Title: Teaching History in This Fraught Time

[MUSIC]

Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, sitting in for Brian this week. This week, the Tenement Museum is hosting a group of teachers from across the country for a workshop and how to teach Black and immigrant history now when American history is disputed territory.

To hear more about their approach to history and what they're hearing from the teachers, we're joined by Annie Polland, historian and president of the Tenement Museum, and by poet and author, Clint Smith, who's leading one of the sessions. You may know his book, How the Word Is Passed: Remembering Slavery and How It Shaped America. A new edition for young readers comes out this fall. Welcome back to the show, Annie and Clint.

Annie Polland: Thank you. Good morning.

Clint Smith: Thank you.

Brigid Bergin: Annie, maybe you can start by telling listeners who might not have visited the Tenement Museum about its really unique way of opening the door to ordinary New Yorkers' lives throughout history.

Annie Polland: Yes, so we're a really unique place and a really special place, and we are a tenement, actually two tenements on Orchard Street in New York on the Lower East Side, and what we've done over the years and the Museum was founded in 1988, and what we've done is research the stories of people who lived in those tenements, and there's one exception. There's a story of a family that lived, actually, a few blocks away from where we are, but also in tenements.

To be able to tell the stories of immigrants, migrants, and refugees, how they came to the City, how they created homes, we teach that history through educator-led tours. Educators lead people through these spaces, talking about the history of those specific families, but also through, through that, immersing people in the issues of the times that they lived in. Our earliest family lived in the building in the 1860s.

Our building, 97 Orchard, was built in 1863, right in the middle of the Civil War, and through our second building, we're able to tell stories into the 20th century. The most recent story is a story of a Chinese family that lived there in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, alongside a Puerto Rican family that lived there also in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. We have this century-long timeline of immigration, migration, and refugee history that spans all of these different cultures, and what they have in common is that they all started their lives in New York in tenement apartments that people can stand in.

Brigid Bergin: It is a fascinating place. I am a big fan of the Tenement Museum, and I most recently saw that exhibit you were just talking about of the Chinese family. It's really cool. You can kind of feel it in your bones when you're in there, this sense that you're in a place that has history and has time, and because of how immersive the experience is, what life may have been like for them there. Clint, the Museum's approach seems really very much in keeping with the one you take in How the Word Is Passed, where you visit monuments and memorials where America's history of enslavement is very much present. Is that part of why you're leading one of these sessions?

Clint Smith: Yes. I actually had the opportunity to visit the Tenement Museum yesterday, and Annie gave me a tour. It really is a remarkable place. I think it so beautifully and powerfully exemplifies the power of social history, which is to say history that is lifting up the stories of ordinary people. So often when we think about the history that we're taught in school, we are taught about this famous person or this well-known person or this president or this military leader, and it's not to say that those aren't important, but part of what we can glean more fully about the past and get a deeper understanding of is when we look at it through the lens of ordinary people's experience, because the vast majority of us are ordinary people.

We are ordinary people who live ordinary lives and make the most of our lives with our family and loved ones in the best way we know how, and when we the Tenement Museum and this opportunity to step back into the past and to literally, as we've talked about, physically put your body in the place where history happened, and when you're there, you feel that energy. It's almost a sort of, there's something spiritual about it. You feel the sort of essence of that history around you in a different way, and it makes you proximate to that history in a way that strips it of abstraction and makes it real.

Brigid Bergin: Well, listeners, especially teachers, history teachers, I know it's summer break, but we would love to hear from you about how you're tackling American history these days. Certainly, the struggle over whose stories get told and how is not new, but what has your experience been as a history teacher? Are you experiencing more scrutiny of your lessons? Do you have a question for my guests, author Clint Smith or Tenement Museum president, Annie Polland? Call or text us, 212-44-433 WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Annie, do you want to walk us through a bit of what the teachers, who are lucky enough to be part of this workshop, are hearing and visiting?

Annie Polland: Sure. Right now, they're actually at Ellis Island.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, wow.

Annie Polland: Thank God the weather worked out for them today, and it's not Friday. They're at Ellis Island, and then they'll be coming back, and they'll be going on a tour that tells a story of an East European Jewish family, the Rogarshevskys, that lived in the building in the 1910s, 1920s, and actually into the '30s and '40s, and an Italian American family, the Baldizzis, who lived in the building in the 1930s, and these are two families that knew each other, that had a friendship and all sorts of really fascinating ways.

They'll go on that tour, and then they'll hear from a panel of historians, including Maddalena Marinari, to speak about the Italian American experience, and Hector Cordero-Guzman, to talk about the Puerto Rican experience. This, I think, encapsulates each day. What they're doing is they're going on the relevant tours, [crosstalk] kind of going in chronological order. Exactly.

You get this Civil War-era migration with Chinese immigration and Irish immigration and German immigration, Black migration, and then a round of scholars, Mae Ngai, Leslie Harris, Kevin Kenny, and Russ Kazal. Then yesterday they heard from Clint, of course, and then tomorrow we'll go into post-1965 immigration with Nancy Foner and Margaret Chin, and in the morning, a session on Great Migration with the historian Marcy Sacks.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Annie Polland: They travel through this century-long timeline, learning about these different immigrant groups, their families, the migrant groups, their families, and also learn about the laws that shaped the experience of those who were there.

Brigid Bergin: Annie, can you tell us a little bit about "Who are the teachers that are participating in this?" I had said in the intro that they're from across the country, but are we talking primarily from urban districts, rural districts?

Annie Polland: They are from all over. We do have 8 New Yorkers, and the majority of the 45 who are here with us are from all over the United States. Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Utah, California, Iowa, Vermont, all over. I think we have 29 different states represented, and they are here because they chose this content. They wanted to come and learn about it, and I think to them, too, they wanted to meet the historians whose work they've used.

Kat Lloyd, who is leading this, our amazing VP of Interpretation and Programs, texted me from Ellis Island just to let me know that the teachers are really thinking about this opportunity to learn in community. In other words, it's not just the historians; it's not just the space; it's that they can come together as a community and learn, and that is something that Clint spoke to them yesterday about, too, how important it is in these times to be forging connections with one another.

Brigid Bergin: Clint, we mentioned that you did yesterday's workshop. Tell us a little bit more about what you were also hearing from the teachers about their struggles teaching history today, what kind of pushback they were describing when they teach history.

Clint Smith: Yes, as Annie said, they're from all over, and they are operating in a range of different political, ideological, demographic contexts. Many of them or some of them are from the South and are from very red states, where there is a specific legal and legislative push to prevent them from teaching certain subjects, and some of them are from places that are more open to it, but that come with their own challenges, and the sort of trickle-down impact of the federal government being fundamentally antagonistic to a sort of honest account of American history has an impact in even most liberal bastions.

The thing that I tell them is that America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could have simply never imagined, and it has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed, and both of those things are the story of America.

It's not this one over here or that one over there. You get to talk about this one and not talk about that one. Both of those are the story of America. There's so much for us to be proud of, and there is so much for us to be ashamed of, and we don't have to run from that, right? President Trump talks about how we need to be focused on a patriotic education, as he calls it, but for me, the most patriotic thing we can do is to talk about the fullest, most honest, most complex version of who we are.

We were talking about, yesterday in the workshop, how that's reflective of all of us as humans, right? The way that we talk about America is, in fact, the way that most of us probably talk about ourselves. We recognize that there are things in our lives that we have done that we are proud of, and things in our lives that we have done that we're not so proud of. We wake up every day, and we try to become a better version of ourselves.

That's how we think about ourselves. That's how we think about the people we love. That's how we think about the people we're in community with, and so why would we think about our country any differently? We want our country to reflect on what it has done poorly, what it continues to do poorly, so that each day we can try to hold this country accountable, to be the best version of itself. That demands that when we think about American history, you hold the good and the bad alongside one another, as well as everything in between.

Annie Polland: There's something really positive, too, about coming together as a community to do that work. In other words, all of us in our classrooms, all of us in our museums, all of us in our workplaces, we are all the inheritors of this history, of being in this land, right? We all share this together, and so to be able to use history to work through these issues is really eye-opening and also very accessible to people.

One of the things we stress a lot, just from the nature of the tour we give and how we tell that story, is that, as Clint was saying, this is accessible to you and also to look into your own families and trace your own family's history. We have this great project that we started a few years ago called Your Story, Our Story, in which students select an object or a document that tells their family's history or their story in some way, their migration story, their cultural story.

They upload that image and they write about it, and it's that act of writing and that act of research that allows them to situate themselves and their families in this larger historical arc. Now, I think we have over 17,000 stories.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Annie Polland: Our goal is for these teachers to go back to their classrooms in Arkansas, in Utah, and to do the same with those students so that we're able to see the fruits of all of this work and to understand how we can connect, and it's okay to ask questions.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. If you're just joining us, this is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, sitting in for Brian for a few days. I'm speaking with Annie Polland, historian and president of the Tenement Museum, and with Clint Smith, poet staff writer at The Atlantic and author of How the Word Is Passed: Remembering Slavery and How It Shaped America, which has a new edition for young readers coming out this fall, and we're talking about teaching American history today and a workshop for teachers at the Tenement Museum this week.

I want to go to the phones if you have a question for my guests, or you are a history teacher and you want to talk about the challenges you're facing, again, the number's 212-433-9692. You can call or text. Let's go to Kanani in Harlem.

Kanani: Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for all that you have shared. I used to be the Director of History at Harlem Children's Zone. I also do educational consulting. I got three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships studying the history of racism and slavery in America, including in Brooklyn, through the Brooklyn Historical Society.

82 different streets in Brooklyn are named after slave-holding families. The way I teach and the way I also do professional development is to lean into curiosity, creativity, and joy. Imagine what America could be if this. What if America was that? What if this part of America we could do more of in our Constitution, in some of our founding documents? What if we could revise in a way that covered more people who are drowning in injustice, in some form of justice, a life raft, whatever that vehicle is towards freedom and salvation, which again, we idolize the Martin Luther Kings of the world, but do we actually do it in practice?

A really quick example is the caller earlier who said, "We ended slavery. Racism is over." Number one, why did slavery start in the first place? Number two, ending slavery, did it also end any type of economic disadvantage, any type of educational disadvantage, healthcare access disadvantage? What is the standard in America for justice that looks like everybody else? Is it just, you end the harm, or do you also start the healing to the same extent, if not more than the harm that you cause?

Because we have not built up the muscle in America to have these conversations is why we have the political unrest that we do reflected in society, and then we have callers saying something like that and attaching their name to it in public, not thinking that anyone is going to come after them, say anything. I don't mean violently, but this is what we're talking about, right?

Brigid Bergin: Well, I want to jump in here, Kanani, because I don't want to-- That was the previous segment, which I really appreciate you listening, and definitely appreciate you calling. Call us again. I know that you're a listener, and we appreciate you. For the purposes of the conversation here, I want to bring us back to some of the really great points Kanani made, just about how she teaches history and how she has dug deep into the history in Brooklyn and how she's trying to use that and use what you could imagine as a way of looking forward.

I want to couple it with a text that we just got from a listener who said, "Love this program and wish I could go. Does the Tenement Museum have sister institutions in other parts of the country? It would be incredible to have a program that follows migration patterns from historic immigration entry points like New York City and San Francisco."

Annie Polland: Yes. Thank you. Kanani, thank you for your work and the multifaceted nature of this work, right? Understanding that the past is connected to the present is such an important dynamic. Our Union of Hope tour tells a story of Joseph Moore, who lived right in the neighborhood I'm sitting in, what used to be called the 8th Ward, what's now part of SoHo. He lived in a tenement.

He was a waiter who was not able to vote because New York State did not allow Black men without $250 worth of property to vote. We're able to trace his life and see that in 1870, when the 15th Amendment is passed, the Black community organized an amazing, amazing march and procession with banners that says, "Out of Egypt have I brought my children and impartial suffrage to all," and you can see the joy.

You can feel that joy when we share that primary source in Joseph Moore's tenement apartment and Rachel Moore's tenement apartment, and then to be able to talk to students and say-- and this is part of a program we're doing. Let's say, "What's a cause that's important to you? Democracy is a struggle. Democracy continues to unfold. What's a cause that's important to you?

How would you imagine, let's say, in 20 years, 25 years, that comes to be, your goal happens? How would you celebrate it? What would your banner be?" I think that idea of pulling people together in community to think about the past and use the struggles of the past to inspire movement for continued growth is at the heart of the work we're trying to do with these teachers, who will go back to their classrooms. To the text, thank you for asking that question.

We have a virtual version of this workshop that won't be the full workshop, but it will be elements of the workshop on August 5th and August 7th, and you can sign up for that on our website, or I can get your text and write to you and share more information with you.

Brigid Bergin: Clint, you've spoken on the show and elsewhere about how liberating knowing your history can be. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Clint Smith: Yes, I'm so glad that caller invoked the history of slavery in New York City and in Brooklyn, specifically the history of racism, because a lot of people don't think about New York as being a place where slavery existed. You think of it as so many think of it as a sort of bastion of multiculturalism, a place in the North where people were always free, but in the 19th century, New York City was the second-largest slave port in the country after Charleston, South Carolina.

The mayor of New York City, Fernando Wood, advocated for New York City to secede from the Union, alongside various states in the Confederacy, because of the financial and social entanglements that New York City had to the slavocracy and cotton industry of the South. To your point, learning those things for me is so important because it disabuses me of the false histories that I've been inundated with growing up.

I think as a kid, I was just inundated with these messages about all the things that were wrong with Black people, that the reason there was so much violence, so much crime, so much poverty in Black communities was somehow the result of something Black people had done wrong or had failed to do. When you learn about history, when you learn about the history of slavery, when you learn about the history of Jim Crow, when you learn about the history of Reconstruction, when you learn about the ways in which those histories continue to manifest themselves today, it becomes so freeing.

It becomes so liberating, because what happens is that you are able to look at the country and you are able to understand that, "Oh, the reason this community looks one way and this community looks another way is not because of the people in those communities, but is because of what has been done to those communities generation after generation after generation, or what has been extracted from those communities time and time again."

Part of what I try to write about in How the Word Is Passed in its own way, I think what the Tenement Museum makes so real is how recent this history was. The Tenement Museum is focusing on a period of time largely after enslavement, but in the context of slavery, slavery existed for 250 years in this country, and has only not existed for 160. You have an institution that existed for almost a century longer than it hasn't, an institution in which there are still people alive today who knew, who loved, who were raised by people who were born into chattel slavery.

The woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016 was the daughter of a man who was born into slavery. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved, and so this idea, the idea that anyone would suggest that this history has nothing to do with the landscape of inequality today, the idea that anyone would suggest that this history has nothing to do with the social, political, and economic infrastructure of our country today is being morally and intellectually disingenuous.

I think that recognizing our collective proximity to the past, whether it be to slavery, whether it be in the context of the Tenement Museum, is so important for young people because it helps them understand the ways in which that history continues to shape the world they live in today.

Brigid Bergin: I have another couple of questions, and we only have a couple of minutes left, but it's so interesting. Much of the Tenement Museum is rooted in these individual stories of real people who lived through these moments of history, history that we're still living through. For you both, briefly, this approach of anchoring history in first-person accounts is that avoiding some of the ideological disputes, or is it just taking them head-on? Annie, I'll have you start, and Clint, if you want to weigh in on this, too, please.

Annie Polland: Yes, I think there's a way you can view this and say, "Oh, family history. That's so cute. Oh, I get to go into an apartment and see kitchen." No, it's how we tell that story, right? How we situate people. We're learning about the Rogarshevskys, the Levines, the Moores, the Wongs, all of these families in the broader context in which they interacted, right? They were people who sent children to fight in wars.

They were people who went and boycotted for affordable kosher meat. They were people who sold the clothes that the nation wore. Every step that these ordinary people were taking was completely bound up in the larger, if you would, textbook headlines, if you think about the textbooks. What we do is we bring it all together and we make it accessible to people so that they're able to learn about history that would otherwise maybe seem boring or seem unrelated, but to make it seem real, because they're seeing it through the eyes of a real person.

Brigid Bergin: Yes. Clint, what about you? Go ahead.

Clint Smith: Yes, I would just add that again, for me, part of what I do in my work is I go to the place where history happened, whether I'm doing reporting for The Atlantic and go to Rwanda to go to the site of the genocide, whether I'm, in the context of my book, How the Word Is Passed, going to plantation sites, going to prison sites, going to cemeteries, going to these places where this history is so present.

It really gives you a proximity to the history and allows you to understand how recent it was and also how human it is, right? It takes it out of the realm of the abstract and makes it concrete, makes it human, makes it real, and I think that what it also does, and this is tied to something Annie was talking about with the oral history projects or the projects that the Tenement Museum does with students focusing on an object as part of their history.

In the epilogue of How the Word Is Passed, I speak to my grandparents, and my grandfather was born in 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, my grandmother, born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida, and I walk with them through the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. I have this moment where I'm watching them look at the exhibits in the Museum and realizing that so much of what is documented in this museum are things they experience firsthand.

My grandmother has this story that she came back with after we left the Museum, and we were talking about it, and she kept saying, "I lived it. I lived it. I lived it," and it makes me think about how powerful it'd be. We've been talking about the power of community and collectivity, like how powerful it might be for someone in New York City to go to the Tenement Museum with their parent or their grandparent or great-grandparent who has lived in that city for so long and maybe lived in a building like that, how powerful it might be, how powerful it was for me to go to this museum with my grandparents.

I went to the Whitney Plantation with my grandparents, and there's something about the bringing together of the familial, these primary-source spaces, not even just primary-source documents, but almost primary-source spaces together to help us understand our individual proximity to this history in a way that can be really transformative for our understanding of the past.

Annie Polland: That good history and complex history can bring people together.

Brigid Bergin: Clint, just briefly, I'm kind of stuck on that idea of you in this museum with your grandmother, and I'm curious. Was there anything that surprised you about how you were feeling in that moment? Anything that you didn't expect? You said it was powerful, but I feel like there's probably another word for it.

Clint Smith: It was humbling. It was also a strike. I think sometimes when we think about these oral history projects or these opportunities to talk to our elders about the past, who we can think about it purely as, like, "Oh, the person on the receiving end or the person who was asking the questions as being the beneficiary of it." What I came to learn and what my grandmother would tell you is that it was really beneficial for her.

Sometimes it was really hard for her because what she was doing, as we talked about these things, it became an entry point for us to excavate her past and her life and her childhood and for us to talk about that in a way that we simply never would have otherwise. Without that trip to the Museum together, there would have been an entire realm of her life and her interior life, her psyche, like how she thought about what it meant to walk down the streets of Florida and have the N word lobbed at her by passing students, have things thrown at her from trucks and to have to walk 3, 4, 5 miles in order to get to school.

What it does is, I think, it was an opportunity. My grandmother is so regal and so brilliant and so, so wonderful, but I also saw the shame that she carried from her childhood in a way that was so, so important because it allowed me to see her in a fuller, more complex way and allows me to understand more fully all that she has had to overcome, not only through the structural and systemic realities of the world, but also in the interior life that she has had to navigate in terms of making her way through these structural systems. I can't say enough about how powerful it is to have these experiences with your loved ones, with your family, because they open up a whole opportunity to understand one another better.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we're going to leave it on that very powerful note, and really grateful to hear about a program that is opening doors to new decades of understanding and helping people learn history going forward. My guests have been Tenement Museum President, Annie Polland, and writer Clint Smith, whose book How the Word Has Passed: Remembering Slavery and How it Shaped America, will be out in a new edition for young readers in the fall.

I see that Clint will be back at the Tenement Museum in September, too, to give his take on the question, "What does it mean to be American?" as part of The Atlantic Festival. Tickets just went on sale, so a little plug for the Museum and for Clint there. Thank you both so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Annie Polland: Thank you. Thank you so much.

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