Category: HISTORY

The letters are heartbreaking. Women who had borne three, four, five, or more children in as many years of marriage wrote to Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), begging her to “tell me how to keep from becoming pregnant.” Today, it’s hard to imagine how many American women in the early twentieth century, especially lower-income, less-educated women, were ignorant about birth control. One letter-writer told Sanger, “I, like many women, am interested in Birth Control, …that is exactly the reason I want you to help me.” Another said, “I am constantly living in fear of becoming pregnant again so soon.” Sanger’s mother was pregnant 18 times, delivered 11 live births, and died at age 49. Margaret devoted most of her life to helping other women avoid the same fate.

In a magazine she began publishing in 1914, The Woman Rebel, Sanger wrote:

“Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception? Everybody is aware that the old, stupid fallacy that such knowledge will cause a girl to enter into prostitution has long been shattered. Seldom does a prostitute become pregnant. Seldom does the girl practicing promiscuity become pregnant. The woman of the upper middle class have all available knowledge and implements to prevent conception. The woman of the lower middle class is struggling for this knowledge.”

Sanger trained as a nurse before marrying and starting a family, but after a fire destroyed her family’s home, Sanger, her husband William, and their three children moved to Brooklyn, NY. There, Margaret began working as a nurse in the slums of New York and Brooklyn, where she saw first-hand the impact of women’s reproductive ignorance – frequent unwanted pregnancies, botched back-alley abortions, damaging self-induced abortion attempts, and premature death. Most of the women Sanger treated were married. They wanted to limit their family to a physically and financially manageable size.  

Her experiences convinced Sanger that teaching women about their bodies and the best practices for blocking unwanted pregnancy was more important than strict adherence to misguided legislation. The Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, prevented the distribution of obscene material through the mail. Birth control literature was defined by the law as obscene. Many states passed similar laws that prohibited the dissemination of birth control products and information about birth control. 

Sanger opened the first family-planning clinic in the United States in Brooklyn on October 16, 1916. Within days, she was arrested in an undercover sting. While on bail, she continued to distribute birth control information and was arrested again. After authorities pressured her landlord to evict the clinic, Sanger was forced to close it. It had been open less than 30 days.

In a 1917 essay entitled Voluntary Motherhood, Sanger described her determination this way:

 “I felt so powerless. I had no influence, no money, few friends. I had only one way of making myself heard. I felt as one would feel if, on passing a house which one saw on fire and knew to contain women and children unaware of their danger, one realized that the only entrance was through a window. Yet there was a law and a penalty for breaking a window. Would any of you hesitate, if by so doing you could save a single life?”

Sanger continued to ignore the laws against distributing information about birth control and how to obtain birth control products. She was arrested several times and once chose a 30-day sentence in a workhouse instead of paying a $5000 fine. Sanger spoke to many groups about birth control and even gave a lecture to the Women’s Auxiliary of a Ku Klux Klan local.

In her talks, she told the story of “Sadie Sachs,” a woman Sanger nursed who had developed a sepsis infection after a botched self-induced abortion. Sanger listened as Sadie’s doctor refused to give her birth control information. “I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced,” Sanger told her audience, “… that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth.”

Margaret Sanger’s legacy is complicated. Although she was instrumental in educating women about birth control, thus giving them more agency over their own lives, she was also a Eugenics supporter and member of the discredited movement aimed at improving the population by encouraging so-called superior people to have more children while discouraging others. She supported the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v Bell when the court ruled that forced sterilization of mentally disabled women was constitutional. Planned Parenthood, the pro-choice organization that promotes family planning, sees Sanger’s Brooklyn short-lived clinic as the birthplace of their organization. Though the group supports abortion, Sanger did not. Her goal was to end unwanted pregnancies before they happened. On its website, Planned Parenthood “denounces” Sanger’s support of the Eugenics movement while celebrating her role in teaching women where babies come from.

Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.

Teaching government at Hilliard Darby High School in Ohio (a suburb of Columbus), Amy Messick helps students understand how our constitutional system works. She also encourages them to figure out their own political views and to actively engage in civic life. One former student who appreciates what he learned from Messick now serves on the school board for the district in which Messick teaches. In 2023, he returned the encouragement Messick had given him. He suggested she run for a vacancy on the Dublin City school board, the district in which Messick lives.

It was an idea Messick had already tossed around in conversations with her husband. By August 2024 she would complete her degree in the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program, giving her time for such an endeavor. She thought she could help repair a disconnect between what some worry is happening in public schools and what she knows actually happens.

Understanding the Reality of Public Education

During her more than twenty years teaching government at the general and AP levels, Messick has certainly seen changes. Some of them encourage her. As immigrant students from Somalia, Venezuela, and elsewhere have swelled the student population in her district, students’ attitudes toward racial, religious, and cultural diversity have shifted toward greater openness. On the other hand, because students now rely increasingly on cell phones for information, Messick spends more class time helping them identify credible news sources. Since the disruption of schooling during COVID, she’s also spent time catching students up on critical thinking skills.

But one concern being raised at school board meetings—that teachers were indoctrinating students with their own political ideas—showed a misunderstanding of how she and her colleagues work.

“Some groups were saying we’re teaching critical race theory,” Messick said, explaining why the claim was baseless. “I have two master’s degrees, one in educational leadership and one from MAHG. I’ve even taught at the college level.” (She began teaching a 200-level dual enrollment class for Kenyon College a decade ago.) “But critical race theory is something I don’t know. I’ve never studied it,” Messick said. Another claim—that teachers were “persuading students to change their genders”—struck Messick as comical. “I can’t get students to put their phones away. But people think I can persuade them to change their gender?” 

More worrying was a complaint that showed confusion about what civic education requires. “Parent groups have complained that teachers are injecting controversial topics into lessons. School boards are responding with directives to avoid controversial topics,” Messick said. “Well, how do I teach government without talking about controversial topics?” Self-government in America has always entailed controversy and debate, Messick pointed out.

Messick’s former student thought she could explain the reality of public education to worried voters and a worried school board. He put her in touch with a citizen’s group who’d support her as she campaigned. They’d help her identify homes in the district to canvas—those at least 40% likely to vote for a “progressive” candidate (Messick’s self-description). Assured of help, Messick decided to run. “I’d been complaining enough. Now it was time to do something.”

How Messick Campaigned and Won

Knocking on doors, Messick found her task simpler than expected. Most voters focused on a point she raised as she introduced herself: that no one then serving on the Dublin School Board had experience as a K-12 classroom teacher. This surprised voters.

Messick assured them that “all those serving on the Dublin School Board want to do what’s best for students. But when school board members are approached by very vocal groups, and the members themselves are not inside school buildings every day, it’s natural for them to think, ‘Well maybe what these folks are complaining about is what’s happening.’ They then feel they must respond with a new policy.” Many citizens took Messick’s point, agreeing the school board needed someone with classroom experience.

In the November election, Messick—out of six candidates running for two open seats on the school board—won the highest number of votes. Her support even exceeded that of a twenty-year incumbent.

As she serves on the board, Messick will focus on “making sure that our teachers feel supported in their efforts to support students. Do they have everything they need to do their job to the best of their ability, so that all students can succeed to the best of their ability?”

The Content Expertise Teachers Must Acquire

One thing all teachers need is something they must acquire on their own: expertise in the subject area they teach. “I highly encourage any new teacher to get a master’s in content,” Messick said. Once a teacher is comfortable with steering students through the basic outline of the subject area, “it’s on the teacher to realize, ‘I need to up my game. I need to make sure that I know more than my students can learn by reading the textbook.’” The biggest barriers to getting a masters are time and money.

Messick herself did not begin the MAHG program until twenty years after she completed her undergraduate degree. In 2017, she began taking occasional courses in MAHG, realizing she needed “to get some refreshers.” Messick was ready to put in the time required to get through the heavy reading required for each course. MAHG program administrators, she adds gratefully, helped her overcome the financial barrier.

“Our school district used to get student teachers from Ashland University, and I would get fee waivers for working with them. That was a huge help.” Then MAHG Director Chris Pascarella pointed out that the degree was within her reach. She had already completed the six core courses the degree requires. “Why don’t you just finish this up?” he suggested. Pascarella arranged for her to pay for some of the remaining coursework through Buchwald fellowships, grants provided through the generosity of Jim Buchwald, a donor who recognized the unique value of a Master’s program conducted through conversation about the primary documents of American history.

How MAHG Builds Teachers’ Confidence

“When you look at the other programs out there for teachers to take for credit, MAHG is a breath of fresh air,” Messick said. “You’re talking with colleagues who face the same teaching challenges you do. They also share your passion for the subject.” Taking an online course that meets in the evenings during the school year taxes a teacher’s stamina, “but it’s also energizing. The next morning you want to share with your students what you learned the night before. All the courses are immediately impactful.”

MAHG’s required history courses “gave me the context I need for teaching government,” Messick added. “It helped me see how the Constitution has been interpreted at various moments of our history.” Reading deeply in the primary documents of each era gave her more resources to deal with students’ questions. “If I don’t know the answer, I now know where to look. And having read two, three, or four different sources for each concept I teach solidifies my certainty that what I’m telling students is true.”

She also learned from watching how MAHG professors steer discussion of documents. Professors provide context for each document—“the who, what, when and where,” then “ask questions to make us think about the how and the why. I’m now more confident I can help students break down a document’s argument.”

Helping Students Understand Our Contentious Politics

Teaching government involves teaching current events, which involves following the contentious politics of our current era. “I try to put a positive spin on it,” Messick says. “Let’s watch the chess game play out,” she tells students, as an incoming administration tries to push appointees through without FBI background checks, and Senators of his own party object. “I tell students about the relationship between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama. She worked with the president, but also reminded him, ‘You can’t just steamroll over Congress. We’re in charge here.” “It all relates to Federalist 51,” Messick says. “We’re seeing ‘ambition . . . counter ambition.’ This is why we have separation of powers and checks and balances. They need to fight it out, and it’s going to be fun to watch.”

Discussion of primary documents. A supportive and engaged group of educators. Historic locations. Free professional development. What more could you ask for?

Applications open soon for our Fall 2025 Multi Day Seminars! We are hosting seminars on a variety of topics in American history and politics. The application will be open March 10-31, 2025. Some of our topics include:

• The American Revolution at Old Fort Niagara in Niagara Falls, NY.
• West Coast Immigration at Angel Island Immigration Station in Angel Island, CA.
• Native American Leadership, Identity, and Resistance at Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center in Mashantucket, CT.
• Susan B. Anthony & Reform at Susan B. Anthony Museum and House in Rochester, NY.
• The West in History and Memory at National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum  in Oklahoma City, OK.
• The Underground Railroad at National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH.
• 9/11: Causes and Consequences at George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, TX.
• Freedom, Virtue, & Resistance in African American Political Thought at African American Museum and Library at Oakland in Oakland, CA.

Each Multi-Day seminar runs for three days and brings together a small group of teachers from around the country. During the seminar, the teachers discuss primary documents on the seminar topic with the guidance of a scholar, who acts as the seminar leader. The seminar also includes a visit to a local historical site. See a sample itinerary here.

For more information about our Multi-Day seminars and to see the schedule of events please click here. Have more questions? Click here.

---

Part II: Teenaged Integration Pioneers Endure a Lonely Spotlight

Gloria Reeves Sloan was the oldest of the first three students to integrate Belmont High School. Entering Belmont High as a junior, she would be the first African American to graduate from the high school. Today, Sloan is founder and president of Personal Dynamics, Inc., a global hospitality consulting firm. In 2018 she published a memoir, Abundant Faith, Secrets to Plenty: Traveling on Life’s Journey (Westbow Press). In it she details the spiritual practices that enabled her to turn challenging life experiences, including her years as an integration pioneer, into opportunities for growth and achievement. You can read more about her at gloriasloan.com.

(For more about the implementation of the Brown decision nationwide, see James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 86-223.)

Below, Sloan shares her experience of school integration in Belmont with TAH Publications Editor Ellen Deitz Tucker.

You entered Belmont High School in September of 1964, as the sole black student in the junior class. The same year, two other black female students were enrolled in the sophomore class. Would you explain how the responsibility of leading the integration of Belmont High School fell on the three of you?

I will speak only for myself; I’m sure the other two black students have their own thoughts and feelings on the subject. I recall the adults speaking of what we were doing as “pioneering to integrate.” Our fathers, along with other leaders in our church, had attended a meeting in neighboring Mecklenburg County at which the Reverend Martin Luther King and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council spoke. Their message was: It is time to get school integration done! Later, this cause was discussed at our church. I don’t recall exactly what was said, but I’m sure we had a voice in the matter. It was presented to us not as an assignment, but as an opportunity to help the community achieve an important goal. People have often asked, how were we selected? I simply say that we attended the same church. Those working behind the scenes to plan the integration process probably know why we were asked to do this.

Yet there must have been something about your character or upbringing that made church leaders feel you could handle their request.

I was the last child of six, more than a decade younger than my older siblings, and my mother died when I was small. My father raised me by himself while he worked three jobs. He was a machinist at one of the local mills, the proprietor of a small store, a cook, and a handyman. My father raised me well on his own with support from family and neighbors. When school let out for the summer, I would travel by train to visit my aunt and other relatives up North. I learned to be rather independent at an early age.  I also gained some understanding of the world outside of my community.

Before you entered Belmont High, were you and the two sophomore students given any sort of preparation for what you were going to do?

No. I don’t recall any specific preparation given us in the black community. I vaguely remember all of us meeting with the school superintendent before the first day of class, but there was no orientation and no support from the white community that I knew about. No one warned us about possible hostility to what we were doing; I think they did not want to put fears in our heads. Much of the planning for integration happened behind the scenes and was kept from us, you know.

Do you know whether the white students at Belmont High School were told you’d be joining them, or whether they were asked to welcome you? Did anyone at Belmont High speak with you personally to offer support or advice?

I don’t know if the white students were briefed. No, I don’t remember any special welcome. It may be that they didn’t want to put ideas in the heads of the white students, either. I received no ongoing support from Belmont High during my two years there. The three of us supported each other as best we could—but we could do so only outside of school, because each of was placed in a different class group during the school day. We did not even share the same lunch period. More than anything, my faith gave me support and strength.

How did your fellow students at Belmont High School receive you?

My fellow students for the most part were cordial and polite. Some were friendlier than others. I participated in school activities, such as the Drama Club, the Beta Club [an association of students with high academic achievement], chorus, and the French Club. During my senior year, things grew easier; my classmates loosened up and talked with me more.  There was a talent show, and I persuaded the two younger girls to join with me in impersonating the Supremes. This was a big hit; it made the school yearbook, and it’s still talked about at class reunions.

How did your teachers at Belmont High School treat you?

The teachers were nice at Belmont High School but didn’t give much support. I don’t think they knew how to work in the integrated process with a person who didn’t look like them. They just graded my papers and handed them back to me. It was nothing like the teacher support we had received at Reid High School. At Belmont High, I was put in the class with the “smartest” kids. I’m sure it was to see if I could keep up with the work, and of course, I did. I made good grades on my own – not cheating like some of them did. Looking back on that time, I know that if just one teacher had said, “Gloria, we are glad to have you here. You are doing good!”— that would have made a big difference in what I was experiencing. The teachers showed no compassion for me as a student and I don’t recall ever speaking with a student counselor about my future.

What did you sacrifice in order to take on the role of an integration pioneer?

I sacrificed my junior and senior proms. I lost a close connection with the students still at Reid High School that I had been friends with in the earlier grades. But what bothered me most was the lack of counseling about what I would do after graduation. I applied to a number of colleges and was accepted; but no one suggested that I apply to the major state universities, and no one pointed me toward scholarship opportunities. As my time at the high school drew to a close, it seemed they were saying to me, “You broke the ice and showed that integration could work. You’ve done your work—you can go now.”

Overall, what do you feel you accomplished? Who do you think you helped most—the black students who would follow you in the integrated school, or the white students and teachers who needed to learn how to relate to black students?

The integration process should have helped us all. I hope it did. The black students who followed me were relatives, neighbors, and community friends. I’ve heard many stories of good and bad times at Belmont High School (now called South Point High). Relationships developed slowly, just as the town slowly adjusted to the change.

With the change, the South progressed; yet many in the black community today feel haunted by the decision to desegregate. In Belmont, we made sacrifices the white community weren’t asked to make. Reid School, with all of the history it held, and all the community support it offered, was closed and torn down. School systems continue to have problems related to racial discrimination. There are some cases where teachers just don’t get it, causing students to struggle to learn.

Did the experience help you in any way?

For me, the experience caused me to draw on my faith in God and to form my own personal goals, which helped me later in life. I decided that after graduating high school, I would seek out the education that would help me grow and accomplish what I wanted for myself. I knew I wanted a business career, so I went to business school for a couple of years. After that, I went to New York to study at the legendary Ophelia Devore School. It was a classic and elegant life preparation. Many notable celebrities and entertainers—Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Richard Roundtree—studied there. The finishing school provided a curriculum of personal development, teaching soft skills in etiquette essentials, poise, charm, behavior principles, communications, and public speaking.  This experience elevated my entrepreneurial goals.

After graduation, I returned to North Carolina, eventually starting a successful event planning business. Now, I’m a published author and inspirational speaker helping people identify and use valuable life skills to achieve their ambitions. In my book, Abundant Faith, and my presentation, “Life Skills for the Journey,” I share stories about my experience during the civil rights era, when I helped lead integration at Belmont High School, and how I dealt with this challenge.

What is the biggest lesson you’d like readers to learn from your story?

Teachers need to know how much they can influence a student’s life by encouraging them. They need to engage students in discussions of life skills, options for future careers, and strategies to pursue goals. I made the experience of integration work for me on my life’s journey. But not every student has the support from family or the inner resources to turn a tough experience into a growth experience. That’s why a teacher’s support is so important.

Ellen Tucker, a longtime blog contributor for Teaching American History.

Why is Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union  one of our favorite documents? This document is short enough to be used in younger classrooms, but it’s profound enough to be worth discussing with older students as well. 

Near the start of his presidency, Lincoln was thinking about the relationship between the Constitution and the Declaration. Reflecting on a passage from Proverbs that says “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” he found an analogy for how to understand these two documents. 

The principles within the Declaration were the words fitly spoken—an apple of gold. The Constitution was the frame of silver around the golden apple. When putting a frame around a work of art, care must be taken to choose a frame that serves important purposes. While any frame can help protect the artwork, the right frame will also not be a distraction—will not draw attention to itself. And the best frame adds to the beauty of the artwork, highlighting its best parts and drawing attention to them.

He clearly believed the Constitution is important enough to wage a war to preserve, but he didn’t want to lose sight of what makes it so important. The Constitution is the silver frame around the more important document from our Founding. It is there to “adorn and preserve” the principles within the Declaration, and that makes it worthy of saving.

All this is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is the principle of “liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.

The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government and consequent prosperity. No oppressed people will fight and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters.

The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union and the Constitution are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made not to conceal or destroy the apple but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.

So let us act, that neither picture or apple shall ever be blurred or bruised or broken.

That we may so act, we must study, and understand the points of danger.

Check out our Apple of Gold Poster in the bookstore.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first African American to publicly protest segregation in regional and local transportation systems in the modern civil rights era.  Thirteen years before Ms. Parks refused to move for a white passenger, Bayard Rustin had a similar encounter.  After purchasing a one-way ticket from Louisville to Nashville, Mr. Rustin was beaten and arrested for refusing to comply with the bus driver’s directive to sit in the back row.  Mr. Rustin described this encounter and illustrated the power of nonviolent protest in one of his early essays “Nonviolence vs. Jim Crow” (1942), which we excerpt below:

Recently I was planning to go from Louisville to Nashville by bus. I bought my ticket, boarded the bus, and, instead of going to the back, I sat down in the second seat back. The driver saw me, got up, and came back to me.

“Hey you, you’re supposed to sit in the back seat.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the law. N——s ride in back.”

I said, “My friend, I believe that this is an unjust law. If I were to sit in back I would be condoning injustice.”

Angry, but not knowing what to do, he got out and went into the station, but soon came out again, got into his seat, and started off.

This routine was gone through at each stop, but each time nothing came of it. Finally the driver, in desperation, must have phoned ahead, for about thirteen miles north of Nashville I heard sirens approaching. The bus came to an abrupt stop, and a police car and two motorcycles drew up beside us with a flourish. Four policemen got into the bus, consulted shortly with the driver, and came to my seat.

“Get up, you—N——!”

“Why?” I asked.

“Get up, you Black——!”

“I believe that I have a right to sit here,” I said quietly. “If I sit in the back of the bus I am depriving that child”—I pointed to a little white child of five or six—“of the knowledge that there is injustice here, which I believe it is his
right to know. It is my sincere conviction that the power of love in the world is the greatest power existing. If you have a greater power, my friend, you may move me.”

How much they understood of what I was trying to tell them I do not know. . . . Read more

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and raised by his grandparents, including a grandmother who was a Quaker and a charter member of the NAACP. He studied briefly at Wilberforce University and in 1937 moved to New York City, where he furthered his education at City College of New York. In 1938 he joined the Youth Communist League but severed his ties with that organization within a few years. In 1941 he accepted A. Philip Randolph’s invitation to assist in planning the first March on Washington, and later that year he became youth secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the nation’s most influential pacifist organization. A decade before the quickening of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, Rustin and FOR, in conjunction with FOR’s civil rights offshoot, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), organized a series of Freedom Rides to give effect to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated state-mandated segregation on interstate buses.

This document is excerpted from our CDC volume Race and Civil Rights, which contains classroom-ready primary sources, introductory essays and discussion questions.  Download or purchase your copy today from our bookstore!

One of the many letters Abraham Lincoln received after being elected president in November 1860 was from Alexander Stephens, a former congressional colleague of Lincoln and the future Vice-President of the Confederacy. He urged Lincoln to make a public statement regarding his intentions as president. It would be, Stephens wrote, “the word fitly spoken” that might “save our common country.” Lincoln deliberated on the phrase and jotted down some thoughts on the essential purpose of the Constitution and the Union.

Lincoln’s notes are preserved in a document historians call the Fragment on the Constitution and Union. Lincoln believed the “word fitly spoken” already existed. “It is the principle of “liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—…, enterprise and industry to all.” The “word fitly spoken” is the promise of the Declaration of Independence, liberty and equality for all people. An “apple of gold in a frame of silver.”

If Lincoln was right, if “liberty to all” was “the word fitly spoken,” why did he claim in his first inaugural address; “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Why not immediately declare liberty for the enslaved people in the South? Why wait so long to issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

The answer, according to historian James Oakes, in his outstanding book Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1860-1865, is that emancipation was not “the singular act of a singular individual” as many Americans assume. The actual emancipation story is far more complex.

PEACETIME EMANCIPATION

Oakes argues for a broader understanding of the context of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the decades preceding the Civil War, anti-slavery editors, politicians, and abolitionists developed a legal and constitutional theory that guided their emancipation strategy.

As early as 1851, Republicans like Senator Henry Wilson (MA) were articulating a peacetime emancipation theory that insisted Congress could legislate against slavery in territory under its domain.  “We shall arrest the extension of slavery” in the territories, Wilson said. “… and blot out slavery in the National Capital. We shall surround the slave States with a cordon of free States.” According to this theory, slavery existed in the United States because some states protected “the peculiar institution” with state legislation. Freedom, however, was national. The Constitution was not a pro-slavery document. Lincoln, congressional Republicans, and many abolitionists assumed this “cordon of freedom” would inevitably lead the slave states to abandon slavery on their accord.

WARTIME EMANCIPATION

War changed everything. Military emancipation was constitutional as necessary to save the Union from a rebellion.  With southerners absent from Congress, Republicans quickly built the “cordon of freedom” with limited opposition from northern Democrats. Within three months of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Republicans banned slavery in the western territories and Washington, DC, and blocked federal enforcement of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause.

In August 1861, Lincoln signed the 1st Confiscation Act, authorizing the military to reject enslavers efforts to reclaim their so-called “property.” Union officers and soldiers could not encourage enslaved people to flee bondage but were not required to return those who “self-emancipated.” Lincoln signed the 2nd Confiscation Act on July 17, 1862. Now Lincoln and Congress were committed to a military emancipation in addition to their “cordon of freedom” peacetime strategy.

Lincoln quoted from the 2^nd Confiscation Act when he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Under the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation military officers and men could entice slaves to escape on the promise of freedom. The disloyal states had one hundred days to reenter the Union, or their slaves would be “forever free.”

The Final Emancipation Proclamation, signed on January 1, 1863, quoted Sections 9 and 10 of the 2nd Confiscation Act verbatim. In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln acknowledged that a president did not have “the power to interfere with slavery” where it existed. But he did not say that a president lacked that power during a civil insurrection. With the onset of war and the authorization of Congress, the commander-in-chief exercised that power.

I wish I could hear a recording of Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address. When he said, “that all knew” slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war did he emphasize “somehow”? He said neither side expected “the cause of the conflict might cease” before the war ended. Yet, he knew his administration implemented peacetime emancipation upon assuming office and military emancipation after the war started. And he knew their plan succeeded. It is difficult to believe he was surprised at the outcome.

For more classroom-ready Lincoln documents, please see our CDC volume, Abraham Lincoln, available for purchase or download from our bookstore.

Ray Tyler was the 2014 James Madison Fellow for South Carolina and a 2016 graduate of Ashland University’s Masters Program in American History and Government. Ray is a former Teacher Program Manager for TAH and a frequent contributor to our blog.

In May of 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, finding segregated schools “inherently unequal.” One year later, the Court issued its “Ruling on Relief,”  mandating that desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed.” Given the deliberate vagueness of the instruction, Southern school authorities delayed compliance. As a white child born in 1954 who grew up in the small town of Belmont, North Carolina, I did not share my classroom with a single black student until I was an eleven-year-old sixth grader. Later I would inquire why it took so long.

Many white Southerners did not accept integration as unavoidable until the Civil Rights Act passed in the summer of 1964, when I was ten years old. This act required integration in employment, retail businesses and restaurants, and public facilities like libraries, parks and museums—as well as schools. Even then, many Southern school districts stalled for time, some waiting until the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklinberg School District, which compelled the district serving North Carolina’s largest city to integrate despite the de facto segregation of residential neighborhoods. The plan the Court eventually endorsed unanimously for Charlotte—after much negotiation among the judges—used a combination of newly organized magnet schools and long bus rides to achieve integration.

A Human Relations Committee Forms to Plan Integration

In Belmont, a small town just west across the Catawba River from Charlotte, school integration presented fewer logistical problems, because segregated schools for black and white children were situated within a mile of each other. More proactive than many communities,[1] Belmont initiated its integration plan only two months after the 1964 Act passed. Even so, Belmont’s leaders did not publicly promote the plan. They hoped to introduce it quietly and gently to a skeptical and potentially hostile white community. They would test that community’s receptivity to African American students by sending a group of carefully vetted volunteers into formerly white schools during the 1964–1965 school year. As a fifth grader, I had no idea such plans were being made; but when I returned to school the next year, I met a new student: a very quiet, studious black girl, the daughter, I would learn, of a local pastor.

I was only dimly aware that my father served on the local “Human Relations Committee.” Initiated by black church leaders, who had invited several trusted white clergymen and business leaders to work with them, this citizens’ committee were planning the integration of Belmont’s schools and businesses. Later, when I reached high school, I talked with my father about how he’d helped to locally implement the Brown decision. He explained that the quiet black child had been deliberately placed in my sixth-grade classroom, just as two other black children had been placed in the ninth and third grades, in the classes where my older sister and younger brother sat.

Quietly Integrating Black Children into Majority-White Schools

In Belmont, integration faced three political problems. First, would white students accept black students without public protest or secret retaliation against the students themselves? On the first day of school in September 1964, when three young black women enrolled in Belmont High School, no angry outburst disrupted the order of the school day. Whether the black students felt welcomed and comfortable is another question. Still, to those orchestrating the integration process, this first year of limited integration succeeded well enough, and plans were made to send other carefully chosen black students into the elementary and junior high schools in September 1965.

I believe my sister and brother, both more extroverted than I, welcomed the new students warmly, probably helping their adjustment in a small way. I, however—then a very shy child—did not reach out to my new classmate, and the memory of my standoffish behavior still haunts me. Still, I wonder why my parents never sat me down to explain how I should behave. They probably talked about it in indirect ways, hoping I would catch on. They seemed to think integration would proceed most smoothly if the minimum attention were called to it.

Accustoming White Families to Black School Teachers

When this second year’s trial also worked, plans were finalized for the third year, when all of the black community’s school-age children would enroll in the formerly white elementary and secondary schools. But this meant also integrating the teaching staff of Reid School, which served the black community, into the formerly white schools. Might those white parents whose children drew black teachers complain? To make clear that black schoolteachers would serve in equivalent roles to those of white teachers, the Human Relations Committee proposed to school officials that teachers for the entire fourth grade class during the 1966–1967 school year be drawn from Reid School. There had been only one or two fourth grade teachers at Reid, while at Belmont Elementary School there had been four. The latter now received new and unexpected grade-level assignments, just as several black teachers were drawn out of other grades to cover the fourth. None of the teachers with shifted assignments were happy about it; but no doubt the black teachers unused to both fourth grade curriculum and to majority-white classrooms faced the greater challenge.

Whether to Save or Close a Beloved Black School

So far, so good; but the third political problem facing the integration plan seemed irresolvable: what would happen to the well-loved Reid School, which had provided both elementary and secondary education for all black students in town since visionary educator Charles Reid became principal in 1914?[2] It was a cultural center for the black community, where dedicated teachers working with the white schools’ discarded textbooks cultivated black students’ futures. But school officials felt white parents would not send their children to a school in a black neighborhood without fierce protest. They decided that Reid School would close for good. The facilities at Reid were no longer needed, they said, since Belmont had increased its classroom capacity in 1964 by opening a new high school and converting the old high school into a new middle school.

The black community would castigate this decision, especially after the old school was demolished, along with the auditorium that had housed community events, the trophy cases housing awards for Reid’s winning teams, and a brand new gymnasium that many had hoped to see converted into a town recreation center.

The White Reformer’s Perspective

I don’t think my father ever seriously questioned the decision to close Reid School. To him, Reid’s closure was just one element of a countywide school consolidation he was working to accomplish. (He’d been interested in this reform since serving a term as foreman of the Grand Jury and making it his task to investigate the wildly divergent school facilities across the county. He’d found they ranged from well maintained buildings in Belmont to, in a distant rural area, a one-room schoolhouse heated by a pot-bellied stove.) He hoped to see racial integration occur throughout the county as part of the student reassignments that would result from consolidation and new building.

Pleased to see the school system modernized and countywide racial integration quietly begun, did Dad stop to consider the loss borne by black students and teachers as they left the more supportive environment of the older black schools? I’d like to think he did; but I don’t know that he dwelt on it. He wanted to see the integration of schools and businesses in Belmont. He wanted to help make the “New South” a more just, more prosperous place. An optimist, he saw racism as thoughtless conformity to an irrational code.  To change the code, you just had to signal to the white community that new and better behavior was now expected. Years later, recalling visits to local restaurant owners whom he asked to serve black customers, he told me, “You’d be surprised how many people were willing to do it if you just asked.”

---

[1] But not as proactive as some. In my father’s papers I found a pamphlet published by the Southern Regional Council, “Next Steps in the South: Answers to Current Questions.” It states that prior to the Brown decision, segregation was required by law in 17 states and the District of Columbia. But “two years after the decision, more than 350 school districts in nine of the 17 states had desegregated their public schools. Schools in the nation’s capital were also opened to all” (Reprint of New South [Vol. 11, No. 7 and 8, July–August 1956], p. 3).

[2] Before becoming an educator, Charles Reid had to earn his own education. One of eight children born to freed slaves in Lowell, NC, he first traveled 11 miles to Lincoln Academy, a boarding school for black students operated by the American Missionary Association. Graduating in 1904 at the age of 26, he took $40 he had managed to save and traveled across the Appalachian Mountains to Knoxville College in Tennessee (a missionary effort of the United Presbyterian Church founded in 1875 ). Four years later, at the age of thirty, Reid returned to Gaston County and began teaching. In 1914 he assumed leadership of the school in Belmont that would eventually take his name. (Ross Yockey, Between Two Rivers: The Centennial of Belmont, North Carolina [City of Belmont, 1996], p. 170; Oscar DePriest Hand and Julia Neal Sykes, Footprints on the Rough Side of the Mountain: An African American Niche in the History of a Southern Textile City [Hand and Sykes Concepts, 1997], p. 77.) Among his many contributions, Reid organized the building of an early school house in 1921, one of 800 “Rosenwald schools” built in North Carolina between 1919 and the early 1930s, a joint project of Booker T. Washington and Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. The project combined seed money from Rosenwald with contributions from the African American communities served; local school boards contributed the remaining funds. (Fisk University Rosenwald Fund Card File Database. For a history of Rosenwald schools, see Thomas W. Hanchett, “The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review, vol LXV, no. 4 [October 1988], 387 – 444.))

Watch for Part 2 coming in March 2025!

On this day, we are pleased to post this essay by Lucas Morel, Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Politics at Washington and Lee University and long time former faculty member at Teaching American History, who considers the lasting legacy of King’s great speech:

Equality, Fairness and Brotherhood: Common Ground for the Nation’s Diverse Citizenry

August 28th, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech,” which ranks among the most famous speeches of the 20^th century.  Delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King’s keynote address was heard by over a quarter million people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  King declared that the goals of the modern Civil Rights Movement were simply “to make real the promises of democracy,” which he found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  What he called “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream” was based upon a faith, both biblical and constitutional, that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

With only five blacks serving in Congress, and riots mounting that summer of 1963, the 34-year-old Baptist preacher had faith that the white American majority would do right by the Constitution and their consciences.  This they did, most notably by passing the Civil Rights Act the following summer and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  To be sure, a legislative full press by President (and former Senate majority leader) Lyndon B. Johnson was instrumental to their passage, pursued as a tribute to the slain President John F. Kennedy, who lobbied for a major Civil Rights bill in June 1963.  But King’s televised speech kept the “citizenship rights” of black Americans on the national agenda, and thus paved the way for the passage of serious civil rights legislation for the first time in almost a hundred years.

No aspect of King’s dream has provoked more controversy than his hope that his children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  Fifty years later, with affirmative action still debated in the highest court of the land, Americans remain divided over the relevance of race in securing equality under the law.  Arguing that the Constitution should be color-blind, Chief Justice John Roberts has written that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg counters that the Constitution is “color conscious to prevent discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of past discrimination.”  Simply put, should race be the measure of any person’s constitutional rights?

When King spoke the language of individual, God-given rights, he found common ground for the nation’s diverse citizenry to occupy without jeopardizing any individual’s opportunity to succeed through their own work and effort.  But only a year after his “I Have a Dream” speech, King doubted that in his day, true equality before the law could be achieved without “compensatory consideration” for those deprived as a result of American slavery—a category of citizens that King argued would include millions of poor whites in addition to most blacks of his day.  How does one reconcile King’s devotion to human equality and individual rights with his later call for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged and a guaranteed annual income?  His “I Have a Dream” Speech does not answer this question, but does make its appeal on the basis of traditional American principles of equality, fairness, and brotherhood.  Only by respecting these did King believe Americans could “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Lucas E. Morel, Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Politics Washington and Lee University.

Read the complete text of King’s address to the March on Washington.

For the past year, Teaching American History’s webinars have been about the presidential election. Last spring, we broke down the presidential election cycle.  We spent this fall diving into the rhetorical traditions of American politics.  We don’t know about you guys, but we need a break from politics!

So let’s take a step back and look back at an entirely different aspect of US history.  We want to spend some time rereading and reflecting on those books that contributed to the national conversation–some immediately and others through the weight of time.  And we really hope that you guys are ready to snuggle into your favorite reading chair, make a cup of tea, and start flipping through those pages with us!

Our webinars meet monthly on select Saturday mornings from 10.45am–12pm ET. Excerpts for discussion, a pre-webinar discussion board, and links to webinar recordings and relevant primary sources will be made available to registrants. Those who remain digitally present for the duration of the conversation will receive an attendance letter from Teaching American History for 1.25 hours of professional development.

Register now for this free professional development by clicking on the links below!