This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers' bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them,…

Reparations policies that seek to make amends for a harm incurred face exigent challenges. In this article we focus on what makes reparations successful and what policy components are necessary, if not sufficient, for success. To study the success of reparations policy design we employ a case study approach. Our analysis investigates the…

In the US curriculum, "The History of Mary Prince" (Prince, 1831) is an under-recognized account of Black enslavement and the salt industry in the 19th century. Mary Prince, a Black enslaved woman and salt laborer, is the author of the earliest known anti-slavery, anti-colonial autobiography written by a self-manumitted Black woman.…

Education in the African Diaspora unfolded under difficult conditions yet provided its communities with individual advancement, conceptual discoveries, and institutional achievements. Examining regions across the of African Diaspora, this essay explores education in the era of enslavement and emancipation (up to 1880); in times of…

The article critiques schools' current reification and overreliance on teaching slavery as a history of exceptional individuals and unbroken progress toward freedom. The authors explore how the counterstorying of narratives of formerly enslaved individuals in both preservice and inservice education coursework complicates and engages the histories…

Scholars have utilized the allegory of Reconstruction to trace threads between the historical and contemporary struggles for freedom. In this article, I highlight the ways that abolition has always been a dual project and remains as such in our present time. It calls for the complete destruction of oppressive structures while simultaneously…

Drawing on experiential, literary and historical narratives, this article connects the long history shaping the school-to-prison-pipeline to the contemporary experiences of Black youth in today's educational system. It maps abolitionism from its origins as a movement to end slavery through the ongoing Black freedom struggles that have challenged…

This conceptual article identifies the ways that the seventeenth-century slave code, "partus sequitur ventrem" (PSV), "the child follows the mother" is a functioning allochronism that undergirds the treatment of Black mothers in contemporary institutions of higher education. Through conceptualizing three functions of PSV,…

On a fall Thursday afternoon, the author sat with students, who were preservice social studies teachers, and discussed approaches to teaching slavery to high school students. As the discussion continued, the author began to ask about their experiences learning about the institution of chattel slavery in the United States South. During this…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

In an interview with Randall Kenan, Octavia E. Butler extracts the harsh realities of history and its effects on the present, stating, "I couldn't let her come back whole… Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole." (Kenan, Callaloo, 1991, 14, p. 498). This quote refers to her book, Kindred (1979) in which the protagonist, Dana,…

This article is a conversation with Juliet King, EdD, the AMS 2022 Living Legacy. Dr. King began her career in South Florida some five decades ago, teaching in Miami-Dade County when public schools were beginning to desegregate. She transferred to an inner-city school with a Title I Montessori program; this was her first introduction to the…

While the completion of a baccalaureate degree is the gateway to a greater quality of life in areas of employment, health, housing, civic engagement, mortality, and economic wealth, the college experience for Black American students is typically coupled with the accumulation of a disproportionately high amount of student loan debt. While the most…

If high school history courses are meant to introduce students to the paradoxes and debates of American history, then they should study the 1619 Project, the authors argue in this article. College history students regularly debate the extent to which slavery was formative to the development of American systems of law, business, medicine, religion…

In this article, I document and analyze all municipal, state, and county-level efforts for Black reparations in the United States. Most efforts resemble H.R. 40's exploratory commission model, possibly due to policy path dependency. Few geographies have allocated funding for committee recommendations, but some have allocated funds for committee…