The Unschooling of the Well-educated Negro

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

The Miseducation of the Negro Carter G. Woodson

I grew up in a quiet, woodsy, predominantly white well-manicured suburban neighborhood in Warwick, Rhode Island, and was one of only two Black kids in my elementary and secondary schools. From 1979 to 1991, K-12, I attended Holliman, Aldrich, and Pilgrim, all of which were considered some of the best public schools in the state and all of which were within walking distance of my home. What I was taught in those schools was the same one-size-fits-all curriculum that generations before me had learned to master the necessary skills to get a job. Where my schools failed was in providing any historical context from a Black perspective. None of my teachers offered readings from Black writers. There was no James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglas, Toni Morrison, or any other Black writers to give me as well as the white kids a sense of Blackness. The books I had to read were Romeo and Juliet, Death of a Salesman, A Tale of Two Cities, Hamlet, Les Misérables, The Glass Menagerie, and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories.

I don't know if those teachers avoided the subject because there was too much pain to explore, too much guilt, ignorance, and denial, or if it was to keep peaceful relations between races, but what my eleventh grade history teacher, Mr. Hutchinson, taught us about slavery and Negros stripped me of my culture, and left me disenfranchised, terrorized, and with this heritage: an oppressed Black man in a hostile white man's world. Hutch, as he liked to be called, told us that slavery not only was prevalent in Rhode Island, but that Rhode Island's economy was reliant on the South's slave-labor production.

Pacing our classroom floor in Pilgrim, which was directly across the hall from my locker, Hutch minimized Blacks and the slave narrative to the point that it had little significance or meaning.

"Slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears!" he exclaimed. "You didn't like it, but you didn't dare let it go." He stopped, raised his left index finger, and pointed at a picture of the third president of the United States hanging on the side of the chalkboard. "Jefferson said that," he continued. "But slavery here in the North was different than slavery in the South. Slaves up here were much better off after the settlers bought them from Africans in Africa to America. They learned specialized skills and crafts. They were given food and housing in exchange for their help. And they were freed far sooner. Rhode Island tried but failed to pass laws that would have set slaves free after ten years of service."

His recitation had the feel of something memorized than internalized. It saddened me. My descendants were shackled and stolen from their African country to be used as "workers" in colonial America. Those who refused to leave or be separated from their children and family were killed. Hutch portrayed Rhode Islanders as angels of mercy to slaves. He didn't offer up any slave narratives. He didn't tell us about Occramer Marycoo—known by his slave name, Newport, the city where he lived and where the majority of slave ships leaving British North America came from—who was taken from West Africa and sold to Rhode Island sea captain Caleb Gardner to be his slave. Nor did Hutch tell us that Rhode Island sent five-hundred-and-fourteen slave ships to the coast of West Africa. The rest of the colonists sent one hundred and...