Black students were first exposed to pre-colonial African civilizations through elective courses

Evidence

My public high school in Waterloo, Iowa, offered a one-semester elective called “The African American Experience,” which I took my sophomore year. Only other Black kids filled the seats each day, and the only Black male teacher I’d ever have taught the course. Rail-thin and mahogany-skinned, with a booming laugh that revealed the wide gap between his front teeth, Mr. Ray Dial deftly navigated our class through the ancient Mali, Songhai, Nubian, and Ghana empires (it was he who taught me that “from here to Timbuktu” referred to an African center of learning), surveying the cultures and knowledge and civilizations that existed among African peoples long before Europeans decided that millions of human beings could be forced across the ocean in the hulls of ships and then redefined as property. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 21

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Learning itself served as anticolonial resistance within segregated black schools — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 11