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Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
-Chinua Achebe, "The Art of Fiction," 1994
The African proverb, "Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter," is used to metaphorically describe how dominant groups inscribe power through historical narrative. The foundation of historical writing is a legacy that promoted European and Western ethnocentrism, which created a racial apparatus that elevated the humanistic global characteristics of Whiteness while perpetrating the subpersonhood status that demeaned the humanity of Black people (Mills, 1998).
Central to this approach of racial subjugation were K-12 social studies textbooks written by White historians and educators who used history as a means to explore ideas of U.S. citizenship. It was common in these textbooks to underscore Black persons as inferior and second-class citizens. Early social studies textbooks emphasized that the "Black skin was a curse" (Woodson, 1933 p. 3) through narratives that purported that Black people were naturally "barbarians," "destitute of intelligence," or " having little humanity" (Brown, 2010; Elson, 1964; Foster, 1999).The racializations of Blackness were used as justifications for the paternalistic attitudes White citizens had towards African Americans.
In response to these racist depictions, the multicultural education movement was created to attempt to correct the textual and visual representations about the race. Between the years 1890 to 1940, AfricanAmerican educators continued a long trajectory of repudiating racist conceptions of Blackness "so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail-the bravery, even, of the lions" (Achebe, 1994).
To be clear, the work of African-American educators' textbooks were not simply neutral or independent projects at expanding African-American historic representation, but were also connected to a larger purpose that attempted to alter the racial meanings associated with Blackness. The efforts of these African-American educators were the foundation of multicultural education-they became the lions that spoke for the people whose voices were silenced.
In this article I discuss how AfricanAmerican educators between the years of 1890-1940 conceptualized citizenship education through Black history textbooks. Much of the literature about turn-of-the20th century social studies textbooks typically described the lack of diversity or racist conceptualization of Blackness (Elson, 1964; Dubois, 1999/1935; King, Davis, & Brown, 2012; Nash, Crabtree, &...