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Not Even Past

Resources For Teaching Black History

Over the past decade, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources connected to Black History. These are designed to showcase research but also to help teachers. Here they are collected in one compilation page.

Compiled by Alina Scott

Topics

  1. Economy of Slavery
  2. Slavery & the Family
  3. Urban Slavery
  4. Key Figures
  5. Medicine & Healthcare
  6. Civil Rights & Black Power
  7. On #BlackLivesMatter
  8. Gender & Sexuality
  9. Diasporic Blackness
  10. Primary Sources
  11. Reviews

Economy of Slavery

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

STEPHANIE E. JONES-ROGERS

Slavery & the Family

Urban Slavery

Key Figures

Lucy Parsons’s biography offers several overlapping narratives— a love story between a former slave and a former Confederate soldier, the rise and decline of radical labor agitation, the evolution of race as a political ideology and social signifier, and the trajectory of social reform from Reconstruction through the New Deal. She was a bold, enigmatic woman. Her power to inform and fascinate is enduring and her story, in all its complexity, remains a remarkable one for its useful legacies no less than its cautionary lessons.

Jacqueline Jones, “Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical”

Medicine & Healthcare

Civil Rights & Black Power

On #BlackLivesMatter

Gender & Sexuality

Black is beautiful.  The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s popularized this slogan and sentiment, but almost half-a-century earlier, black beauty companies used elaborate advertisements like the one pictured here to sell their vision to uplift and beautify black women.  African American women like Madam C.J. Walker produced beauty products and trained women to work as sales agents and beauticians. and in the process, developed an enduring enterprise that promoted economic opportunities and connections with African descendant peoples throughout North and South America.

Tiffany Gill, “Black is Beautiful – And Profitable”

Diaspora

Primary Sources

Reviews in Black History

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. 

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes, Reviewed By Tiana Wilson

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