Is learnt it from the opening of the Watchmen tv show, and then asked my black M.I.L. about it. It was crazy that it was real event, and even crazier that they don’t want to mention race when it was literally called “black wall street”.
I paused the show to explain to my kids that it was a real event, then realized that they might have never learned about it unless it was for Watchmen. (We later saw the history galleries in the Smithsonian African American Culture Museum in DC and they had a section on it, but otherwise you have to seek out the info on your own.) I’m having my kids read The People’s History of the United States because I’m not sure they will be getting any of that in US schools.
I’m not from the US so I had an extra disadvantage but it’s disgraceful that it’s not taught in school.
And yet the 200 year old Alamo propaganda is taught twice, probably more in Texas, full page spread to us making 70,000 purple hearts before we nuked Japan.
Then missing the point of Upton Sinclairs “The Jungle” the same way people did at its release.
Nice little blurb about the child version of Hellen Keller that never acknowledges her lifelong devotion to unionization and worker safety.
Maybe a sentence or two about Blair mountain, no mention of John Brown at all except maybe a pop out 2 sentences about the date of Harper’s ferry.
Infact lots of dates, almost no reasoning or abstraction, discussion of class, gender, race, or national relations (though maybe a side paragraph about the Irish during their genocide which would be called a famine to avoid upsetting engerlend, or the Germans during WW2), nary a mention of our intelligence agency coups in south America or the middle east, much less the barbaric tactics employed.
