ABSTRACT
The African American community’s historical and educational context explicitly tells the story of pain and suffering, misalignment and disorder, injustice and enslavement. This narrative of historical negativity is spoken about and often gives an inaccurate voice in the educational context for Black Americans. The authors assert that while the disenfranchisement of Black people is actualized, the counternarratives regarding the triumph through the travail and the stories of these experiences shift the lens from the victimized to the lenses of educators, historians, and social justice advocates. The counternarrative written within this chapter illuminate historical occurrences throughout our country from the inception of African American lives stemming from before the Emancipation of the enslaved, through the Civil Rights and the Jim Crow eras, Brown v. Board of Education, and to and through the Black Lives Matter movement of today. The authors capture the importance of shifting the narrative and exploring how to incorporate intentional influences in Black history pedagogy. The pedagogy of the oppressor has long been perpetuated within educational contexts. In this chapter, the authors inform the reader to investigate the stories behind the Black history and illuminate those stories by acknowledging the hurts, trials, and misfortunate realities, and challenge educators to create space, place, and opportunity for learning from a new lens in K–12 and higher education.
