E.D. and her teachers, Kristin Marconi and Christine Snivley, who teach middle school students in Ohio, were part of a virtual learning community created for Freedom on the Move by the Hard History Project. The goal of these workshops was to tap the genius of teachers to build a bridge between the digital archive and K–12 classrooms. As a crowdsourced archive, FOTM was built with the public in mind. Still, it takes the expertise of teachers to reach, arguably, FOTM’s most important readership: young people.
We are in a cultural moment in which teaching about racism and the world it has made is both essential and controversial. Critics rallying under the banner of “anti-CRT” describe this teaching as divisive and disturbing. But we can’t teach the history of the United States without teaching about slavery. And of course, they’re right about the emotions involved—there’s nothing comfortable about slavery. But they’re missing something: There’s a lot of good, and even joy, to be had in talking about the relentless and omnipresent resistance to slavery that we see again and again in newspapers before the Civil War, in ads seeking the return of self-liberating people.
When it is complete, FOTM will contain upward of 100,000 ads. Even though the stories they convey were written by enslavers and jailers, thousands of self-liberating people forced those stories into the historical record. Because they sought freedom, we can glimpse their personal histories, skills, languages, family ties, community networks, sometimes even their fashion sense. The Hard History Project and FOTM have been working with teachers from around the country to create lesson plans and assignments that ask students to explore the vast archive of freedom seekers for themselves.
When asked about the difficulties of teaching slavery in the current political climate, Ahmariah Jackson, who teaches English in majority-Black classrooms in Atlanta, is clear about why FOTM’s focus on Black resistance matters, both at the level of the individual and as a mass movement. “We’re speaking about the humanity of those who were enslaved, and that takes priority more than anything,” Jackson says. “I can’t tell someone what to think about their great-great-great-great-grandfather. I’m not here for that. But I’m also not here to tell a student that their great-great-grandfather was evil. I am more concerned with shedding light on the institution, the practices of the institution, and the implications of that. How are we going to shape this world, move forward, if we’re not learning from that past?” Freedom on the Move, Jackson says, “allows for a full-circle discussion. It allows for an opportunity to heal.”