"You have charters schools that have risen and are mostly religious in nature and people think they are better for their kids, so they put them in charter schools or then they put them in Christian academies, and all the materials are designed to tell a lie. So, what you're faced with is an educational system that, by the time the students get to me in college, it's a mess. You have people crying because they don't know anything about slavery. My African American students are always upset because they're like, "I never learned this." And I'm like "You didn't learn it because you probably had really crappy books. Where you from?" Half the time, it's somewhere in the South. Some of them were in private schools. One summer, I did a short one-week course about African Americans to get people ready for school, and they didn't know anything about lynching.
I had to stop everything and basically say, "I'm sorry, but this is going to feel like terror to you for the next two hours. I want you to understand what that terror was like for African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century. I want you to understand what people in this country have done because they didn't want to be with us or they did not want us to be integrated into this society. You need to understand the kind of violence that has happened in America.""…
