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Brian Jones<\/span>Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy photo<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On a frigid Thursday afternoon<\/span> in late January, in a now-viral video<\/a>, employees at Philadelphia\u2019s Independence National Historical Park were captured removing interpretive signs about slavery posted at the President\u2019s House Site\u2014where George Washington and John Adams both lived, and where Washington enslaved nine people.<\/p>\n The outdoor exhibit, installed in 2010 after years of advocacy<\/a> by Black activists and historians, was intended to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the nation\u2019s founding ideals of freedom, equality and democracy and the brutal system of slavery it maintained. When a Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em> reporter asked one<\/a> of the park employees why the signs were being removed, he replied, \u201cI\u2019m just following orders.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Months after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump directed national parks<\/a> and museums to root out \u201cdivisive, race-centered ideology,\u201d specifically targeting Independence Hall\u2014where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted\u2014in preparation for the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re living in a time\u2026where people are really trying to constrain what we learn,\u201d said Brian Jones, an author, longtime educator in New York City public schools and senior director of reading and engagement at the New York Public Library. \u201cSometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the sensors come along and remind us how powerful they are.\u201d<\/p>\n After nearly a decade as an elementary school teacher, Jones earned a doctorate in urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research there on \u201ca really explosive chapter in Black education history,\u201d the 1968 student uprising<\/a> at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute\u2014which Jones\u2019 father attended\u2014would become the subject of his first book and propel him to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture<\/a> at the New York Public Library, first as a scholar-in-residence and later as staff. The more Jones studied Black history, the more he came to believe that Black history was for everyone\u2014the title of his latest book<\/a>, published with Haymarket Books.<\/p>\n As America nears its semiquincentennial, February also marks 100 years of Black history commemorations, a tradition started by the historian Carter G. Woodson<\/a> in 1926 and officially recognized by president Gerald Ford<\/a> during the 1976 bicentennial.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It\u2019s usually more that we didn\u2019t go far enough.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Some sixty years ago, in yet another period of social and political upheaval, the writer James Baldwin delivered an address<\/a> to teachers in his native New York in which he concluded that the source of the country\u2019s troubles was its own slippery sense of self, built on \u201ca series of myths about one\u2019s heroic ancestors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The role of education in such a time, Baldwin argued, was to produce free-thinkers capable of questioning these myths and willing to challenge society in order to save it. By teaching an inclusive and unvarnished view of history, and creating an opportunity for Black students to see themselves in the classroom, educators could liberate all<\/em> students, he suggested.\u00a0<\/p>\n To better understand Black history, the liberatory power of education, and how ideas of race and nation shape American identity, I spoke with Jones in early January about Black History Is for Everyone<\/em>\u2014a book born out of the belief that Black history is an \u201cinvitation to rethink everything,\u201d and that studying it \u201coffers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves, whether you identify as Black or not, in a new way.\u201d<\/p>\n This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIf history is any guide,\u201d you write, \u201creconstruction is even more difficult than abolition.\u201d Today, amid the rolling back of so many hard-won freedoms, the dilution of Black political power, and the erasure of Black history, what can we learn from past liberatory struggles about the path to building a more durable and equitable democracy?<\/strong><\/p>\n I mean, that\u2019s the million-dollar question. The idea that reconstruction is even harder than abolition, as you may recall, is an idea I get straight from [the abolitionist Frederick Douglass] and W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black scholar who wrote a masterful book called Black Reconstruction<\/em><\/a>, against the idea that Reconstruction was a disaster filled with just Black corruption, and Black people shouldn\u2019t have been able to do all the things that they were doing, voting and carrying on: [that] it was just too much, too fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n What Du Bois teaches us is that after the abolition of slavery, the process of reconstructing the South came to this moment in its most radical phase, when the social order got turned totally upside down, and we had this quite radical experiment in biracial democracy. You had people, Black people, elected to offices at all levels, not just state government, but to the Senate, to the federal legislature. You had, through voting, the creation of amazing new state constitutions, some of which banned racism, created, in at least two cases, interracial schooling\u2014[and] in every case, prohibited racism in saying who could go to what school.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have white children, in [Reconstruction], going to school for the first time thanks to the advocacy of their Black neighbors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n\n
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