“I never knew Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Long Island.”
That is what I heard over and over from students at Calhoun High School in Merrick on Friday, January 13. Students from the Ambassadors and Leadership Club had selected my book, MLK on LI: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Long Island, to be part of the district’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Week of Service. The student leaders wrote a lesson plan and taught the book in the district’s two middle schools and four high schools. The Chairperson of the district’s Social Studies Department invited me to observe the lessons, and I was truly honored to attend.
What they taught was not the ordinary, default lesson on King that most students get every year. That is, if they are lucky to attend a school that views the holiday as more than a day off. Calhoun students learned something new. They learned that King visited Long Island many times. They learned what brought him here and what he said during those trips. They learned that King spoke at South Side Middle School in Rockville Centre just days before his death, invited by a student who is now a local professor. They learned that many Long Island towns celebrated the MLK holiday for years before it became a national holiday in 1983. They learned that King spoke about New York in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.They learned about the mixed racial, ethnic and religious groups that came together to fundraise and support the Civil Rights Movement.
These facts are not new, but teaching them is. I never learned them as a Long Island student, and my children were not learning them, either. That is what led me to write the book. What surprised me in researching the topic was that the information has been out there for years. It would have been easy for a school to bring these facts into the classroom. There was even a 1997 curriculum developed by Dr. Alan Singer from Hofstra University for teaching the Civil Rights Movement on Long Island to middle and high school students. Had any schools ever used it in the past twenty-five years?
This is starting to change, thanks to schools like Calhoun. These schools should be celebrated and supported by Long Island parents. They should not be subject to baseless charges of “indoctrination,” or have their patriotism questioned for teaching facts. Facts are not “woke,” or “critical race theory,” or any other theory. Those labels are used to undermine facts and silence teachers. Anyone who knows the history of education in this country will tell you that indoctrination in schools is nothing new. Education has always been a tool wielded by the powerful to serve what they see as the best interests of society. Teaching the facts undoes those centuries of indoctrination.
However, we must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past. There is a difference between teaching facts and the conclusions from those facts. We would not ask students to form opinions based on a book they had not read, and history is no different. The facts must come first. Interpreting history is a complex task influenced by personal views and the incomplete set of facts we carry with us. And the facts are always incomplete. The history of our nation evolves as we fill in the gaps with new facts and voices. It is never final, fixed or static – a warning to those too wedded to any one interpretation – and treating it as such denies students the knowledge they need to be educated citizens.
The teachers and administrators at Calhoun get this right, and other schools should take notice. In the last class I observed at Calhoun, the teacher (who was also an Iraq War veteran) added a final slide to the student leaders’ presentation. A map of Long Island filled the screen – a long, skinny checkerboard of an island with different colors representing the predominant racial makeup of each town. The teacher pointed out the dividing line of the Meadowbrook Parkway, a familiar road to these students, although perhaps never viewed through this particular lens.
The teacher waited, then simply asked, “So what do you think when you see this?” He did not draw the conclusion for them. Did the ensuing discussion bring about the chaos and destruction we are warned about? Did the facts sow the seeds of blame, distrust and resentment among the student body? Did the students turn against each other, the community forever divided and tarnished by this new information? I did not see any of that.
What I did see were students engaged in a subject many find boring and irrelevant to their lives. Learning something new is exciting, no matter what the subject. The student presenters actually took the initiative to go beyond my book and do further research about Long Island. They were hungry to learn more. Isn't that what every teacher wants?
I told the students at Calhoun,
“We all have the right to write our own history.”
I’m confident the students I met will do just that. Hopefully, there will be teachers similar to those at Calhoun to teach it.