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Searing images from this month’s mostly white insurrection in Washington, D.C.—including a hangman’s noose on the Capitol grounds and the Confederate flag carried inside the U.S. Capitol—harken back to another era when both were tools and symbols of white supremacy across the country.
But relatively few students have learned about previous sordid moments that foreshadowed this year’s efforts to instill terror and violently overturn an election such as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, widely thought to be the only successful coup in U.S. history, and the Tulsa Race Massacre.
New attention to what is taught in history class has sparked debate over the approach that schools should take.
“In secondary education, we tend to sidestep the controversy, the trauma, the pain, the suffering that’s embedded in history,” said Karlos Hill, an associate professor and chair of the Department of African and African-American studies at the University of Oklahoma.
“For some to tell the truth about American history, in particular to tell the truth about Black history, would run counter to what history is supposed to do, which is to make us more patriotic, more flag loving and flag-waving.”
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