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COMMERCE, Georgia, June 29 (Reuters) - I grew up hearing my father’s reminders to be aware of my surroundings. But it was too dark to heed that advice by the time I reached my destination in rural Georgia, the starting point of an exploration of where my family’s history dovetails with efforts to reckon with some of the bleakest moments of America’s past.

If not for the mechanically calm voice of the navigation app I’d used to get from the airport, I might have missed the roadside marker near Moore’s Ford Bridge. It commemorates the 1946 lynching by a white mob of two Black couples: George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom. George Dorsey was a World War II veteran. Dorothy Malcom was seven months pregnant.

I did not need to read the sign’s 95-word inscription to know what had happened near this place, just outside the city of Monroe. My Georgia-born father, not quite 10 years old in 1946, had glimpsed the mob from a truck in which he was riding that day. He had told me about what he saw and what he gathered later from reports on the killings – four murders for which no one has ever been charged.

Such racist violence erupted after the Civil War and endured as part of efforts to keep the benefits of full citizenship from freed Black Americans and their descendants. The lynching at Moore’s Ford is what some educators call “hard history,” a horror that sullied the promise of America but nonetheless represents the realities of a nation torn by racial violence since its inception. How such history is taught has become more politicized today than at perhaps any time since America’s founding.

Some politicians have denounced what they call a “woke” representation of history. They say that children are being divided by race and indoctrinated with a view of the United States that accentuates divisions and imbues students with a sense of guilt, rather than of promise. Others counter that America’s history cannot be glossed over – that policies and practices from the nation’s inception continue to shape society today. Knowing where we’ve been, they say, is integral not only to who we are but also to where we’re heading.

Caught in the middle are parents and teachers trying to find the best ways and the most appropriate moments for lessons that ensure young Americans of all races have a full understanding of their nation’s past and a shared foundation on which to build its future.

As a journalist, I spent years covering the end and aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, and the debate over teaching about slavery and its aftermath is personal for me. I come from a family of educators, past and present. My grandmother was a teacher in the segregated South. My father once filled in for her. And I’ve raised a child here who attended public schools and has since pursued teaching.

My family and I also have felt the pain of racial violence. In a city once called Harmony Grove but now known as Commerce, some 40 miles from the highway marker along U.S. 78, my father learned from his aunt what happened to his grandfather – my great-grandfather, General Bryson. In the 1930s, white men pulled General Bryson from the store he owned, and then tarred and feathered him, my father was told. General Bryson subsequently died, although his death certificate from the time makes no mention of the violence recounted to my father.

For African American families such as mine, connecting intimate stories to a larger history can be difficult and daunting. I would discover this as I sought to learn more about what happened to my father’s grandfather in the 1930s, a time when Jim Crow laws and segregation ruled the South and official records of violence against Black Americans were often unreliable or non-existent.

As part of a Reuters project examining the ancestral connections to slavery of America’s political elite, many of whom are involved in shaping what students learn today, I began to explore official records that might help me trace the path of my own ancestors: Black Americans whose time in the United States dates back to the days when chattel slavery was legal.

Not surprisingly, the tools that made it relatively straightforward to chart the lineages of white lawmakers weren’t nearly as effective when it came to tracing my own family’s journey. Hundreds of years ago, census takers did not record the names of the people enslaved in the United States, instead listing only their ages, genders and whether they were considered Black or of mixed race. Those slave schedules are emblematic of an official record that effectively silences the voices or misrepresents the experiences of minorities – or takes decades to acknowledge them. The Moore’s Ford sign, according to the Georgia Historical Society, is believed to be the first historical marker recognizing a lynching in Georgia or possibly the entire United States. It was erected in 1999, more than a half-century after the lynching itself.

But in thinking about the challenges my own family faced, and in talking with my father and with teachers past and present, I also found reason for optimism.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed widespread agreement among Americans of every race and political persuasion that issues such as slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement should be taught in U.S. schools. Most – about 7 out of 10 – said middle and high school was the appropriate time, and some favored starting even earlier. Such consensus suggests it’s possible to come together for conversations about how to best learn from a shared past.

The history of slavery is hard no matter your race. In the course of his own scholarship, Michael Thurmond, the author of 'Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage 1733-1865,' said he agonized over stories of African leaders who sold other Africans into slavery.

“That was painful for me to research, to understand and ultimately write it,” Thurmond said. “So I can see how some people can feel that way about other aspects of our history.”

Thurmond believes the United States could benefit from something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As a reporter, I covered the first hearings of that commission, established after apartheid ended in 1994 and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The commission held public hearings on apartheid-era crimes on both sides of the struggle, allowed for amnesty to those who fully disclosed their role in human rights violations, and recommended reparations payments.

Thurmond, a former Georgia school district superintendent himself, said history should bring people together, not drive us apart.

“If we study it and understand it,” he said, “we emerge from this process a better people and hopefully even a better nation.”

CENSUS AND MAPS

Our first classrooms are our homes, our first history lessons drawn from family stories. As I arrived in Commerce, the city where many of those lessons were passed down through generations dating to the late 1800s, I thought about what I might learn during my visit here.

A descendant of storytellers and storylovers, I decided to pursue journalism fairly early. Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School was my top choice, and when I got there, I remember thinking that in addition to studying journalism, I would be able to immerse myself in what I thought of as the “other” history. That included courses focusing on the lives of the enslaved, not just the institution of slavery. I read the Black American abolitionist David Walker’s 'Appeal' for the first time at Northwestern. His 1829 pamphlet urging African Americans to break the “infernal chains of slavery” and telling whites “America is as much our country, as it is yours” is part of the reading list for a new high school African American Studies Advanced Placement course.

The educational opportunities that helped take me to Northwestern were a far cry from those my now 86-year-old father was afforded growing up in the segregated South. At that time, high school for Black students ended at the 11th grade in Commerce, so my father left Georgia to continue his education. He completed 12th grade at a boarding school for Black students at what is now Voorhees University, a historically Black institution in South Carolina. He then earned his bachelor’s in chemistry at what is now West Virginia State University.

He knows he was blessed to be surrounded by educators, most notably his mother, Julia Downs Bryson Rollins. As I researched my family’s ancestry, I also noted that in 1940, when my father was still a toddler, a boarder stayed with the family. He didn’t remember her, but as I looked more closely at the U.S. census documents and other records, it became clear that the Black woman, Alma Wardlaw, had come from Atlanta to teach in Commerce. My father told me it was common for Black teachers to come from the state capital and to stay with Black families because other accommodations for Black out-of-towners were unavailable.

As a child, my father would accompany his mother to a school outside Commerce in rural Jackson County, north of Moore’s Ford. Her work placed her in a long line of Black American women leading efforts to ensure education for their communities.

The tradition started before the Civil War, when an enslaved person could be whipped for daring to learn to read and write. Black memoirist Susie King Taylor, who was born in Georgia in 1848, writes of her childhood before the Civil War, when she wrapped books in paper to hide them from police and white people, and tried not to be noticed as she slipped into the home of a free Black woman for lessons. Taylor fled with her family during the war to territory held by Union forces. There, she taught Black soldiers and other former slaves, “all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” My father has often told me of the joy he took in a set of encyclopedias his mother had at home.

One of my favorite stories my father had told me is about the Commerce library. During segregation, my father’s mother was – because she had studied library science – the only Black resident allowed to use the facility.

That library has since been replaced by the building I visited, but I thought about my grandmother as I settled in at its microfilm machine and began spooling through decades of editions of The Jackson County Herald. I focused in particular on newspapers from the late 1930s, looking for anything about my father’s grandfather, General Bryson.

General was a mason, a merchant and a mechanic. He had a store called General’s Store. My father said it was indeed a general store, supplying everything from hog feed to eggs to coal for heating. His store and garage were near Mt. Calvary Baptist Church. I came across a 1932 map of Commerce created and published by the Sanborn Map Company to enable fire insurance companies to assess liability. The map is part of a searchable collection held by the Library of Congress.

On the map, I believe General’s Store is the building at the bottom and labeled S for store. The largest building, labeled D for dwelling, is where General and his family lived. And the skinny rectangle just across the way from the church may be General’s garage.

My great-grandfather’s name – G.G. Bryson, as he also was known – is among those carved into a stone that’s set in the brick wall near the front door of the church, which is still standing. General was on the building committee for the church, completed in 1924.

Aside from breaking for lunch, I spent the entire day at the library – from 10 a.m. to its 8 p.m. closing – searching for anything about my great-grandfather’s life or his December 21, 1937, death.

DIFFICULT TO RECONCILE

I found scores of obituaries of white residents of no particular accomplishment. I saw only two obituaries of Black residents. Here are each in their entirety.

One from Sept. 17, 1936, under the headline "Colored Citizen Passes," reads: "George T. Williamson, a good colored citizen of the county, died this week at his home near Hurricane Shoals. Burial services were held Tuesday at Hurricane Grove church."

The other, from Dec. 23, 1937 – two days after General Bryson’s death – under the headline "Well Known Colored Citizen Dies" says: "Lucille Newton Duke passed away Monday at her home in Jefferson. She was the daughter of the late 'Boots' and Barbara Newton."

The weekly Herald regularly wrote about white folks visiting their relatives. It published essays lauding the courage of Confederate soldiers and obituaries of Confederate veterans and their widows. Black people appeared chiefly in sketches aimed at amusing readers – or when they were accused of crimes against whites. Here’s an article from Nov. 26, 1936, headlined "Drunken Negro attempts to enter home, is killed":

"Bud Moon, colored, was shot to death Sunday with a shotgun in the hands of Mr. Jim Smith, who resides on the old Winder-Jefferson highway, just beyond the residence of H.S. Fits. The negro was drunk, and his actions indicated that the whiskey had made him crazy. Moon first tried to enter the Smith home, but was driven away. Later he started back to the home, and when ordered by Smith not to come any farther, Moon acted as if he was reaching in his hip pocket for a pistol. Smith fired, killing him instantly. Sheriff Culberson was called to the scene of the killing, but after making an investigation, made no arrest. Moon was 56 years of age. His body was interred at Maxey’s Hill church cemetery."

My father thinks he was 5 or 6 years old and the store building was standing empty when he first heard the story of his grandfather’s death. It was late October. He and his older brother, who was wearing a Halloween mask, were playing outside their grandmother’s house at dusk. Their grandmother began shouting at him when she saw the mask. As adults came to calm her, the boys heard them talking about her memories of masked Klansmen and about what had happened to her husband.

“They said he was too uppity, or something. These were Klansmen or yahoos or whatever,” my father said.

As he learned it, the men dragged General Bryson from his store, then they tarred and feathered him. “That’s what killed him,” my dad recalled.

General is buried a few blocks from the church he helped build along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive – known to my father decades ago as Pigeon Street. He lies at the foot of a marker not much bigger than the stone at the church. It bears only his name and the word “FARTHER,” either a cryptic epitaph or a misspelling of father.

A search of the genealogy website Ancestry.com offered a death certificate. It seemed at odds with what my father had been told, giving heart and kidney disease as the cause of death at age 68.

My father and I looked together at General’s death certificate. He scoffed when he read the cause of death. It did not lead him to question what he had been told.

The document highlighted something genealogists told Reuters: that Black Americans often encounter contradictory information – or none at all – when trying to document the lives and deaths of their ancestors.

For her 2022 book, 'By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,' Margaret Burnham reviewed a thousand cases of lynchings, abductions and other racist violence for which no one was punished, sometimes using records saved by victims’ families. Burnham, a lawyer and the founding director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, opens her book with a 1944 death in Donalsonville, Georgia, that resonated with me.

All Burnham had to go on was a letter found in the files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pleading for an investigation into the death of an unnamed “elderly Negro woman” in Donalsonville, nearly 300 miles south of Commerce. The letter writer said a young white man in a general store had ordered the woman to put down a can of oil she was examining. She did and left. He followed her onto the street, where he beat her with an ax handle, killing her. The man was arrested but quickly released, according to the letter.

The death – in public, outside a store in a small Georgia town – could just as easily have been my great-grandfather’s. The woman’s death “never made it into any newspaper or historical account,” Burnham wrote. “If there was any legal process in Donalsonville, it appears not to have been preserved.”

I followed Burnham’s lead into the archives of civil rights group the NAACP, which have been digitized and made searchable by database vendor ProQuest. I found nothing on General Bryson.

One death I did find documented was that of Isaac Gaston. Gaston – a businessman, like General Bryson – was taken from his Atlanta-area barber shop in 1940, flogged and left to die, according to a New York Times report archived by the NAACP.

Walter White, who led the NAACP from 1929 until 1955, was concerned that many lynchings weren’t documented. He wrote a newspaper editor in 1940 that “our means are very limited so that we do not have the funds to send investigators to look into all the cases that are reported to us. So we have to rely on local people, some of whom are a little afraid to be very effective in running down the facts. And I suspect that we only hear of a very small percentage of the cases.”

A RICHER HISTORY

I know my family’s story to be rich and nuanced. I hate to think of it being reduced to violence. But to the Jackson County Herald of that time, my family story wasn’t noteworthy. I could find nothing that accounted for the death of General Bryson, let alone any item that mentioned the Bryson family.

Through online searches, however, I did find documents that helped me see how my family story is connected to our national narrative, and how I’m connected to my fellow Americans. I turned up the World War I service card of my father’s father, Mim Bryson.

And I found Mim’s name on a list of soldiers who returned to the United States from Brest, France, aboard the USS Patricia on July 5, 1919. In the Black cemetery in Commerce, I had seen his military gravestone, which is just like the markers at Arlington National Cemetery. I knew he had served as a corporal in World War I, but I had misread a timeworn inscription on the stone as OMC. The Patricia’s passenger list clarified it was QMC, for Quartermaster Corps.

My father had told me that Mim learned French in France during the war and that he and my school-teacher grandmother Julia, who had learned the language in school, spoke French when they wanted to have a private conversation within earshot of my father and his brother.

But I wish I’d found more. As LaBrenda Garrett-Nelson, one of the board-certified genealogists who worked with Reuters, has said during presentations across the country, “generations of Americans were socialized to think of African-descended families as people who had no history worth remembering.” In reading what appears to be the primary written history of the city where my father grew up and my great-grandfather died, her observation held true.

In his 'History of Harmony Grove-Commerce Jackson County Georgia', published in 1949, a local historian and minister, Thomas Colquitt Hardman, chronicles the arrival of highways and railroads, the building of schools and industry and the contributions of prominent white families such as his own. Lamartine Hardman, governor of Georgia from 1927 to 1931, was born in what was then Harmony Grove in 1856.

In his book, the Rev. Hardman did make mention of my great-grandfather, noting him among five Brysons – Hardman spelled it Brison – in a list of four dozen “old-timers of Johntown,” the name given to a predominantly Black Commerce neighborhood. I’d seen the names of the five Brysons on the Hardman list in a report I received after sending a DNA sample to the genomics-analysis company 23andMe. My 23andMe family tree goes back only as far as Harry Bryson, another of the five listed in the Hardman book. Harry was General’s father, born presumably in slavery in 1834. Nothing more is said of the “old-timers” in the Hardman book, though there are passages that poke fun at a Black debate club and opine that “Negroes have always been interested in and gifted in music.”

This was – and wasn’t – the place where my father grew up. Yes, the book reflected the attitude of many of the white residents. But it profoundly diminishes the vibrancy of the Black community. My father knew, for example, the blacksmith Uzell Mathis, merely listed by Hardman but a man my father remembers as having powerful biceps that resembled the one on the Arm & Hammer baking soda boxes. Other Black entrepreneurs my father remembers were masons, plasterers, plumbers and electricians, but he said most Black people in Commerce worked in the homes of white people or on farms. White people used to invite my father into their homes to show him the fireplaces his father had built or the tilework he had done.

My father described the Black churches as the centers of life. I think of them as places where Black people could be free of the white gaze. For Easter, my father remembers hundreds of Black people from town and from nearby communities – some traveling by wagon – gathering at the churches for programs that included their children reciting Bible verses. At other church and school events, Black children recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or Shakespearean soliloquies. People who grew up in that era, my father said, “don’t have any trouble with crowds, speaking before groups, because you’d been doing it all your life.”

The Harmony Grove-Commerce history book has been archived by Ancestry.com, one of America’s foremost digital repositories for genealogy records. When I told my father I’d read the book online, he recalled his mother getting a copy of what may have been that same local history. He described her irritation at finding that her town’s Black residents were depicted with little respect.

Thomas Colquitt Hardman does note that “the Negro population of Commerce are very cooperative and have always shown an interest in the education of their children as well as in their church life. There are very few illiterates among them.’’

WHAT TO TRUST

In the mid-1990s, college professor Terrie Epstein studied how students in fifth, eighth and 11th grades in a Michigan school district learned American history. Epstein, who teaches education at New York’s Hunter College, later published a book called 'Interpreting National History.' She wrote that white students were more likely to believe that “history textbooks, teachers and library books were the most credible sources of history.” Black students found what they were learning in the classroom to be at odds with what they had learned at home.

Epstein asked 11th graders to explain why white students were more trusting of the teachers and textbooks and why Black students “believed that family members, Black teachers, and movies or documentaries by or about Blacks ranked highest.” Black students thought it was because teachers and textbooks did not tell “the whole story” about national history.

Research has shown they have a point.

For a study she published in 2020, Chara Haeussler Bohan, a Georgia State University professor of educational policy studies, perused history textbooks and teaching guides by writers such as Alexander Stephens, who was vice president of the Confederate States of America, and Mildred Rutherford, official historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The latter was founded in 1894 for women seeking to honor ancestors who fought for secession from the United States.

Bohan and her researchers borrowed the term “mint julep” for their study from Northern textbook publishers of the 1960s. Bohan’s team used the name of the sugary bourbon cocktail to refer to a style of history textbooks dating to just after the Civil War. Those books catered to a desire by Southerners to characterize the Civil War as the Lost Cause: a revisionist effort that downplays the injustice and violence of slavery and portrays their ancestors as having fought for states’ rights without elaborating that the right to own slaves was central to such independence. Bohan found that perspective to have enduring power.

“By the early 20th century, Northern textbooks had adopted mint julep Lost Cause narratives in an apparent attempt to appease Southern readers,” Bohan concluded in her paper, “The Mint Julep Consensus.”

It’s hard not to see the result in findings by the Southern Poverty Law Center in a late 2016 online survey of 1,000 U.S. high school seniors. Fewer than one in 10 identified slavery as the central cause of the Civil War – even though South Carolina, the first to leave the Union, explicitly cited protecting slavery as the reason in its secession declaration. Slavery was also central to the arguments of the other three states – Georgia, Mississippi and Texas – that wrote secession documents before a Confederate constitution was adopted in 1861. That constitution declared the Confederacy’s congress would protect “the institution of negro slavery.”

Today, politicians in some parts of America are again aiming to define what constitutes history, and to shape what teachers are allowed to present.

In Florida, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis has led efforts to limit what is taught about racism in his state’s schools – and what is included in that new African American AP course, the one that included the David Walker pamphlet. DeSantis is seeking the Republican nomination for president.

Last year, DeSantis, who taught high school history for a year between earning his bachelor’s at Yale and starting at Harvard Law School, signed a law that, according to a news release from his office, would “protect Floridians from discrimination and woke indoctrination.” Under its provisions, Florida teachers are to present African American history as a chronicle of individuals and “the courageous steps they took to fulfill the promise of democracy and unite the nation.”

African American history lessons, according to the law, are meant to help students “develop an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms and examine what it means to be a responsible and respectful person, for the purpose of encouraging tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society and for nurturing and protecting democratic values and institutions.”

The law also bans instruction that would make a student “feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” And it prohibits textbook reviewers from recommending materials “that contain any matter reflecting unfairly upon persons because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, disability, socioeconomic status or occupation.”

Bohan, the Georgia State University education professor, worries about the chilling effect of such laws across the country, particularly on young teachers.

“They think they can’t teach about slavery, they will skip it. Or only put it in a very positive light, almost like back to the ‘happy slaves,’” Bohan said. “There’s a scary atmosphere. I keep hearing it. Most of my doctoral students are working teachers.”

An aide with the governor’s office directed Reuters to the website for the state’s Department of Education. A statement on the site said that, under DeSantis, instruction on African American history has expanded in Florida. It notes that DeSantis signed legislation ensuring that Florida’s students learn about what is known as the Ocoee Massacre, a deadly 1920 attack by white Floridians against their Black neighbors, “in addition to requiring instruction on slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow laws.”

HISTORY'S LESSONS

Carol Swain believes young Americans should come away from U.S. history lessons with the conviction that problems can be solved by working together. Swain, a legal scholar and political scientist, is the author of such books as 'Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts And Minds'. She argues that critical race theory, or CRT for short – which rests on the premise that racial bias, intentional or not, is woven into U.S. laws and institutions – promotes division.

“You will never be able to bring about racial healing if you use a conflict model,” Swain told me. “The conflict model tends to racialize America and demonize America.”

Swain grew up in Virginia, where she says the history lessons she studied as a child gave her a sense of pride and possibility. She learned that the state had given America many of its presidents. It was also the birthplace of Booker T. Washington. Born in slavery in Virginia in 1856, Washington founded Tuskegee University and stressed that Blacks must rely on themselves and advance economically on farms, in factories and as craftspeople.

“The poverty that I came from was grueling,” said Swain, who is Black. “But it was nothing in comparison to being a slave. I still was better off than Booker T. Washington. The message I received as a child was that if you worked hard, got an education, you could succeed.”

Swain thinks third or fourth grade is the appropriate age for American students to start serious study of their national history. She said she was in the fourth grade when she read Washington’s autobiography 'Up From Slavery.'

U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley, a California Democrat of Swain’s generation, also grew up in Virginia. She remembers fourth grade differently.

“The history that we were taught was that Robert E. Lee,” commander of the Confederate States Army, “was a hero. We all knew his horse was named Traveler. That’s what we were taught,” said Brownley, who is white.

She is among the 100 U.S. lawmakers from the 117th Congress who Reuters found have direct lineal ancestors who were slaveholders.

In California, Brownley was a longtime school board member who chaired her state legislature’s education committee before she ran for Congress. She grew up in Virginia during segregation.

When schools were desegregated, she said, her parents enrolled her in an all-white girls boarding school three hours from their home in Petersburg, Virginia. She said when she got to college – the women’s Mount Vernon College, which later merged with George Washington University – she realized she was surrounded by people who were better educated in part because they had not had the “twisted version” of history she had learned.

When my father thinks of how his mother might have reacted to the current politicized debates over how to teach U.S. history, he remembers the Black high school principal sending him and friends to pick up outdated textbooks being handed down by the white high school. They found the chapters on Reconstruction had been ripped out.

But that did not mean, my father said, that Black teachers failed to inform their students about the era – the dozen years after the war when the newly freed gained political rights and Black Americans were elected to public office at local, state and federal levels, only to be relegated to second-class status through violence and discrimination.

“They would start teaching you that even before you went to school,” my father said.

My grandmother, my father told me, filled in the gaps with her own literature and history books, and with that beloved encyclopedia set.

“My mother felt that in order to have a democracy you needed to have an educated populace,” he said. “She would have been infuriated, I would imagine,” by attempts to restrict what is taught about Black history in America.

OPENING A DIALOGUE

In an effort to help K-12 teachers find ways to teach about slavery, Georgia State’s Bohan helped create a summer workshop called “Courting Liberty: Slavery and Equality Under the Constitution.”

They study primary sources, such as the first declaration of secession, in which South Carolinans in 1860 cite “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and the election by Northerners of “a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

The workshop starts in Atlanta and includes a trip to Drayton Hall, an 18th-century plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, where the lives of the people who were enslaved are central to how its history is told.

William Frazier, who attended the workshop, incorporated lessons on slavery in the United States into his world history course for ninth graders when he taught at the high school in Laurel, Mississippi. He moved last year to Petal High School in Mississippi’s Forrest County. The county was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who was the Ku Klux Klan’s first grand wizard. Frazier teaches computer science and coaches football at Petal. He does not teach history at Petal, but said he often talks with his students there about history, including the history of slavery.

Frazier, who is Black, was born and raised in Mississippi. He used to work as a juvenile probation officer but switched careers in 2015 when he concluded he could do more to help young people by teaching.

Petal is a predominately white school. His students, Frazier said, “have a vast knowledge of the Confederacy and they have none of the Union soldiers coming down here to battle.”

Frazier’s own research has included reviewing advertisements by slaveholders searching for runaways.

“One of the ads stated, ‘My slave ran away for no reason. He’ll be known for fresh whip marks on his back,’” Frazier said, and laughed dryly. Does he worry, as do some parents in other parts of the country, that using such ads in teaching will make white students feel personally ashamed for how other white people treated Black people during that era?

He hopes not. But if they do, he would reassure them that “you’re so far removed from being a slave owner that you can’t hold that guilt.

“But the knowledge is that it happened, and it happened in a way of harshness. Now, you don’t have to wear the guilt of it, because you don’t treat people harshly.”

So far, Frazier hasn’t had to have that conversation – likely because the issue is so sensitive, he said.

The silence worries him.

“I want kids to be able to freely talk. This is a large part of what we’re missing in society today, which is conflict resolution. That basically comes from conversation. We don’t understand each other just by looking at each other. But we do understand by talking to each other.”

Listening to Frazier, I was reminded of Jonathan Jansen. In 2009, Jansen became the first Black leader of the then century-old University of the Free State, which had been established for white South Africans and was integrating in fits and starts as apartheid ended. In addition to his duties as the university’s rector, or president, Jansen taught a course on understanding the violence and divisions of his country’s past.

Students would tell him they wanted to put those divisions behind them. Jansen would respond that such an approach has been tried, and has failed. “The past keeps coming up,” he told students. “So let’s learn emotional, psychological skills to cope.”

When I quoted Jansen to him, Frazier said it rang true.

“If something’s broken, you have to fix it,” Frazier said. “You can’t walk away. When you come back, it’s still broken.”

“Tough conversations are only tough before you have them,” Frazier said. “Because once we start talking, we understand, and we understand how to move forward. We understand how to fix it and how to move forward.”

Historian John Morrow believes candor is key in the classroom.

“I think we’ve been through worse times. Much worse times,” said Morrow, whose half-century career began in 1971 when, with a doctorate in modern European history from the University of Pennsylvania, he became the first African American faculty member of the University of Tennessee’s College of Arts and Science. He retired last year after spending the past three decades at the University of Georgia.

When he was a very young student, Morrow said, material on such issues as slavery “really didn’t reflect reality,” he said, summing up the narrative as “white people were not guilty of anything, Black people liked being slaves.”

“We aren’t going to go back to what it was,” he said. “You can’t undo history when people have reached a certain level of knowledge.”

'ALL WE ARE IS MEMORY'

I recently took my child Thandi along to revisit some lessons with my father, Andrew Bryson, a retired industrial hygienist now living in California. The three of us sat in a book-filled room in his San Diego home that doubles as his bedroom and home office.

After graduating from college, my father did a stint in the Army, and then worked as a civil servant for several branches of the military in Illinois, Colorado and California. He still consults for private clients on workplace health and safety.

His father, Mim Bryson, a brick mason, died in spring 1946. Not yet 10 but eager to help his mother, he took an afterschool job at a drugstore. Then he took a second job when a neighbor asked his mother whether my father could accompany him on his route delivering sodas on Saturdays during the school year and during weekdays in the summer. My father earned a dollar a day and lunch for helping unload crates of soda.

The Moore’s Ford lynching was July 25, 1946, a Thursday.

“I can’t remember the date of that lynching,” my father told me. “I do remember it was a sunshiny day.”

They left Commerce in the delivery truck on a route that started to the north before circling back south toward Monroe and Athens. My father remembers the neighbor had taken a shortcut on a dirt road. That’s where they came upon the grisly scene.

“There was shooting and there were four bodies,” my father said. The driver, who was white, pushed my father into the wheel well, whether to hide him or to hide the sight from a child.

“As I look back on it, he was scared to death, too,” my father said. The driver “was white as a sheet. We drove like the dickens. We didn’t even stop for the other two stops we were supposed to make.”

My father described his initial reaction as fear, but also childish excitement. Once he got back to Commerce, he “was just telling everybody.”

His mother didn’t like him talking about what he had seen.

“I think one of the things that was in her mind, she was thinking about General Bryson,” he told me. “People get scared.”

I told my dad that I had heard him exchange stories of lynchings with other Black adults when I was a child. I grew up thinking every Black family had such stories. He never shooed me from the room when the subject of white American violence against Black Americans came up. But I also realized that he and I had never discussed that history one-on-one until I was older.

Then Thandi spoke up: “Mom, do you think you talk about that kind of history?” Thandi was calling me out for not discussing the violence our family has faced.

It is an agonizing history, after all, but one that should be recognized as part of our whole story.

“We talk about students reacting with anger, discomfort,” Thandi said. “Maybe that’s not so much the case if they come in knowing family history and having that background.”

My now 19-year-old was about to start a job teaching preschool at the time – the next generation of educators in my family. Thandi recorded the conversation for me when I spoke to my father about our family history, including the violence our ancestors suffered. My child believes the impact of that violence endures.

“All we are is memory,” Thandi said later. “The entirety of who people are as individuals and how they interact with the world is based on prior experiences.”

The words reminded me of those of James Baldwin, one of America’s greatest writers and thinkers. “History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past,” Baldwin wrote. “On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

My father told his grandchild and me: “For the grace of God, we’ve managed to move through this, not necessarily past it. And we want to do it without talking about it.”

He wasn’t endorsing such silence. Rather, he once again was offering wisdom to those he loves: Be aware of our surroundings.

(Reported by Donna Bryson. Edited by Blake Morrison)