pressure on educators, we are again confronting efforts to narrow what we teach and whose truth we acknowledge.
So, the questions before us as educators are these: What do students need to understand about what they are witnessing right now? How do we prepare them to recognize when history is repeating itself—and to avoid the harm that follows when those patterns go unexamined? How do we help them become resilient and empowered when their rights and values are under threat?
The answer is both simple and profound---we must teach America’s complete history. We must tell the truth about how we got here and how far we still must go to perfect the practice of democracy. And that requires teaching Black history. When students are shielded from this history, they are left unprepared for civic life. When they are taught it, they gain the tools to understand power, recognize injustice, and exercise their responsibilities as citizens.
Across U.S. history, education has been both a tool of liberation and a battleground for control. From enslavement-era prohibitions against teaching Black people to read, to Jim Crow segregation, to today’s book bans and efforts to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion, Black history reveals a consistent truth: access to knowledge has always been contested.
