Teachers Need To Talk: Stories of Teaching in the Deep South

Jim Garrett is a professor of Social Studies Education at the University of Georgia and Montu Miller is a teacher of peer leadership, ethnic studies, and AP African American Studies at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens.

Teachers need to talk. 

For three years before starting our Teacher Fellowship, we designed workshops for teachers aimed at building community within and across buildings and grade levels.

Then, during the winter of 2023 and early 2024, we convened social studies teachers in our town of Athens, Georgia, to take part in rich discussions about materials from The 1619 Project and our own stories of what it means to teach in the Deep South. 

Throughout our project, we had a small but diverse group of teachers deeply engaging in honest reflection about the realities of learning and teaching about the racialized past. From Riley, who is in her first year teaching, to Wyatt in his 20th year, we were a group of Black, white, Protestant, Jewish, atheist, single, married, child-raising, not-child-raising, middle school, high school, and private school teachers who shared at least the following two things: 

1. A commitment to antiracist teaching, and 

2. A desire for community with other teachers who share that commitment. 

The public school district in Athens is a Title 1 district where the student population is 49% Black, 25% Hispanic, 20% white, 4% multi-racial, and 2% Asian. The county itself, however, is 55% white, 25% Black, 11% Hispanic, and 4% Asian. These demographic patterns are direct consequences of the history of enslavement, and engaging with the materials in The 1619 Project (and of course other related texts and information) is a natural fit for social studies educators to support the Black and brown students our district serves. 

However, teaching about the histories and legacies of racism and racial violence is never simple. In states like the one we live in, such teaching is complicated further by the efforts to remove honest and forthright accounts of these topics from schools. We wish deeply that our state legislators would encourage and support us in assisting our students to learn about, and learn from, the histories of enslavement and the continuing impact of these histories on our current society. Because we do not have that support, and because of our commitment to honest, factual histories, we endeavored to make our own communities of support.

Therefore, with the support of the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Education Network, we devised a plan to invite teachers to convene for a series of conversations about their experiences teaching about the legacy of slavery in the Deep South. We organized each session to center a spirit of collaboration, community, and educational responsibility. For three sessions, we convened on Friday evenings in a restored firehall owned by a nonprofit organization called Historic Athens for what we have been calling “uncommon conversations.” We were fortunate to have the opportunity to meet at this location because of the race-conscious work Historic Athens does for our community. We could immediately feel that this was the right location for our dialogues. We shared stories about our families, our successes, challenges, frustrations, and wishes for our students and communities.

We also focused each session on direct engagement with materials from The 1619 Project (its essays, podcasts, and docuseries).

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“Despite being one of the most criticized pieces of curriculum, The 1619 Project is one of the most accurate and necessary projects in the United States right now,” wrote Riley Hefner, a native Athenian and first-year teacher in Athens, in a post-program reflection.

“This generation of students is more engaged in the news than ever before due to technology. They hunger to know more when something related to social issues pops off in the news and look to me for accurate answers. So I purposefully design lessons to help them understand how the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism continue to shape society today,” added educator Sean Simpson in his post-program reflection. “To do so correctly, I constantly do research to provide accurate information to them. I've used 1619 Project articles at times and have developed a lot of inquiry-based lessons centered on primary sources, reputable historical accounts, and diverse perspectives to present a well rounded understanding of social studies topics."

As we reviewed materials from The 1619 Project, we reflected on the historical knowledge we were learning from The 1619 Project sources. But more than that, we discussed what that knowledge comes to mean for us as individual people who work with youth in schools. 

In our first meeting, we discussed the essay “The Idea of America” by 1619 creator Nikole Hannah-Jones. During that meeting, what was remarkable was how as each individual pointed to particular excerpts from the essay, we all referenced the places of our upbringing. Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Georgia all figured in our experience of reading and engaging with Hannah-Jones’ essay. We each heard from one another about the ways that these histories of growing up around particular kinds of knowledge about racism affected us. We listened about the various ways ignorance had yielded to awareness and deliberated on how our awareness of the lasting legacy of slavery and racism has informed our lesson plans and teaching strategies. These were intimate conversations of teaching at the granular level, but they attended to issues that spoke to a wide arc of American history. 

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At the culmination of our sessions, we asked teachers to produce their own reflections. These are deeply autobiographical works that are a testament to the connections between who we are as people, how we learned about being those people, and what that means for us to be teachers in a place where most of our students are Black and brown. Excerpts from these reflections, and a full outline for how we organized the three gatherings can be found in our project, Stories of Teaching in the Deep South.

“As an early career teacher, I am trying my best to incorporate The 1619 Project into my content and curriculum…Through this group, I have gotten more ideas and tangible suggestions for what I can do in my room.”— Riley Hefner, an educator from Athens who participated in the Stories of Teaching in the Deep South program in spring 2024

“It’s not anti-American to be critical of your country’s past, but rather, inherently American to call out truth wherever it is present.”— Chris Bateson, a veteran social studies teacher and participant, in his reflection

“We must honestly acknowledge the truths in The 1619 Project and educate ourselves to counter the white-washed history we were taught. Not only should we teach The 1619 Project, we should also ask our students why it has so many white people upset to the point of legislating against it.”— Beth Mendenhall, an educator in a high school receiving Title 1 funding in Athens who participated in this series in spring 2024

Across these stories, we learned that the South is not only a place of continued backlash against the teaching of factual histories, it is also a place where committed educators are acting in good faith to earnestly address these histories in ways that are directly relevant to their students and themselves. 

We learned from these experiences that teachers need to talk. They need to build trust with one another, convene and discuss the stakes of our work, and double down on relationships and community. We learned that we can support one another, and our capacity to teach powerfully is increased through our own awareness of what we know, what we do not know, and how we relate to our work. 

Our creative move, as we see it and invite others to think with, is that there is an incredible possibility to take on the things that seem too big by starting and staying small. With continued support, community, and connection, we can connect to the people in our buildings, districts, and communities and take responsibility for the educational experiences of the youth with whom we work.

"It’s been really powerful to be a part of this group that Jim has convened to swap stories of our resistance teaching in the Deep South. It has been really healing. It’s been really inspiring in lots of ways.”— Lora Smothers, a 1619 Project Education Network alumnus and the founder and director of the Joy Village School in Athens, a K-8 school focused on the joy and thriving of Black youth.

“Collaboration with fellow educators who work in the same district has been significant in my professional growth, providing invaluable insights, sharing knowledge and resources, and reinforcing our shared commitment to creating an inclusive and equitable education system […] Through continued collaboration, engagement with resources like The 1619 Project, and a steadfast commitment to confronting uncomfortable truths, I am confident that we can help guide the future where the whole story is told.”— Excerpt from the post-program reflection by Montu Miller, facilitator for Stories of Teaching in the Deep South and a veteran educator in Athens.