Teaching Black history in Virginia through the political minefield

A high school history teacher in Newport News navigates the first year of controversial curriculum demands ordered by Gov. Glen Youngkin

By Leah Small

The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

Teaching Black history in Virginia classrooms today means sprinting through a political minefield. One misstep brings the ire of parents and conservative leaders who say teaching how race has shaped American history is harmful and divisive.

Virginia is one of 18 states that limits how teachers can discuss racism in the classroom. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin made the issue a cornerstone of his election campaign, and his first executive order banned teaching “inherently divisive concepts” in the state's public schools. The order says K through 12 curriculum are subject to a compliance review by top education officials in Virginia. Youngkin even established a short-lived hotline for parents to complain about teachers and lesson plans involving race. 

Matthan Wilson, who teaches government and African American American history at a high school in Newport News, aims to objectively teach the painful parts of American history, while dodging a political firefight. A 56-year-old Black man, Wilson, was raised in Portsmouth and was bussed to a predominantly white elementary school.  As a young student, he began to distrust the history he was being taught, leading him to read independently and question narratives that favored white American exceptionalism.

Today, Wilson teaches the African-American history elective. The course was developed in 2020 under former Governor Ralph Northam, following the racial reckoning brought by the Black Lives Matter movement. He helps his students think critically about complexities such as Blacks passing as white during segregation, and the contradiction of the founding fathers owning slaves and advocating for equality under the law. 

In his classroom, only two students stand for the pledge. Most feel the U.S. government has failed them, having spent their formative years in a society where systemic racism persists, as evidenced by many metrics of inequality.  

But Wilson sees  hope. He’s inspired by his student’s motivation to learn outside of the classroom, and desire to bring Americans of all races closer in both fellowship and equity. He encourages students to seek balanced perspectives and to challenge the mythos of American history. It’s his way of making sure that some of the darker chapters of history are not repeated..

“Understanding your mistakes makes you a better person, Wilson says, “because you say I messed up, which means I can change it.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I've always been interested in social studies. At Norfolk State, I got a degree in history. I've always been very interested in the stories. I used to listen to my grandmother tell stories on the porch in Southampton County, the stories were just so interesting, how people lived in that time and the experiences that they had. So I was always interested in history. I finished up with a master's in urban affairs.

[I wanted] to spark an interest in or to spread the love of history to younger students to give students an energetic view of history classes. When you're growing up, they were always those classes everybody said were so boring. But if I could bring my energy, if I could bring something new to the table and introduce it in a way the students could understand it and in a way that would make it interesting to them, then maybe I can spark something in someone.

My education in history started out in elementary school. I remember we had a textbook and my teacher was describing the founding of America. The textbook had a picture of a Puritan who was holding an ax and had all of these tree stubs in his field, where it looks as if he had chopped down the trees. And my teacher said the Puritans came over and they cleared the land and built this great nation. 

I'm thinking, wait a minute, who did we have a Thanksgiving with? And then we found out the Native Americans were here and they were here first. And I'm thinking, so why would the Europeans have to come and clear the land?

And as a second grader, I could not understand. It did not make sense to me. I said, well, maybe I need to look into this more.

My father was a graduate of Norfolk State also. He's an economics major. He had all his textbooks in our den on a bookshelf and I would take the textbooks down, and I would read textbooks and say, wait a minute, what? Here I am, a second grader reading college level textbooks. And I said, wait a minute, that teacher didn’t teach me the right thing!

(I told the teacher) what you said wasn’t right. I would get ostracized for it. Well, what I went through in Portsmouth for the third year of integration, bussing in inner city Portsmouth, for us to talk back to a (white) teacher that way meant you got sent out.

There's this ideology that when you're teaching African-American history that it does become separate. You get very cautious about what you say and what you discuss. One of the things that we always try to tell kids in the very beginning is that there weren't any slaves that were brought from Africa. You say, well, they weren't slaves. They were architects, engineers, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, warriors that were brought to America. And turned into slaves. 

Well, you get kind of nervous saying those kinds of things because that's not an ideology that a lot of people have and [opponents] say, well, no, you’re teaching something that’s woke. You're trying to sway kids to believe a certain ideology. [But] when they first came in 1619 they weren’t all slaves. Some of them were indentured servants that gained their freedom. So you really have to stick to the curriculum guide. And sometimes at the end of the class, you have a student say, well, ‘Why didn’t you say this?’ And you’re sitting there with a student with tears in their eyes.

When we were doing the (online video) course during the pandemic, we've had parents that kind of sat back and were listening to the course. They would come in and they would be there just as a student would, right on time for class. I had parents who were taking notes listening to it, asking me about books that they could read and find out information, because a lot of parents are saying, I was never taught this information myself.

The Black Lives Matter movement, when that was going on, it was the scariest thing in the world to talk about because you had the parents that would say, all lives matter. And it was hurtful to a lot of kids. You know, Black Lives Matter. 

You try to sit down and talk to the parent, let them see the curriculum, let them know the classroom is open. That they can talk to me. I can show them where we get information from. Let them see that I'm not trying to indoctrinate the kids; I'm just reporting what's going on. But we want the kids to see it from different perspectives so that the kids can make their own mind up about what they're seeing, which is sometimes difficult if you give in to one side of the story. 

These young people today are incredible. I don't think we give them enough credit because they don't carry themselves the way we do. They don't believe the way we believe. But also they are not growing up in a world we grew up in. The world is changing. These kids are strong. They're resilient. These are students from all ethnic backgrounds. They're just saying this isn't right and they're starting to see things very differently. And as the demographics of America change, and they are changing rapidly, we're going to see a lot of different things happen in our lifetime, hopefully for the better. Hopefully with a better understanding of the founding principle of the Constitution and what they meant by, All men are created equal. 

This is a great country, but we can't cherry pick what we teach kids, so it could be something that we enjoy. We can't teach kids that we did not make mistakes. We messed up. Let's take our mistakes and ’fess up to them, as the kids say. Let's make this a better country. Let’s stand up and take responsibility for it.