The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice (LFJ) program is relaunching the Teaching Hard History podcast series — with host Hasan Kwame Jeffries — to resist current efforts aimed at altering our nation’s history.
So, just what is hard history? In the short TEDx video “Confronting Hard History,” Jeffries explains:
“[American slavery is] hard history because it’s difficult to imagine the kind of inhumanity that leads one to enslave children to make bricks for your comfort and convenience. It’s hard history because it’s hard to talk about the violence of slavery — the beatings, the whippings, the kidnappings, the forced family separations. It’s hard history because it’s hard to teach white supremacy, which is the ideology that justified slavery.
“If we don’t remember the past, we will continue it,” said Jeffries, a professor of history at The Ohio State University who is also the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt.
He encourages his listeners to “disrupt the continuum of hard history.”
Teaching Hard History originally streamed from 2018 to 2022. It begins with the legacy of slavery and continues through Black Americans’ experiences during the Jim Crow era and the victories of — and violent responses to— the Civil Rights Movement, while offering context for the issues we face today.
The podcast connects to Learning for Justice’s Teaching Hard History: American Slavery and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement frameworks and the Learning From the Civil Rights Movement series of resources. Each week, an episode from the original series will be highlighted with a new resource page that includes essential ideas and teaching recommendations from the conversation along with updated resources.
The first two episodes in Season 1: American Slavery kick off the podcast, featuring critical conversations with Salem State University history professor Bethany Jay on slavery and the Civil War. Episode 1 analyzes the complex role slavery played in causing the war and outlines ways to teach this history and clarify our understanding of the Confederacy. Episode 2 examines how the actions of free and enslaved African Americans shaped the progress of the war and contributed to emancipation.
This is American history that we all need to know and that should be taught in schools and in communities.
Jeffries connects past and present, reminding us of history’s relevance.
“We can’t have a productive conversation about removing Confederate statues if we don’t acknowledge what the Confederacy was about,” Jeffries said in Episode 2 of the podcast. “Similarly, if we don’t acknowledge the massive impact that slavery and the enslaved had on our past, we can’t see the impact that their legacies have had on our present. And maybe the first step towards righting the wrongs of today is getting the history right.”
Illustration by Noa Den