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Evolution of Black Studies Into New York City K-12 Curriculum

By Mary Alice Miller
New York City implemented a citywide K-12 Black Studies curriculum this school term.
The Black Studies social studies curriculum includes the study of traditional African cultures, the global migrations of African people throughout the African Diaspora, the continuum of the Black experience in the Americas from the 17th century to the present, African American history in New York State, and Black history and heritage in New York City.

“With the new K-12 Black Studies curriculum rolled out across New York City Public Schools, made possible by the leadership of the EEAP Coalition and the Council’s Black, Latino & Asian Caucus, young scholars now have the opportunity to learn about Black history, the legacies of early African civilizations, and much more,” said NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. “At a time when other states are limiting the inclusion of Black history in the classroom, New York continues to lead the way with inclusive education that reflects the full breadth of our history and students.”

The Education Equity Action Plan is the first-ever Pre-K-12 Black Studies curriculum to be implemented into the public school system.
The EEAP Coalition’s core partners include the United Way of New York City (UWNYC), The Black Education Research Collective (BERC), The Eagle Academy Foundation (EAF), The Association of Black Educators of New York(ABENY), Black Edfluencers United (BEU) and The City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus (BLAC) in collaboration with the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE).
The implementation of the Black Studies curriculum in NYC public schools was decades in the making.

It took the collective works of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and Dr. John Henrik Clarke to begin pushing forward the study of Black history in public schools.

Dr. Du Bois fought against negative racist caricatures of Black people in the public square. Woodson experienced the suppression of Black history in the American Historical Association. Both Schomburg and Clarke were told that Black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments.
Then came Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ivan Van Sertima, Francis Cress Welsing, Amos N. Wilson, William Loren Katz, Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Michael Hooper, Adelaide Sanford, Dr. Lester Young, and Queens public school educator Diane Glover.
There were bumps along the way.
Dr. Leonard Jeffries was the prime researcher for “A Curriculum of Inclusion.” Public statements by Jeffries distracted from the report.
Never formally adopted by the New York State Board of Regents, “A Curriculum of Inclusion” (July 1989) examined social studies curricula used by the NYS Dept. of Education that favored Eurocentric contributions while denigrating, distorting, and omitting contributions from nonwhite cultures.

The Task Force that produced the report found that a more balanced teaching of history would serve all children by improving the self-respect and self-esteem of African American, Puerto Rican/Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children while disabusing children of European cultures of the notion that white people’s contributions are paramount to the exclusion of all other cultures.

Two years later, the NYS Board of Regents approved recommendations derived from a 1991 report called One Nation, Many Peoples: A Declaration of Cultural Interdependence. The state committee that crafted the report found that existing syllabi were inadequate, contained insensitive racial and sexist language, and omitted essential content regarding racial and ethnic groups and areas of the world.

The report called for extensive revision of state social studies curriculum and “shift the emphasis from the mastery of information to the development of fundamental tools, concepts, and intellectual processes that make people learners who can approach knowledge in a variety of ways.”

For example, that report called for slaves to be referred to as “enslaved persons” in the social studies curriculum, making the point that slavery was not an occupation like bricklayer or architecture. Columbus would transform from a “discoverer” to a voyager whose behavior impacted the already settled peoples of the Americas. The report recommended that minorities in the United States should be considered global majorities.

The difference was subtle yet profound. For instance, the Meridian map of the world places the equator (the point equidistant from both North and South Poles) as three-quarters down the map, psychologically depicting the United States and Europe as larger land masses with more importance than Africa and South America when the opposite is factually accurate.

The threat of normalizing these concepts disrupted the world view of paternalistic, white male-oriented purveyors of history who preferred promoting the common cultural heritage of the United States as opposed to the inclusion of nonwhite, racial, and ethnic cultures.
Despite these efforts, in 2006, the NYS Regents History Exam included a question that asked how imperialism benefitted Africa.

But, efforts to include a proper history of Black people in public school curricula extended further back.
The “First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question” was held June 4-6, 1890 in Ulster County, New York.
Ex-president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, opened the conference by calling for the education of formerly enslaved people.
“For some years past, the Trustees of the Peabody Education Fund [… ] have looked forward with confident hope to the time when the people of the United States, through the general government, would give their powerful aid to the education of the emancipated race for the duties of citizenship which have been cast upon them,” said Hayes. “No doubt, during several years, a decided majority of both Houses of Congress, without regard to section or party, would have supported the measure if it could have been brought to a vote. The recent adverse action of the Senate admonishes us, however, that we may no longer look with confidence for government aid.”

Haynes may sound disappointed that Congress did not address the education of formerly enslaved people at that time, but the concern for him and his cohort was that a large uneducated Negro populace would negatively impact the development of the country. In addition, lurking below the purpose of the conference was anxiety about threats to white rule, competition for jobs from a Black educated and skilled populace, and a deep-seated fear and hatred of Black people.
Advocacy for educating Black people 135 years ago did not include the teaching of Black history to Black people.

The next step is to include Latinidad curriculum in NYC public schools.
Following the model set by the implementation of the K-12 Black studies curriculum, the NYC Council’s Education Equity Action Plan initiative has allocated $3 million to Columbia University’s Teachers College to develop a curriculum that will explore and celebrate the contributions, history, and cultures of the Latinidad diaspora, integrating underrepresented Latinidad history, culture and identities.

The initiative is a three-year project which includes collaboration with the United Way and the Hispanic Federation.
The NYC Department of Education introduced curricula on Asian American and Pacific Islander history and heritage in 2022 and LGBTQ coursework in 2021.