Carolina K-12, part of the Carolina Public Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hosted the conference. It received a $974,000 American History and Civics grant from the U.S. Department of Education over three years. These funds enabled the group to host this professional development.
Cori Greer-Banks, a 24-year veteran teacher and the director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina K-12 program, set the tone for the educators on day one.
“The question here that I want you guys to consider is: What can Wilmington, this place, teach us about democracy, memory, and our responsibility to tell the whole story?” she asked
Greer-Banks was one of the pioneers in teaching what happened during the Wilmington coup and massacre at a charter school in Raleigh in the mid 2010s. 1898 didn’t appear in the state standards until 2021.
“So I was taking a big risk in teaching this topic to my eighth graders,” she said.
Greer-Banks, though, told the educators that they need to be prepared for possible pushback if someone alleges that teaching the Wilmington 1898 coup is ‘woke history.’
“You need to come with your airtight defense and point to the North Carolina Standards of Studies, where it explicitly states that we are mandated as educators to teach Wilmington 1898,” she said.
On the third day of the conference, those 50-some educators walked through a lesson they could do with students after reading either a fictional or non-fictional book on 1898. Greer-Banks said her students read Barbara Wright’s Crow when she was a teacher - a fictional account of 1898.
To accompany that assignment, students also read a historical primary source: for example, reading and annotating the “White Declaration of Independence,” written by one of the coup perpetrators, Alfred Moore Waddell. The document demanded that the Black community give up power and, in some cases, leave the city.
The educators acted as students for the mock lesson and were assigned to write a formal rebuttal to the White Declaration on behalf of the Wilmington Black community.
The rules for role play, though, have to be clearly explained for students, added Greer-Banks.
“We don't just go into role play and say do whatever you want because we know kids can take it way too far,” she said.
But when history comes to life and sits right before you, even adults can feel the emotional weight of the past.
At one table, six educators from across the state worked together on the assignment. Lanelle Sutton, who is Black, said she was angry and on the verge of tears when she read what Waddell had written.
“So why even tell me you are waiting for me to agree? Especially when you already think I'm dumb, but if I was so dumb, why do I have so much?” Sutton asked.
Educator Tracey Barrett wanted to point out that White supremacists like Waddell were betraying American values.
“In blaming their own failures on their neighbors, however else we want to say it, like they’re betraying democracy to advance themselves economically, or betraying democracy for their own gain,” Barrett said.
Teacher Sarah Walls wanted to brainstorm tone for the rebuttal.
“Indignant or maybe angry?” she asked the group.
Others said they should write in a neutral tone so as not to further inflame anger and violence.
Barrett disagreed.
“While I hear that the idea of anger can be, you know, you don't want to escalate the situation towards violence, the responsibility isn't always on the people being targeted to deescalate from holding the line of here's what we will not accept in our community,” she said.
Walls said when writing their response to use some of Waddell’s own arguments against him.
“The white people who wrote this see this as a crisis, and so ‘we’ also see it as a crisis,” she said.
In the midst of discussing the document, these educators noted that this might be a difficult exercise for students, their parents, and the community.
Sutton said, “We also have to set up before we read stuff like this that we're not blaming anyone in this room. We're not blaming your ancestors. We're not. We're here to learn about history.”
Liz Davis, another educator, said how she approaches difficult topics in the classroom.
“We don't want anyone to ever feel the Holocaust or try and understand what genocide feels like. But they're gonna hear about terrible topics anyway. Why not do it with a safe guide, with a professional, with someone who knows how to carry them in and carry them out of it, so they can go on to math class and be a normal person,” Davis said.
Walls added that students don’t like to be lied to – that they want to be able to handle the realities of the human experience.
“Students are seeing a lot of things in their world. Our students are not living in sheltered bubbles, and when given the chance, they see parallels between what's going on in their world and what has happened in the past,” Walls said.
This conference on teaching 1898 comes amid a political climate that can oppose discussion of teaching the darker parts of history.
At the federal level, the Smithsonian has altered exhibits on slavery, and the North Carolina legislature has banned instruction on 12 divisive concepts in public schools, many related to race. But Barrett says this history is too important to leave off the lesson plan.
“The mindset of some elected leaders seems to be that the worst thing that can happen in a history classroom is that students will encounter a difficult emotion, right? That learning a truth about the past will cause them to feel something challenging," she said, "I think it shows a lot more about the emotional literacy of those adults than it does about the skills and potential of our students or about the historical reality of our country.”
LeRae Umfleet, the principal researcher and author of the official state record of the 1898 Wilmington coup, visited these same educators at the conference.
While she spoke, she gave some advice, holding aloft a brick pulled from a black-owned home that white supremacists shot into during the coup.
“So history is hard sometimes, and people say, ‘What do you mean hard? Remembering the dates?' Sure, that's hard sometimes when your teacher wants you to remember what year the Gettysburg Address was, but it's hard, like a brick, because if this hits you, it hurts.”
Student engagement, Umfleet added, can also be difficult to come by.
“Kids are like, ‘Oh, history's so boring.’ I'm like, it's a power struggle. Who has the power? Who wants the power? And what are they willing to do to get that power back or to keep it?” she said.
