Laura:
So, I was a part of the Kelly Program which is an honors program in the history department at Davidson and it's a year-long program. You get to ahve an individual research project that you then ultimately write a full-length senior thesis (for). I again with my interest in North Carolina and interest in southern history and also historical memory which is kind of the way people learn history and how the past is remembered and the politics and things that shaped that. I wrote on the history of history teaching in North Carolina. So looking at how historical teaching in North Carolina's public schools changes over time, what did those textbooks look like, what did those bodies look like that were making those decisions, things like that. Then (1:00) the second part of it was the history of home-based education in the black community. So, to summarize a very long paper when the public schools were failing to...John Hope Franklin, he's a very amazing historian. He led a lot of this, I call it, "history activism" being activist around both what he called "the sin of omission and commission" so the ways that things were left out but also the way things were mistold or whitewashed in the history books. So the ways the institution of slavery were completely left out of the history books or told very incorrectly. That's just one example.
There's kind of this...Basically, the sin of omission and commission the ways that black parents and black communities responded to those textbooks (2:00) by centering the home as a space for history learning for their children. I looked at a ton of different things particularly in the sixties and seventies there's this explosion of history magazines, comic books, children's magazines, books, all of these different things that parents and children would use in order to learn history outside of those books that were co-opting the narrative or telling the narrative incorrectly. I think. So I think this idea of if the system's not working or if...Yea, if the system's not working the way I want it to or the way that it needs to be done for my children or for my community, we're gonna find a different way. And that's not to say that the system shouldn't change but I think it was a really beautiful (3:00) story of self-determination and resistance the way parents really rejected the way the schools were teaching history to their children and the types of history that their children were having access too in these systems and so saying "Alright, if you're not going to do what we need you to do, we're going to circumvent you and we're going to bring history to our home."
It changed a lot over time, obviously, the way but I argue that this served as a form of homeschooling even before homeschooling was necessarily legal in North Carolina as an alternative to public schooling. Because so many parents who are homeschooling their kids now, these are black parents homeschooling their kids now, are doing so for similar reasons. Issues with the curriculum, racism within the curriculum, that they see, that they don't see fit for their children. They pull their kids and they teach their children at home. (4:00) So, I think, I argue that what is happening in the sixties and seventies even before it was legal is a root to the phenomena that's happening today.