Hard History: Teaching the truths we don’t like to talk about

Story by Anna Pogarcic

RALEIGH, North Carolina — Matt Scialdone doesn’t care about silence. He’s the kind of teacher that will lean back on his desk and wait for students to answer his question, no matter how long it takes. 

His classroom at Middle Creek High School is warm, and that makes the silence more uncomfortable. He jokes that it almost feels more like a bunker, and that’s because it is — it’s a windowless, glorified closet that’s just big enough to hold his 30 students.

He had asked students in his African American literature class in the fall of 2017 a question about the Middle Passage during their first lesson. He leaned back on his desk and waited, as usual.

Students stared at their laps or their notes. As Scialdone watched his Black and white students avoid his question, for once, he gave in.

“Raise your hand if you know what the Middle Passage is,” he said.

One, two, three timid hands went up — out of the entire class.

Thirty students, both honors and Advanced Placement, sat in silence. They had been taking history classes for years, but many of them didn’t know how enslaved people were transported to the Americas from Africa, a major part of the transatlantic slave trade.

The day’s lesson was to study spirituals, songs sung by slaves. But how could they understand that if they didn’t comprehend the horrors of slavery?

Scialdone went to a drawer in his desk to pull out one of his posters — he thinks they’re too traumatic to actually paste on the wall — and lifts it up for the students. It gave instructions for how to arrange bodies on the ships crossing the Atlantic for “maximum packing” of the human cargo. There were diagrams of devices the captors used to force feed the enslaved people so they couldn’t starve themselves to escape their fate.

Students gazed with wide eyes. Many of them were seeing these images for the first time, and now they could understand just how gruesome, and real, the history was.

Once that day’s lesson was over, Scialdone couldn’t help but wonder, “How many other students out there don’t understand?”

***

Scialdone taught this before the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize last year for its 1619 Project, marking the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in America. He taught this before President Donald Trump criticized efforts to teach history with a deeper look into slavery and racism.

And Scialdone taught this before the N.C. State Board of Education began revising its social studies standards and its U.S. history requirements. He hopes his courses will influence the discussion.

Building a class

Now in his 40s, Scialdone has been teaching for almost two decades. His bunker-turned-classroom made students at Middle Creek feel like they were entering a different world from their other classes. Anything from jazz to “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone greets them as they search for their assigned seats. 

Instead of hanging educational posters on the wall, Scialdone said he uses those spaces for students to “see themselves.” Images of Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Malala Yousafzi and even Joe Holt, who integrated Wake County schools, watch over his students to remind them how powerful an education can be.

Ninth-grade English is Scialdone’s comfort zone, but through the years, he has increasingly incorporated history into his English electives. He heads the English department, and his philosophy is simple: if he asks his teachers to offer a class, he has to be willing to offer that same class. So when the school needed an extra elective, he stepped up to offer African American literature.

The course was already considered an elective with a statewide curriculum, so he had material to work with. Still, he wanted to do more. If students were learning about Frederick Douglass and the Harlem Renaissance, they should also be studying modern rap and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A switch usually flips in the heads of his students on day two. Scialdone takes out the school’s American history textbook and flips it to the chapter on slavery, asking the students to look at the language. Cameras existed during that time, so why are there no pictures of the lash marks on slaves’ backs? Instead, it shows them clothed and working in fields, as if they were farmers. 

Though the chapter is about slavery, it’s titled “The Abolitionist Era” — focusing on the positives. Soon, the students start wondering what else they don’t know.

“The kids that have come out of there get bit with the bug,” Scialdone said.

Abby Rogers got bit when Scialdone played Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” later in the semester. 

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

She still remembers the lyrics and wonders how such a beautiful song could be about something so grotesque.

But the biggest lesson for her wasn’t the song itself. She is white and grew up going to majority-white schools. Scialdone’s class was the first time she felt her perspective wasn’t the one that should be heard. Instead, she sat back and let her peers talk about how the song affected them, and she just listened.

Getting bit by that bug lasts long after students leave his class.

KaLa Keaton was the only freshman when she took African American literature in the fall of 2017, which would have been nerve wracking enough if she didn’t also have to think about how Scialdone is white. She remembers the first lesson about spirituals, the question about the Middle Passage and being one of the few who raised their hands. But surrounded by a majority of Black students for the first time, and hearing him asking that question, she could let go of just a bit of the tension in her shoulders.

‘Bigger than a participation grade’

The last 20 minutes of African American literature class was free time.

“This is an honors elective,” Scialdone reminded his students, “You don’t have to be here. You chose to be here, so I want to respect your time.”

Students could use this time to talk about whatever they wanted or work on their projects, either among themselves or with Scialdone. Keaton said this time was often what taught her the most: mass incarceration, eugenics, lynching.

Listening to the 20-minute talks and seeing the class evolve, Scialdone understood the class was full of curious, hard-working kids. After reading “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, a book about how a lawyer in the South fought against racially motivated wrongful convictions, the students wanted to prove they cared.

Scialdone had never hosted an overnight field trip before, and he never planned to. After he filled out “a million and one” forms, his students piled into a charter bus and drove through the night to Montgomery, Alabama.

The main stop: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Approaching the memorial, you’re overcome by an eerie calm. The memorial is surrounded by large, flat fields of grass, lining a walkway leading to the entrance. Along the way you see statues of enslaved people, crouched down and chained by the neck and hands. You can walk up to them and see the detail on their faces, mouths wide open in shock and brows furrowed in pain. A middle passage.

As soon as the class crossed the threshold into the museum, the rowdy chatter of the high schoolers stopped. They weren’t the only ones; the whole memorial is quiet to allow visitors to take it in.

Visitors descend until the museum is above them, and pillars line up as far as the eye can see. Five-foot-tall rusted blocks of metal hang over people’s heads like bodies from trees, symbolizing those who were lynched in the United States.

Founded by Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, the memorial is one of the only national sites in the country dedicated to the trauma of the history of slavery. Each metal pillar is dedicated to a county in the country with recorded cases of lynchings, with the recognition that there are likely many more. And for each county, there is a name and date.

Wake County had just one: George Taylor, killed in 1918. For New Hanover County, there were many more, all with the year 1898 engraved underneath.

Keaton had learned about American history, and she thought she knew everything. Since elementary school, she studied the Civil War, Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. But she had never learned about lynching.

“Seeing what we were working on in a completely different place made us realize this was something bigger than the class, bigger than a participation grade,” she said.

At the end of the walk, duplicate pillars for each county sit waiting to be claimed so they can be put on display in the home county. This is part of the museum’s larger goal of encouraging the whole country to recognize this history. 

Keaton noticed that Wake County’s pillar was still waiting.

Owning up to history

When Scialdone was standing by the New Hanover pillar, where Wilmington is located, one of his students asked why the same year was repeated so much. What happened in 1898?

Scialdone told the students about the Wilmington coup in which white mobs overthrew the rightfully elected city government and killed scores of Black citizens.

And he realized then that one class wasn’t enough.

Two years after that field trip, Scialdone set out to create a part two for African American literature after encouragement from his students and support from the district. The new class, Hard History and Civic Engagement, premiered in spring 2020 and designed to cover the territory that wouldn’t fit in an English elective. 

This new class touched on different social justice movements, eugenics, the 1898 Wilmington massacre — everything the students wanted to learn about. They talked about current events, especially after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. They also did community service and independent projects, like producing a video project for the local chapter of the NAACP. It was hands-on, an illustration of how this history is still relevant today.

For students such as Rogers who took African American literature, this was an opportunity to continue learning about cultures different from the ones they grew up in North Carolina. For Keaton, this was another way she could keep asking what she didn’t know, and why. Just what Scialdone likes to see from his students.

“What makes his work so great is his incorporation of student voice and those who are not often heard from,” said N.C. State Board of Education member James Ford at a meeting over the summer.

Many of his students from the African American literature class ask why they learn all these new things in a literature class. They get indignant thinking about the things that are common knowledge, like George Washington and the cherry tree, when there are so many other important things that were left out. That’s where Hard History comes in.

“I show them it’s not that difficult to find this information out,” Scialdone said.

He’s sure there are people who aren’t happy with him teaching these kinds of classes, but they often don’t come forward directly. He wouldn’t care if they did.

“The most patriotic thing there is, is to question authority,” he said. “You can’t simultaneously lift up the Boston Tea Party as patriots and say what we’re seeing in the streets right now is unpatriotic.”

The Hard History class didn’t roll out the way Scialdone had hoped because they had to pivot to remote learning, but he hopes to offer it again in the spring. 

Even if it wasn’t perfect, he advocates for classes like this and hopes Hard History can become a statewide elective, especially as the State Board is planning on revising its standards for social studies. 

“The State Board can talk about having a greater focus on equity and having greater representation, but they are also talking about pulling American history from being two separate semester-long courses spread across two years down to one semester,” he said, “and there is no way to do that without leaving a lot of stuff out. When you look at what’s likely to get left out, it’s going to be these stories.”

Scialdone doesn’t teach African American literature anymore and instead is focusing on ninth grade English and the Hard History class. A new teacher, a Black woman with a background in African American history, is taking over the class, and he thinks that’s a good thing.

Even when students leave Scialdone’s class, they take the bug with them. Rogers said nothing she learned in Scialdone’s classes was as important as what they taught her about empathy, privilege and “just being a decent human being.”

“I don’t know if there would ever be a place outside of that classroom where I would have had that experience,” she said. “We don’t own up to our history in America, and I think it’s because we’re scared to, and we don’t really know how to in a way that’s appropriate for children to learn.”

But she wants to make one thing clear: kids are ready. Scialdone’s students prove that.

Keaton plans to take what she learned in his classes into her future. She wants to be the person who decides what goes in the history curriculum, and how it’s done. If she has her way, future students will understand what lynching is before they get to ninth grade.

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