PHILADELPHIA, June 22 - Angry that public
schools here have always taught American history through
a Eurocentric prism, parents of black children began pleading
with local school officials to offer a course in African-American
history.
That was nearly 40 years ago.
This year, their pleas were finally - and
emphatically - answered. Starting in September, students
entering city high schools as ninth graders will be required
to take a course in African-American history, making Philadelphia
the first major city to require such a course for high school
graduation.
School officials here say the course carries
huge benefits for all students and offers a perspective
on American history that has been largely absent from most
contemporary teaching guides.
"You cannot understand American history
without understanding the African-American experience; I
don't care what anybody says," said Paul G. Vallas,
the school system's chief executive, who is white. "It
benefits African-American children who need a more comprehensive
understanding of their own culture, and it also benefits
non-African-Americans to understand the full totality of
the American experience."
Critics of the policy shift say it will
further polarize the city by focusing attention on just
one race and not dealing with other racial and ethnic groups
like Mexicans, Chinese or Poles.
According to a course outline developed
by district officials, the course will focus on how Africans
became Americans through the colonial period, efforts of
slaves to achieve freedom, the Civil War and its aftermath,
economic development for blacks through the last century,
the civil rights movement and the growth of modern black
nationalist movements in the United States and Africa.
Supporters say the course will place a new
emphasis on historical African-American figures like Frederick
Douglass, Ida B. Wells and Dr. Charles Drew, whose contributions
to American life and culture seldom get more than a brief
mention, if that, in the current textbooks that many schools
use.
The Philadelphia School District includes
185,000 students, two-thirds of whom are African-American,
and only two in seven are white or Hispanic. The School
Reform Commission, a panel that sets policy and is now composed
of three whites and two blacks, voted 5 to 0 in February
to make the course mandatory in all 53 high schools after
some in recent years had offered African-American history
as an elective.
The vote garnered little notice at the time,
but in recent weeks as the school board began mailing out
letters to parents informing them of next year's curriculum,
pockets of local resistance began emerging.
The speaker of the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, John M. Perzel, an otherwise strong supporter
of the city's schools for recent improvements in test scores,
asked the commission to reconsider making the course mandatory.
Mr. Perzel, a Republican who represents
a district in northeast Philadelphia that is largely white,
said in a letter to the commission chairman, James E. Nevels,
that he was concerned that the mandate "will divide,
rather than unite" the city "and thereby erode
the positive learning environment."
Mr. Nevels, calling himself "respectful
of the points" Mr. Perzel raised, said he was certain
that district officials would not reverse their decision.
"There's no question about the commitment to African-American
history by the Philadelphia School District," he said.
An aide to Mr. Perzel said the letter was
prompted, in part, by complaints from constituents. Mr.
Perzel declined a request for an interview, but his sentiments
appear to reflect discomfort among some whites elsewhere
in the city.
Standing outside a recreation center in
Fishtown, a largely white working-class neighborhood, Mike
Budnick, 16, called the requirement "a bad idea"
and said he was not especially interested in learning about
black culture or heritage.
"I'm more interested in our history,"
he said.
A friend of Mr. Budnick, Arbi Ferko, also
16, said, "It's not our history to learn," and
pointed out, as other critics have, that the school had
not sought to create courses on the history of other groups.
Supporters of the course are dismayed by
such views, insisting that in large measure, African-Americans,
like no other ethnic group, have been cheated by contemporary
textbooks and social studies curriculums that introduce
students to blacks in this country as slaves from Africa
with no prior language, culture or heritage.
"Too often, African-Americans are marginalized
in American society," said Sandra Dungee Glenn, a commission
member who was the driving force behind making the course
mandatory. "People's views and understanding of who
we are focus on us as descendents of slaves. It begins and
ends there, giving us inferior status."
The course is designed to alter those perceptions
by reviewing the origins of civilization in Africa and early
developments in African history before tracking the movement
of Africans to North America as slaves.
From that point, the course follows the
progress and travails of blacks throughout American history
with a special emphasis on their contributions.
As a pilot program, African history was
offered in the spring semester this year in four high schools.
Patricia Thomas Whyatt taught the course
at Strawberry Mansion, a nearly all-black school of 900
students, and found that even her own students had misconceptions
of their race.
"The first day I asked students to
make a list of everything they knew about Africa, then we
went through each item," Ms. Whyatt said. "They
thought Africa was all jungle, that people ran around with
spears and lived in huts. A lot of crazy things like that."
By the end of school this month, she said,
not only had perceptions changed but self-esteem had improved
as well.
One of her students, Christopher Davis,
18, said: "In American society, we're known as gangsters,
drug dealers and killers. People don't know all about our
heritage, what we stood for, our accomplishments as a culture.
I feel better now because I know a little bit more about
how we lived before we got here."
