ABSTRACT
Under plantation slavery in the United States, African-American slaves were expected, among other duties, to care for children both in the big house and in the slave quarters. In an oral interview, Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III, Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University connected this shared cultural history to the present state of early childhood education. He shared that,
We [African people] have an incredible culture with over 1000 years of development. Right now you would have to say that we would be the world’s experts on child development and socialization. I do not know of any tradition that is more profound than African child development tradition. I am also talking about the legacy of that tradition in places around the world where we went, like here. It is no accident that people wanted us to nurse their babies in slavery. We were great mothers and fathers. Under the nose of the plantation masters, we ran schools. We had hundreds of schools after the Emancipation Proclamation that we paid for. We have a great deal to teach the world. But most of us in the field don’t know it, so we frequently expect that we can really learn things from other people and not much from ourselves.
(A. Hilliard interviewed by J. Simpson, May 2001)