Most American adults and teachers lack basic knowledge of slavery’s history

Evidence

One of the reasons American children so poorly understand the history and legacy of slavery is because the adults charged with teaching them don’t know it very well, either. A 2019 Washington Post–SSRS poll found that only about half of American adults realize that all thirteen colonies engaged in slavery. Even educators struggle with basic facts of history, the SPLC report found: only about half of U.S. teachers understand that enslavers dominated the presidency in the decades after the founding and would dominate the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate until the Civil War. Of more than seventeen hundred social studies teachers surveyed in the SPLC study, “a bare majority say they feel competent to teach about slavery. Most say that the available resources and preparation programs have failed them.” As the renowned slavery historian Ira Berlin wrote in an essay in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, “The simple truth is that most Americans know little about the three-hundred-year history of slavery in mainland North America with respect to peoples of African descent and almost nothing of its effect on the majority of white Americans.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 30