'Write the Truth'

Fifth graders research how many U.S. presidents owned slaves — and demand that their history textbooks address this and other issues of racism.

By Bob Peterson

During a lesson about George Washington and the American Revolution I explained to my fifth-graders that Washington owned 317 slaves. One student added that Thomas Jefferson also was a slave owner. And then, in part to be funny and in part expressing anger over vote fraud involving African Americans and the U.S. Supreme Court's delivery of the presidency to George W. Bush, one of my students shouted, "Bush is a slave owner, too!"

"No, Bush doesn't own slaves," I calmly explained. "Slavery was finally ended in this country in 1865." Short exchanges such as this often pass quickly and we move onto another topic. But then one student asked, "Well, which presidents were slave owners?"

She had me stumped. "That's a good question," I said. "I don't know."

Thus began a combined social studies, math, and language arts project in which I learned along with my students, and which culminated in a fascinating exchange between my students and the publishers of their U.S. history textbook.

After I admitted that I had no clue exactly which presidents owned slaves, I threw the challenge back to the students. "How can we find out?" I asked.

"Look in a history book," said one. "Check the Internet," added another.

I realized that I had entered one of those "teachable moments," when students show genuine interest in exploring a particular topic. Yet I had few materials about presidents and slaves, and no immediate idea of how to engage 25 students on the subject. I played for time.

First, I had a student write down the question - "Which presidents were slave owners?" - in our class notebook, "Questions We Have." I then suggested that a few students form an "action research group," which, in my classroom, means an ad hoc group of interested students researching a topic and then doing something with what they learn. I asked for volunteers willing to work during recess. Several boys raised their hands, surprising me because I would have guessed that some of them would have much preferred going outside to staying indoors researching.

ACTION RESEARCH BY STUDENTS

At recess time, Raul and Edwin were immediately in my face. "When are we going to start the action research on the slave presidents?" they demanded. I told them to look in the back of our school dictionaries for a list of U.S. Presidents while I got out some large construction paper.

The dictionaries, like our social studies text, have little pictures of each president with some basic information. "Why doesn't it show Clinton?" Edwin commented. "He's been president forever."

I think, yeah, Clinton's been president four-fifths of this 10-year-old's life. But I kept that thought to myself and instead replied, "The book is old."

"Why don't they just tell whether they have slaves here in this list of presidents?" asked Edwin. "They tell other things about presidents."

"Good question," I said. "Why do you think they don't tell?"

"I don't know, probably because they don't know themselves."

"Maybe so," I responded. "Here's what I'd like you to do. Since slavery was abolished when Lincoln was president, and since he was the 16th president, draw 16 lines equal distance from each other and list all the presidents from Washington to Lincoln and then a yes and no column so we can check off whether they owned slaves."

I was soon to find out that filling in those columns was easier said than done.

In the next several days the students, with my help, looked at various sources. We checked our school's children's books about presidents, our social studies textbook, a 1975 World Book Encyclopedia, and a CD encyclopedia. We found nothing about presidents as slave owners.

I had a hunch about which presidents owned slaves, based on what I knew in general about the presidents, but I wanted "proof" before we put a check in the "yes" box. And though my students wanted to add a third column - explaining how many slaves each slaveowning president had - that proved impossible. Even when we did find information about which presidents owned slaves, the numbers changed depending on how many slaves had been bought, sold, born, or died.

In our research, most of the information dealt with presidential attitudes and policies toward slavery. It was difficult to find specific information on which presidents owned slaves. To help the investigation, I checked out a few books for them from our local university library.

Overall, our best resource was the Internet (see article, page 12, on how we did our research and some of the most valuable resources.). The best sites required adult help to find and evaluate, and I became so engrossed in the project that I spent a considerable amount of time at home surfing the web. The "student-friendly" websites with information about presidents - such as the White House's gallery of presidents (www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents) - don't mention that either Washington or Jefferson enslaved African Americans. Other popular sites with the same glaring lack of information are the Smithsonian Institute (http://educate.si.edu/president) and the National Museum of American History (http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/presidency).

As we did the research, I regularly asked, "Why do you think this doesn't mention that the President owned slaves?" Students' responses varied including "They're stupid," "They don't want us kids to know the truth," "They think we're too young to know," and "They don't know themselves." (Given more time, we might have explored this matter further, looking at who produces textbooks and why they might not include information about presidents' attitudes about racism and slavery, whether or not the presidents personally enslaved African Americans.)

During our research, we found bits and pieces of information about presidents and slavery. We never found that one magic resource, be it book or website, that had the information readily available. But ultimately, we came up with credible data.

I'm a history buff, and had thought I was on top of the question of presidents and slavery. I was quite amazed, and didn't hide my amazement from our action research team, when they discovered that two presidents who served after Lincoln - Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant - had been slave owners. While the students taped an extension on their chart, I explained that I was not totally surprised about Johnson because he had been a Southerner. But it was a shock that Grant had owned slaves. "He was the commander of the Union army in the Civil War," I explained. "When I first learned about the Civil War in elementary school, Grant and Lincoln were portrayed as saviors of the Union and freers of slaves."

When I told the entire class how Grant's slave-owning past had surprised me, Tanya, an African-American student, raised her hand and said, "That's nothing. Lincoln was a slaveowner, too."

I asked for her source of information and she said she had heard that Lincoln didn't like Blacks. I thanked her for raising the point, and told the class that while it was commonly accepted by historians that Lincoln was not a slaveowner, his attitudes towards Blacks and slavery were a source of much debate. I noted that just because a President didn't own slaves didn't mean that they supported freedom for slaves or equal treatment of people of different races.

I went into a bit of detail on Lincoln, in part to counter the all-too-common simplification that Lincoln unequivocally opposed slavery and support freedom for Blacks. I explained that while it's commonly believed that Lincoln freed enslaved Americans when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the document actually frees slaves only in states and regions under rebellion - it did not free slaves in any of the slaveholding states and regions that remained in the Union. In other words, Lincoln "freed" slaves everywhere he had no authority and withheld freedom everywhere he did. Earlier, in Lincoln's first Inaugural address in March of 1861, he promised slaveholders that he would support a Constitutional amendment forever protecting slavery in the states where it then existed - if only those states would remain in the Union.

SLAVE-OWNING PRESIDENTS

By the time we had finished our research, the students found that 10 of the first 18 presidents were slave owners. Those who owned slaves: George Washington; Thomas Jefferson; James Madison; James Monroe; Andrew Jackson; John Tyler; James K. Polk; Zachary Taylor; Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. Those that didn't: John Adams; John Quincy Adams; Martin Van Buren; William Harrison; Millard Fillmore; Franklin Pierce; James Buchanan; and Abraham Lincoln.

The student researchers were excited to present their findings to their classmates, and decided to do so as part of a math class. I made blank charts for each student in the class, and they filled in information provided by the action research team: the names of presidents, the dates of their years in office, the total number of years in office, and whether they had slaves. Our chart started with George Washington who assumed office in 1789 and ended in 1877 when the last president who had owned slaves, Ulysses Grant, left office.

We then used the data to discuss this topic of presidents and slave owning within the structure of on-going math topics in my class: "what do the data tell us," and "how can construct new knowledge with the data."

Students, for example, added up the total number of years in which the United States had a slave-owning president in office, and compared it to the years in which there were non-slaveowning presidents in office. We figured out that in 69 percent of the years between 1789 and 1877, the United State had a president who had been a slave-owner.

One student observed that only slaveowning presidents served more than one term. "Why didn't they let presidents who didn't own slaves serve two terms?" another student pondered.

Using the data, the students made bar graphs and circle graphs to display the information. When they wrote written reflections on the math lesson, they connected math to content. One boy wrote, "I learned to convert fractions to percent so I know that 10/18 is the same as 55.5 percent. That's how many of the first 18 presidents owned slaves." Another girl observed, "I learned how to make pie charts and that so many more presidents owned slaves than the Presidents who didn't own slaves."

During a subsequent social studies lesson, the three students who had done most of the research explained their frustrations in getting information. "They hardly ever want to mention it [slaves owned by presidents]," explained one student. "We had to search and search."

Specific objectives for this mini-unit, such as reviewing the use of percent, emerged as the lessons themselves unfolded. But its main purpose was to help students to critically examine the actions of early leaders of the United States and to become skeptical of textbooks and government websites as sources that present the entire picture. I figure that if kids start questioning the "official story" early on, they will be more open to alternative viewpoints later. While discovering which presidents were slave-owners is not an indepth analysis, it pokes an important hole in the god-like mystique that surrounds the "founding fathers." If students learn how to be critical of the icons of American past, hopefully it will give them permission and tools to be critical of the elites of America today.

To help develop a healthy skepticism of official sources of information, I displayed two quotations about Thomas Jefferson - one from James Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me, and another from a fifth grade text, United States: Adventures in Time and Place (McGraw Hill, 1998). (See the box on page 10). The quotations differ pointedly about Jefferson's slave-holding practices and attitudes.

The student researchers said that widely varying information was a big problem when they were doing their research. They were particularly critical of the new history textbook, United States (Harcourt Brace, 2000) that had been delivered to our classroom that year as part of the district- wide social studies adoption. One student suggested we throw the books away, but I quickly pointed out they were expensive and that we could learn from them, even if they had problems and omissions.

I then explained what an omission was and suggested that we become "textbook detectives" and investigate what our new social studies text said about Jefferson and slavery. I reviewed how to use an index and divided all page references for Jefferson among small groups of students. The groups read the pages, noted any references to Jefferson owning slaves, and then reported back to the class. Not one group found a single reference.

Not surprisingly, the students were angry when they realized how the text omitted such important information. "They should tell the truth!" one student fumed.

NO MENTION OF RACISM

I wanted students to see that the textbook's omissions were not an anomaly, but part of a pattern of ignoring racism in America - in the past and in the present.

In the next lesson, I started by writing the word "racism" on the board. I asked the kids to look up "racism" in the index of their social studies book. Nothing. "Racial discrimination." Nothing.

"Our school should get a different book," one student suggested. "Good idea," I said, "but it's not so easy." I told my students that I had served on a committee that had looked at the major textbooks published for fifth graders and that none of them had dealt with racism or slavery and presidents.

Students had a variety of responses: "Let's throw them out." "Let's use the Internet." "Write a letter to the people who did the books." I focused in on the letter-writing suggestion and reminded them that before we did so, we had to be certain that our criticisms were correct. The students then agreed that in small groups they would use the textbook's index and read what was said about all the first 18 presidents, just as we had done previously with Jefferson.

None of the groups found any mention of a president owning a slave.

LETTERS AS CRITIQUE AND ACTION

In subsequent days, some students wrote letters to the textbook publisher. Michelle, a white girl, was particularly detailed (see full text, page 11). She complained that the word "racism" was never mentioned in the book and said, "If you want to teach children the truth, then you should write the truth." (Michelle's letter and some of the student- made charts were also printed in our school newspaper.)

Harcourt School Publishers Vice- president Donald Lankiewicz responded to Michelle at length. He wrote that "while the word 'racism' does not appear, the subject of unfair treatment of people because of their race is addressed on page 467." He also argued, "There are many facts about the presidents that are not included in the text simply because we do not have room for them all" (see full text, page 12).

Michelle wrote back to Lankiewicz, thanking him but expressing disappointment. "In a history book you shouldn't have to wait till page 467 to learn about unfair treatment," she wrote. As to his claim that there wasn't room for all the facts about the presidents, Michelle responded, "Adding more pages is good for the kids because they should know the right things from the wrong. It is not like you are limited to certain amount of pages... All I ask you is that you write the word "racism" in the book and add some more pages in the book so you can put most of the truth about the Presidents."

By the time the year ended, Michelle had not received a reply from Lankiewicz.

IMPROVING THE LESSON

Michelle and the other students left fifth grade soon after the letter exchange. In the flurry of end-of-year activities, I didn't take as much time to process the project as I might have. Nor did I adequately explore with students the fact that most non-slave owning Presidents exhibited pro-slavery attitudes and promoted pro-slavery policies. In retrospect, I also wish we had had taken more time to investigate "why" textbook publishers consistently fail to address issues of racism. Granted, this is an extremely complicated question that doesn't have a single easy answer. But whatever the answers, it's essential to encourage students to try to find explanations for injustices they uncover - whether in their textbooks, their daily lives, or in society at large.

At the same time, I believe my students learned a lot from their research on presidents and slaves - and clearly know more than most Americans about which of the first 18 Presidents owned slaves. I'm also hopeful they learned the importance of looking critically at all sources of information.

I know one student, Tanya, did. On the last day of school she came up to me and amid the congratulatory good-byes and said, "I still think Lincoln owned slaves."

"You are a smart girl but you are wrong about that one," I responded.

"We'll, see," she said, "You didn't know Grant had slaves when the school year started! Why should I always believe what my teachers says?"

Bob Peterson (repmilw@aol.com) is an editor of Rethinking Schools and teaches 5th grade at La Escuela Fratney. Some of the students' names have been changed. PDFs of some of the handouts used in this lesson are available at www.rethinkingschools.org.

Summer 2002