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Education

A teen student delivered a masterclass on the true history of the Confederate flag

Christopher Justice broke it down into incredible details most of us probably weren't even aware of.

SM East/YouTube

Six years ago, a high school student named Christopher Justice eloquently explained the multiple problems with flying the Confederate flag. A video clip of Justice's truth bomb has made the viral rounds a few times since then, and here it is once again getting the attention it deserves.

Justice doesn't just explain why the flag is seen as a symbol of racism. He also explains the history of when the flag originated and why flying a Confederate flag makes no sense for people who claim to be loyal Americans.

But that clip, as great as it is, is a small part of the whole story. Knowing how the discussion came about and seeing the full debate in context is even more impressive.


In 2015, a student at Shawnee Mission East High School outside of Kansas City came up with the idea to have student journalists document students engaging in open discussions about various topics. In support of this idea, history teacher David Muhammad helped arrange a debate about the use of the Confederate flag in American society in his classroom.

According to the Shawnee Mission Post, Muhammad had prepared a basic outline and some basic guiding questions for the discussion, but mainly let the students debate freely. And the result was one of the most interesting debates about the Confederate flag you'll ever see—one that both reflects the perspectives in American society at large and serves as an example of how to hold a respectful conversation on a controversial topic.

The full discussion is definitely worth a watch. Justice had quite a few Confederacy defenders to contend with, and he skillfully responded to each point with facts and logic. Other students also chimed in, and the discussion is wildly familiar to anyone who has engaged in debate on this topic. For his part, Mr. Muhammad did an excellent job of guiding the students through the debate.

"I had Chris in class, so I knew he was super intelligent and that he read a lot," Muhammad told the Shawnee Mission Post in 2018. "But that really came out of left-field. He was never out there very much socially, so I didn't expect for him to want to speak in front of a crowd like that."

(In case you're wondering, according to LinkedIn, Christopher Justice is now studying political science at Wichita State University after switching his major from sports management. David Muhammad is now Dean of Students at Pembroke Middle School and also serves as a Diversity Consultant.)

Thanks, SM East, for documenting and sharing such a great discussion.


This article originally appeared on 08.05.21

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culture
Education

Sojourner Truth's real 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech was nothing like the famous one we all read

A prime example of how historical distortions can paint a totally inaccurate picture.

Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

The famous Sojourner Truth speech most of us learned is a fabrication.

For generations, students have read the extemporaneous speech Sojourner Truth gave at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, known widely as "Ain't I a Woman?" As a formerly enslaved Black woman speaking out against slavery and for women's rights, Truth made some powerful points in her speech—except the speech most of us read is almost nothing like the one she delivered.

The way "Ain't I a Woman?" is written makes it sound as if Truth walked straight off a Southern plantation. But Truth was a Northerner her entire life. The Southern dialect that permeates the popular version of her speech is a total fabrication.

It wasn't Truth who altered her speech, though. A white abolitionist woman named Frances Dana Gage published the speech 12 years after it was given, and her version is the one that became popularized, in all its glorious inaccuracy.

Let's start at the beginning.

Sojourner Truth was born as Isabella Baumfree to parents who were enslaved by Dutch settlers in Ulster County, New York, in 1797. When she was 9, she was sold away to another New York enslaver, and by the time she was 14, she'd been sold to several different slave owners around New York State. After being raped by her final enslaver, harassed by his wife, and heartbroken over the man she loved being beaten to death by his owner on a neighboring farm, she escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826—the year before New York's gradual phasing out of slavery was set to be complete.

Truth chose her famous name in her forties, after a religious awakening in which she felt called to travel and speak out against slavery. She became a powerhouse in the early abolitionist movement. In addition to her fierce civil rights advocacy, she successfully sued one of her former owners for custody of her youngest son, who had been sold illegally, making her the first Black woman to take a white man to court and win.

During her adult life, Truth lived in New York and Massachusetts and eventually settled in Michigan. She traveled extensively, but since her entire childhood was spent in New York—and since her first language was Dutch—she wouldn't have had a Southern accent or spoken in a Southern dialect at all.

Since she couldn't read or write, the speech Truth gave in 1851 was never written down by her, so history relies on the people who were present to know what she said. The first attempt to publish a full account of her speech came a few weeks after she delivered it, when journalist Marius Robinson published his version in The Anti-Slavery Bugle on June 21, 1851. According to The Sojourner Truth Project, Robinson was good friends with Sojourner Truth, and there is documentation that she went over his transcription before it was published.

That version, titled "On Woman’s Rights,” begins:

"May I say a few words? I want to say a few words about this matter.

I am a woman’s rights.

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?"

It's a strikingly different account than the one published in 1863 by Francis Gage, which reads in part:

"Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar.

Nobody eber helps me into carriages or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place.

And ar’n’t I a woman?"

Gage's version has been altered over time to smooth out the spellings, and "ar'n't" morphed into "ain't," but the distinct Southern accent remains in the speech we famously attribute to Truth today. (For instance, check out the speech shared by The Hermitage museum, which is the version most of us have read, here. The two originally published versions can be compared side by side here.)

According to The Sojourner Truth Project, "Frances Gage admitted that her amended version had 'given but a faint sketch' of Sojourner's original speech but she felt justified and believed her version stronger and more palatable to the American public than Sojourner's original version."

But changing her speech matters for a couple of reasons. For one, making Truth appear to be Southern adds to the oversimplification of slavery as only a Southern problem, when in reality slavery existed in the Northern states as well. They just abolished slavery earlier than the South, and without fighting a heinous, bloody war over it first.

Secondly, Truth herself did not care for people changing the way she talked, as The Sojourner Truth Project shares:

"In an 1851 issue of the Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, an article states that Truth prided herself on 'fairly correct English, which is in all senses a foreign tongue to her…People who report her often exaggerate her expressions, putting in to her mouth the most marked southern dialect, which Sojourner feels is rather taking an unfair advantage of her.'"

It also matters because the truth matters. As the United States grapples with its history of racism and slavery and Americans argue over the lenses and narratives through which we tell our national story, it's vital that we strive to be truthful. Learning about history requires that we constantly stay open to not only learning things we may not have learned, but also relearning things we may have learned wrong.

Check out The Sojourner Truth Project for more details about Truth and to see a more accurate representation of what she actually said in her famous speech. And listen this reading of Robinson's version of her speech, read by a woman with a contemporary Dutch accent in an attempt to get closer to Truth's original speech:

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black history
Education

The 1962 riot over a Black man attending Ole Miss is an overlooked but vital piece of history

The details of these stories matter.

"James Meredith and Ole Miss" by On Being is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

James Meredith was the first Black person to be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

In our history classes, pretty much every American learns about segregation in the American South and the civil rights movement it spawned, but much of that education is lacking in detail. When we teach the history of racial segregation broadly and dispassionately, as if it were merely a thing that existed and then ended, we underplay the unbridled, unapologetic white supremacy that lay at the heart of that history. It's uncomfortable to look our nation's ongoing relationship with racism square in the face, but we can't repair wounds we don't acknowledge.

To understand the absolutely bonkers levels of racism that enabled and perpetuated racial segregation, it's helpful to look at the details of specific historical events. If we dive into individual stories, such as the experiences of Ruby Bridges, Claudette Colvin, Elizabeth Eckford, Medgar Evers and many others, the truth of how racism has repeatedly cut America to its core becomes clear.

On September 30, 1962, a Black Air Force veteran named James Meredith did something seemingly unremarkable—he showed up to register for classes and move into his dorm at the University of Mississippi, where he had been admitted three weeks prior.

It actually was remarkable, though. No Black person had ever attended "Ole Miss" before and Meredith's admission was viewed as a travesty by the white supremacists in power. State officials, including Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who declared "I'm a Mississippi segregationist and I am proud of it," did everything they could to prevent it. The court battle began in 1961 and went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before Meredith's admission to the school was finalized on September 10, 1962.

Meredith showed up on campus on September 30 escorted by federal marshals for his own safety. Sadly, that wasn't enough to quell the racist rage that necessitated the escort in the first place. Hundreds of angry white students and locals marched toward the building where Meredith was to register.

Federal marshals deployed tear gas as the mob erupted into violence, throwing rocks and bottles before bringing out the guns as night fell. As the mob grew in size, so did the chaos. Reporters covering the riot were beaten and their equipment was burned. A French journalist was shot and killed, and a bystander who had come to campus to see what was happening was murdered as well.

The federal government sent thousands of army soldiers to campus in the middle of the night to quash the rioting, which went on until the early hours of the morning. Ultimately, 30,000 troops were called upon to quell the violence that left two dead and at least 300 wounded.

United Press International reported the day after the riot: "More violence was unleashed in less than four hours than in the six-month period when U.S. paratroopers forced integration of Central High School in Little Rock five years ago."

To make matters worse, the racist mob immediately tried to blame Meredith for the violence. As three deputy marshals and a representative from the U.S. Department of Education walked Meredith to his first history class the following day, white protesters shouted the N-word at him repeatedly and asked him, "Was it worth two deaths?"

Imagine the rage and frustration Meredith must have felt at such a series of injustices. One of the most striking things about these kinds of stories is the contrast between the rage being acted out by white supremacists (who had no legitimate reason to be violently angry) and the rage Black people were 100% justified in feeling but weren't allowed to express.

The fact that these people were willing to burn down the school that they supposedly cared so much about, simply because one Black person dared to set foot on campus as an admitted student, is a testament to how deeply white supremacy can be ingrained. We've seen such insanely illogical events play out over and over again in our history. While we've made many forward strides in the past 60 years, the racist beliefs that led to those events are still around and far too easy to fuel and inflame.

Yet, 1962 simply wasn't that long ago. James Meredith is still alive, and chances are good that some of the students who lost their minds over his admission to their university are still kicking, too. Have they changed? Have they done the hard work of rooting out that racism from their minds and hearts? Did they teach their own children differently? Do their grandchildren know the part they played in our collective history?

The more acquainted we are with our past, the more equipped we are to create a better future. As hard as it is to read these stories, they are vital for us to learn about so that we don't repeat the same heinous history over and over again.

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Democracy

People are sharing the things America does best. Here are 17 things they're totally right about.

National Parks? Yep.

via Pexels

Someone throwing up a heart around Old Glory.

If you watch the news all day, you’ll probably think that America is a politically divided, dangerous, bigoted, contentious, depressing place that’s slowly losing its grip on being a world power. That’s because there are very few media outlets that can stay in business reporting good news. (Unless they’re Upworthy, of course.)

Humans have a negativity bias, so they are much more interested in hearing about the world’s problems than what’s going well. That makes it easy for them to develop a warped view of their country and the world that is much more negative than it should be.

Thousands of people on Reddit came together to make people feel a lot better about being an American recently after a user named KyleB2131 asked, “What does America do better than most other countries?” The post received thousands of responses from Americans and people abroad about the things that truly make the country great.

=

A lot of the responses are about how America excels in innovation and has wonderful topography highlighted by a fantastic system of national parks. Americans are also incredibly creative and make the best entertainment in the world.

“This may be one of my favorite Reddit threads of all time,” a Reddit user named BigPlainV wrote. “Being tuned in to American mass media makes me feel like I live in the most fucked up armpit of the world. This thread has single handedly made me proud to be an American again.”

“The American mass media, I believe, is our biggest downfall,” circ2day added. “Because bad news makes more money than good news, that's all we get. Everything is aggressively sensationalized for the sake of getting views. This makes America look incredibly bad to outsiders.”

Here are 17 of the best responses to the question, “What does America do better than most other countries?”

1. 

"Turning corn into things that are not corn." — rlemon

2. 

"I was going to say cornbread but everyone said rest stops. Have y’all ever had cornbread?" — Admirable-Ad-2554

3. 

"I love the Interstate Rest Areas on road trips. I'm a Canadian from the west coast, and was always VERY impressed with the 24/7 rest areas. Clean washrooms, nice grassy areas for dogs, picnic tables, and a lot of times people selling crafts, or offering free coffee!

"I've only driven through the western states, (WA,OR,CA,NV,UT,AZ) but yeah, those rest areas were always reliable. Always well-marked signs when the next one was coming up. Just made everything about traveling easier! Thanks, neighbors!" — Ubba-Ga

4. 

"Jazz." — PuzzleheadReveal58

5. 

"National Parks." — Big-Win6220

SmellLikeSheepSpirit added:

"Absolutely. People complain about crowds at the national parks, but this is somewhat by design. As you mention the American national parks are very accessible, they have handicapped trails. They have large educational visitor stations. They have viewpoints on the roads. They're meant to "market" the outdoors to the masses. They're a "park" much like an urban park is. Most have truly amazing drives that give a great sampling of what they offer.

"They also have amazing landscapes that see much less usage only a few miles out. People miss the point that they work for both the layperson/day visitor AND the person who will spend 5 days in a roadless wilderness. And of course there are wilderness designations for that reason."

6. 

"Make sure there's ice in your beverage." -- HegemoniHarbinger

DJ33 added:

"I asked where the ice machine was in a hotel in Dublin and the woman at the desk thought I was damaged in the head. She'd clearly never, ever had anyone ask that before."

7. 

"Buffets. No buffet I’ve had can beat the one’s I had in the states." — sueRiot

8. 

"Music — The United States is the birthplace of Blues, Jazz, Rock and Roll, Hip Hop, Punk, Bluegrass, Country-Western, Rap, and a half a dozen different forms of regional folk music. Nearly every culture in the world imitates our musical forms." — Mike the Bard

9. 

"While we have a LONG way to go, the USA is comparatively better than a lot of places regarding supporting people with disabilities." — Kittenesque02

10. 

"The ability of the American farmer to produce food. It is really staggering the amount of food that is grown here." — fat-dum-stoopid

11. 

"Women's sports are really well supported here - so are female athletes. Despite many things Americans might say about it - if you go to other countries female athletics is really almost non-existent." — Juls7243

12. 

"America wins EVERY Super Bowl!" — Leyline

13. 

"Air conditioners everywhere and free public restrooms. You have to pay to use the restrooms in Europe." — SnooDoughnuts231

14. 

"Business. Hands down. It’s their biggest advantage in my opinion. Deals with Americans just get done easier. Compared to other countries American businesses are more open-minded to new things, don’t try to fuck you over, want a win for both sides, want simpler agreements, negotiate fairly, hold up their end of the bargain, etc.

"If you have even done business internationally you really see what a strong advantage it is. Other countries everyone is fucking everyone over, or are close-minded, slow as snails, and obsessed with bureaucracy. Commerce just flows better there." — Stopinstinker

15. 


"Think big and be bold. I am originally from Europe where people often just think small." — throwaway32132190432

16.

"Serious answer? Logistics. We're quite a large country and we've gotten very good at moving things around." — weirdoldhobo1978

17. 

"Chatting, I’m from an Asian country where most people will avoid talking to stranger. But you can literally talk to anyone you met in the street in the US and most of them are willing to talk." — _formosa_

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