Black History Is for Everyone

Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian interviewed Brian Jones, author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History and Black History Is for Everyone. Jones is a former New York City public school teacher who served as the inaugural director of the Center for Educators and Schools at the New York Public Library and was the associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Jesse Hagopian: Why did you title the book Black History Is for Everyone?

Brian Jones: There are many meanings in the title, but I’ll just highlight two of them here. I don’t think people appreciate enough just how central the activism of Black people has been to the world that we’re living in now in the United States. Many historians consider the Civil War a second founding. Like, the country started over again in that moment. So what’s the vision of that starting over? Well, the Reconstruction Amendments.

The right to vote is extended to Black people. Everybody born here is a citizen — including Black people. The rights — the legal framework — that we live in right now is arguably a framework that Black people fought for. And the whitelash that we’re living through right now is so clearly — and often explicitly — trying to reach back to the Reconstruction Amendments and overturn them. It seems clear they want to go back to an original version of the nation — the more explicitly white supremacist version.

We can also look back at what Black educators did under very repressive circumstances — where their histories and professions and livelihoods were constantly threatened, where the things they wanted to teach were banned — and they had many different strategies for dealing with those circumstances. They used fugitive strategies — like closing the door and doing things that people wouldn’t see, creating independent institutions, and then, where possible, pushing back and organizing and fighting back to challenge those curricular demands.

This is one way Black history is for everyone: Because many different kinds of educators — not just Black educators — are right now living under curriculum bans, teaching under the threat of having their livelihoods taken away, having their professional credentials threatened.

Black history is not just something for them to teach — it’s a resource for them. For thinking about how they need to do what generations of Black educators have done. And there are stories from Black history that are there now for everyone — for all of us — to benefit from, and to think with, about how we move through these difficult moments to something hopefully better on the other side.

JH: You weave powerful personal stories throughout Black History Is for Everyone. What made you decide to include your own story? What do you think personal narrative makes possible — both for readers and for you as the writer — when telling the story of Black history?

BJ: It’s a short book. You don’t have to stay with me for too long, but I do want you to stay with me. And I think learning a little bit about the perspective that I’m bringing to the story helps you understand where I’m coming from.

I guess if there was one thing I would highlight about my own story, it would be that I grew up so differently from the way that my parents grew up. And in some ways, it’s only been recently that I’ve come to appreciate the how and why of that — especially in terms of schooling. I went to schools that were multiracial but predominantly attended by white people. Both of my parents grew up in what we would today call all-Black segregated communities and went to schools with all-Black classmates and all-Black educators and remember those communities fondly. And I think it’s taken a while for Black history scholarship to break through and come around to telling the story of the power of those communities, and the commitment and passion of those educators, and the meaning of those spaces that they created.

Learning more about why the schools that I went to looked the way they did — and why my upbringing looked so different from my parents’ — is part of what I’m grappling with in this book.

JH: I love this passage where you ask a provocative question that becomes a central theme:

The enemies of Black history like to claim that it’s anti-American, but is it? Some of Black history’s defenders shoot back: No, Black history is American history. . . . But is Black history necessarily American? Does the study of Black history tend to be pro or anti the United States in some meaningful sense?

How do you answer those questions? Is Black history American history — or does it offer a challenge to the very idea of the United States and the way it’s been constructed?

BJ: That is the kind of question that is really fun to think about with students. And part of the reason I don’t want us to be limited to Black history as American history is then we don’t get to ask that question. This kind of questioning allows us to let in a whole lot of stories from Black history that don’t fit neatly into the catalog of proud contributions to national greatness.

To be clear, a lot of times Black people are marching under the American flag, claiming the Constitution, studying the Constitution, trying to make the nation better than it is, and doing so within its own rubrics — within its own words, and its own language, and its own promises. There’s a lot of that and we can’t easily put that aside.

And there’s a lot of that right now. People are fighting to try to keep other people safe and are using America’s stated ideals as part of the banner under which they’re doing that. I don’t want to be dismissive of that. We should take that seriously. And I’m for classrooms where people could come out of that conversation a lot of different ways. I think that’s our obligation as educators. We need to help people consider wide horizons, and not narrow them.

And the wideness has to include the other view, which includes prominent, intelligent, compelling stories from Black history, where leaders question the American project — disagree with it sharply, totally oppose what it’s doing overseas, and in some cases, have solidarity with and support for other nations and not for the United States in ways that could reasonably be described as disloyal.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the first civil rights organization to come out against the war in Vietnam — in part because one of their activists was murdered in Tuskegee, Alabama. The statement they put out basically said, “We’re fighting the same fight as the Vietnamese and against the same enemy.” That is not just a peace statement. That’s not just an anti-war statement. That is a statement identifying with the cause of someone who was at the time an official enemy. So there are episodes in Black history that don’t neatly fit into “Black history as American history.” There’s something else there. And that “something else” is often an internationalist impulse — an impulse to look abroad for solidarity and to think outside of the borders of the United States.

And isn’t that logical? Given that Black people have so often been hunted by the nation, kidnapped by the nation, excluded by the nation, murdered by the nation, the amount of time when we are reasonably included as democratic citizens in the grand sweep of history is quite brief.  So it’s not shocking that we would look elsewhere for solidarity. In addition, I’m skeptical that we can solve problems like climate change and war within the global system of competitive nation-states. I’m not sure nation-states competing against each other are capable of solving these problems. And that means these internationalist impulses that we see throughout Black history may help us point to a different way of organizing ourselves. 

JH: I love that invitation to educators to allow their students to think bigger — not just to stop at the nationalism that textbooks promote, but to investigate areas of Black history that point beyond our borders. I especially loved your discussions in the “Revolution” chapter about Haiti. As someone who has studied Haiti for a while — my family and I survived the earthquake in 2010, which led me to want to learn everything I could about Haiti — I learned a lot from your chapter.

You tell a powerful story about Frederick Douglass’ role as U.S. ambassador to Haiti, a nation born of the only successful slave revolution in history. At the time, Douglass had to represent a country that had once enslaved him, while honoring Haiti — a nation that had struck a blow for Black freedom across the globe.

So why is this story of Haiti so central to understanding Black history? And why zero in on Douglass’ relationship with Haiti?

BJ: Frederick Douglass’ career is just unbelievable. His life story helps us think about this question of What’s our relationship to the nation? What could it be? What should it be? He goes from being hunted by the United States to being an official representative of the United States — an ambassador of it. He helped lead us through the second founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction. And as ambassador, as you say, to this incredible new nation founded in the middle of a revolt, he is torn.

His impulse is to lift up the nation of Haiti and extend the hand of solidarity. He assumed that because the United States just abolished slavery, the nation would want Haiti to be successful as a country that also abolished slavery. But no. Turns out that’s not what the United States wants to do.

Lots of people in the United States want that — especially Black people — but that’s not what the U.S. government wants to do. The U.S. government is trying to figure out how to fit Haiti into its own imperial ambitions, and is not interested in a free, proud, and prosperous Haiti. And so immediately it starts violating Haiti’s sovereignty — from day one.

And that puts Frederick Douglass in a bind. So what did Douglass do? How did he answer this question of what to do when you’re having to represent the United States to Haiti while the United States is trying to violate Haiti’s sovereignty?

JH: Your readers will have to read the book to find out what happens [laughs]. 

BJ: I will say that for Black people all over the world, the American and French Revolutions really weren’t beacons of liberty in the way that the Haitian Revolution was. The American Revolution strengthened slavery. The Haitian Revolution broke it. The Haitian Revolution set a new standard and created a whole new set of expectations for Black people all over the world about what was possible. To paraphrase Nelson Mandela, you always think something’s impossible until it happens. And then once it happens, and it becomes a real fact in the world, suddenly that is the yardstick.

JH: There are so many powerful lessons packed into the few short pages of your book. But I’ll save other questions for our Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle interview on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026.