In America’s Classrooms, Teaching the Truth About Slavery

From a stop on the Underground Railroad to the classroom, a museum docent, a teacher and a professor give their take on the importance of teaching the truth about the history of slavery in America.

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This train is silent. Sometimes it moves fast – other times, slow. There is nowhere to wave goodbye to family members before departure. The passengers have no luggage, just hope of a better future. The stops are not publicized, and the only way forward is by following lights, colored quilts, moss on trees and stars in the night sky.

The Underground Railroad was a connection of people, houses, buildings, rivers, canals, bays, ferries, river crossings, roads and trails that helped slaves escape from the south to freedom in the north as far as Canada. One “stop” on the Underground Railroad is located right in Wisconsin’s Rock County.

The Milton House was opened in Milton, Wis. more than 170 years ago by Joseph Goodrich, an abolitionist and businessman. This hexagon-shaped building, now a historic landmark, opened in 1845 as a hotel for travelers passing through rural Wisconsin. Goodrich had a philosophy of never turning anyone away, including enslaved people who were traveling north to gain their freedom. 

Because the history of the Underground Railroad was rarely documented, there isn’t much information about how exactly escaped slaves traveled to the inn. However, in the basement, there is a dirt tunnel that slaves may have used to hide or escape to the other side of the house and out the back.

“Stop and imagine being in there with no lights,” said Carol Astin, a docent at the Milton House Museum as she directed a tour through the tunnel. “You didn’t know what was on the other end or who was going to help.” 

Astin was born in 1948 and says when she was a young girl, the building was a museum that only focused on how people may have lived in mid-19^th century. There were items like beds made of rope, blankets made of hay, antiquated sewing machines and everyday clothing. But the part about the Milton House being a stop on the Underground Railroad was not mentioned.

“You never heard much about the Underground Railroad,” Astin said. “People didn’t talk about it. This was a white community.”

Today, visitors get a glimpse into how travelers may have lived and how escaped slaves journeyed through the inn. 

Although Astin didn’t have an accurate history lesson about the Milton House growing up, today she seeks to tell the whole story.

“I think it’s important to talk about things like that because that’s not just part of our history, it’s part of what we’re doing right now, and I think that needs to be documented,” Astin said.

Glossing over the history of slavery in America is not just something that happened in Astin’s hometown, but throughout the US.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a report called Teaching Hard History,  which summarizes research on how schools are failing to teach the hard history of slavery in America.

The report found that, “schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, textbooks do not have enough material about it, and – as a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role slavery played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.”

Inside America’s classrooms, it’s easy to see these failures. In New Jersey, a teacher held a mock slave auction that allowed white students to ‘sell’ their black classmates. In Texas, a group of teachers proposed using “involuntary relocation” as a euphemism to define slavery. And in Wisconsin, a teacher was placed on leave after asking Black students to find games played by enslaved children.

Rebecca Shumway, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, grew up in Utah and didn’t learn about slavery in her hometown either.

“I think there must have been a couple of pages in a textbook, and maybe a picture of dark-skinned people in a cotton field, but it was not something that we spent any time on,” Shumway said.

In her own classroom, Shumway teaches her students about slavery often.

“Slavery is not something that most of us want to spend a lot of time thinking about or talking about, including myself, and yet I do it all the time, because unfortunately, that’s a huge part of the history of this country,” Shumway said.

Shumway teaches in a way that humanizes slaves and helps students identify with them.

“I want them to understand the big picture and the enormous violence and criminality of what happened,” Shumway said. “But I also want them to think twice when they use the word slave, because that language seems like it’s too easy to use that word and thereby take the humanity away from the person that you’re talking about.”

 Instead, Shumway has a different suggestion.

“I think the correct way of characterizing those people is they were captives,” Shumway said. “They’re a person who is going to get the hell out of there as soon as they can.”