Thanks to new scholarship, we know much more about how Carter G. Woodson created the first “Negro history” curriculum and how this fit into a long tradition of fugitive pedagogy that helped Black teachers realize the emancipatory potential of public education. But until now, we’ve known very little in terms of how, when, and why Black teachers, especially women, played a crucial role in this process. In A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools, Michael Hines offers an intimate educational biography of one Black teacher’s remarkable efforts to implement a Black history curriculum in wartime Chicago. He argues that Black teachers like Madeline Morgan played a central role in bringing Black history to US schools, including majority-White ones, and that to date historians have largely missed the significance of Black women as architects of the alternative Black curriculum.
It was not uncommon for Black teachers to teach “Negro history” in the 1940s, nor was it unusual for teachers to teach racial and ethnic tolerance during World War II. What is extraordinary about this story was the scale and influence of Morgan’s work, which extended far beyond the Chicago public schools. Morgan accomplished what prominent academics like Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois could not: she translated Black history into appealing texts for K-12 educators and then persuaded White school leaders to adopt the curriculum. Hines seeks to uncover how Black teachers like Morgan came to play such an important role in building the early Black history movement, and what this tells us about contemporary struggles over teaching Black history.
Morgan published the Supplementary Units for the Course of Instruction in the Social Studies in 1942, a time when educators nationwide were looking to soothe racial tensions and shore up the Allied war effort. Morgan’s curriculum received an especially warm welcome by educators who interpreted Black history as a relevant form of wartime tolerance education. This interest convergence, Hines maintains, created a context where first the White administrators of the Chicago public schools and then a much larger audience of Americans took a tremendous interest in Morgan’s work. As newspapers and magazines published detailed accounts of Morgan’s Black history curriculum, letters poured in from hundreds of Black and White students, teachers, and servicemen detailing how these materials changed their conception of American race relations and US history.
Hines’s research shows that Morgan’s dedication to Black history was shaped by her experiences growing up in the intellectual milieu of Chicago’s Black South Side, where Black social organizations including the sorority Phi Delta Kappa, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and the George Cleveland Library fueled her intellectual curiosity and sense of civic duty. Her college years took her into predominantly White spaces including Northwestern University, where Morgan learned to navigate the perilous gap between what White progressives preached and what they practiced. These different strands of her upbringing and education forged Morgan’s unique perspective on progressive pedagogy and schools as sites of powerful social change. She believed the traditional curriculum was heavily implicated in the maintenance of racial prejudice and social injustice, and that the “study of the Negro, accorded its rightful place in American history, will teach both sides to respect and appreciate racial diversity” (p. 25).
Hines finds that Morgan wrote the Supplementary Units through the support of her Phi Delta Kappa sorors, Black teachers in Chicago, scholars of Black history and culture, and publications from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Morgan requested a meeting with Superintendent William H. Johnson in the early spring of 1941, where she presented a meticulously organized case for developing a new curriculum on Black history. Impressed, Superintendent Johnson granted Morgan leave from her teaching duties and assigned her a full-time assistant. Morgan and fellow teacher Bessie S. King spent the next few months poring over resources in local libraries and talking to Black teachers and school administrators about how to design a curriculum that teachers would find useful.
In just over a year, Morgan and King published the Supplementary Units, 127 pages of biographies, poems, stories, nonfiction passages, prompts for discussion, and suggested activities on African American life and history. The authors intended the text to serve as a “pedagogical counter narrative” that challenged negative stereotypes and emphasized the achievements and accomplishments of African Americans (p. 52). The Supplementary Units highlighted the importance of Africa to world history and discussed slavery as a system of violence and oppression, as well as covering Black military service and local Black history in Chicago. Hines offers a critical interpretation of the curriculum, concluding it was “without question part of the broader tradition of the alternative Black curriculum” (p. 79).
For the next three years, Morgan and King traveled the country, accepting awards and accolades for their important work and bringing the Supplementary Units to new school districts along the way, including some in the South. Hines uncovers a wealth of archival sources on the curriculum’s implementation, which gives him the opportunity to analyze how White and Black students responded in different ways. For example, Grace Markwell’s social studies students in lily-White, suburban Brookfield, Illinois, listened to their teacher read passages aloud with rapt attention and then queried, “Are there really Negro teachers? What are they like?” (p. 112). In other schools, Black students encountered the Supplementary Units and wrote about how it fueled their sense of racial pride and hope for a better future. As one student elaborated, “Since I have studied Negro history every good word about Negroes and also good thing they do make me feel swell” (p. 116). Another added, “I feel great when I hear how our Negro men and women help put us out of [slavery] and build this great nation” (p. 117).
Unfortunately, the political context that fueled the success of Morgan and King’s new Black history curriculum also spelled its demise, and when the war ended in 1945 support quickly faded, especially in predominantly White schools. White people had less interest in Black history as a form of tolerance education after the war ended, and what is more, they became wary of the political implications of teaching about racial equality in the emerging Cold War, where any mention of racial injustice could lead to trumped up charges of communism.
Hines concludes by emphasizing that Black teachers like Morgan have independently crafted counternarratives to the dominant curriculum in ways that have revolutionized history education in the US, adding, “Many Black educators continue to do the same today” (p. 156). Hines thus makes a critical intervention in the historical scholarship on Black history by highlighting the transformative, but often less visible, pedagogical and curricular innovations of Black teachers.
Hines ends on an optimistic note, observing that a new generation of anti-racist writers, educators, and organizations like the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Zinn Education Project are working to center Black history and help students name and challenge systems of oppression. Since the publication of Hines’s book, however, conservatives have successfully mobilized White voters with sensational attacks on these curricular reforms. The fight for African American history that Madeline Morgan helped establish in the 1940s continues, but the dilemma of how to persuade White Americans to see the value of a more inclusive, deliberately anti-racist curriculum remains unresolved.
