Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

1. Lessons from Southern Lives: Teaching Race through Autobiography

17 CHAPTER ONE Lessons from Southern Lives Teaching Race through Autobiography ONE OF THE BIGGEST challenges we face as history teachers—whether working with middle- or high-school students or college undergraduates—is making sense of the vast complexities and variables that have always characterized the interactions of white and black Americans. It is all too easy to oversimplify the subjects of race and racism in the classroom. Textbooks, the popular media, and even we teachers are often prone to broad generalizations in characterizing the ways in which whites have treated blacks. In his indictment a decade ago of high-school history texts, Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen devoted a full chapter to “The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks,” and it seems to me as if little has changed since then.1 As part of the second generation born after the civil rights movement had run its course, our students all too often seem oblivious to past or even current struggles for racial justice, and they react with genuine surprise at the extent and intensity with which “the color line” long defined both southern and American society. One of the most insightful and accessible sources for conveying both the hard realities and the more subtle nuances of race relations in the college classroom —and beyond—is autobiography. I have found this genre to be an effective and immensely satisfying teaching tool for a number of reasons that I lay out below, and in ways that I hope inform these essays as well. Autobiography, as William Dean Howells once noted, is “the most democratic province in the republic of letters.” This is because anyone and everyone “from presidents and generals to ex-slaves and convicts” can write his or her 18 ‡ chapter one own story. As a result, the cumulative effect is that, as another critic has written, “they have been like a private history of the amazing crimes, achievements, banalities , and wonders of American life. Orthodox history is, by contrast, a bland soup.”2 Its appeal to me, as a teacher, is that it offers windows into the historical past at its most intimate, its most emotional, its most human. Autobiographers can bring that past alive in ways that more objective scholarly historians rarely do; as such, they engage us in ways that no history textbook can. Yet another unique feature of autobiography that makes it such an effective teaching tool for both high-school and college students is that, unlike any other historical genre, it is one in which youthful experiences, from both childhood and adolescence, hold such sway. From the Salem witchcraft trials to the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, there have been occasional moments in American history in which teenagers have been catalysts in the unfolding of significant developments. Otherwise we must turn to autobiography, which offers a vast array of case studies of young people struggling with issues and circumstances of historical import—which in the South means slavery, Civil War, emancipation, Jim Crow, and civil rights. Is there any other form of historical documentation to which adolescents can relate so readily in terms of the perspectives and experiences of their peers? (Has any work enlightened more people about the traumas of the Holocaust, for example, than the diary of a teenage girl hiding in an Amsterdam attic?) It is no coincidence that that formative age and all it encompasses—the learning processes, discovery, experimentation, social development, the questioning, probing, and challenging of ideas and authorities—are among the most vital and richly expressed components of autobiography.3 When applied to matters of race, authors ’ insights into their early observations, perceptions, and experiences can be profound. These are stories infused with strong emotional content; they are also narratives in which moral values and ethical dilemmas are often at the forefront. As such, they can serve as vital resources in the character education of students today. Historian and Georgia Humanities Council president Jamil Zainaldin has spoken eloquently about how integral character education is to citizenship in the twenty-first century, and about the role, in turn, of the humanities in making character education happen. “The humanities,” he says “are the heart and head working together. They are the food of citizenship; the conscience of communities.” The humanities are also stories, Zainaldin reminds us. “They are stories read and told, and shared. Stories are the building blocks Lessons from...