surrender. we are those warriors, men and women of the soil. stubborn, courageous. we stand here on the edge of history, ready to push back one more time. help s not coming from california. it s not coming from massachusetts. it has to be you. what are you going to do about it? ur skin, try downy free & gentle. just pour into the rinse dispenser and downy will soften your clothes without dyes or perfumes. the towel washed with downy is softer, fluffier, and gentler on your skin. try downy free & gentle. recognized by the national psoriasis foundation and national eczema association.
that there is a place here that s so rich with history and i didn t know about it. and so i used the map on the front of the newspaper and drove over to the cemetery and found this beautiful place, and immediately felt the need to organize some community cleanups to bring attention to it. many of the african americans that are buried here were not slaves. and so they could be buried and recognized in different ways, but there is a very interesting cemetery called beck knob cemetery that s located on the north side of town, and it was a slave cemetery. and when you look at how overgrown it is, it s almost sad that you can almost drive past it and not even know it. would you take us there? yeah, i can take you there, but i don t know how much you ll be able to see because it s really overgrown.
history. i created a website with the picture of every historical marker in the state. have you taken a picture of the clinton riots marker? have i taken a picture of that marker. i know exactly where it is, near the railroad track in clinton. that s right. and what do you think. tell me what what do you know about that marker? well, i think that the clinton riot marker is particularly important because there was a riot during reconstruction in the town of clinton that was not in the history books that i read growing up studying mississippi history and the local public schools. reconstruction in america, not just in mississippi, is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated historical eras. and the people who wrote about it afterwards, north and south, wrote about it mainly from a white supremacy point of view,
all male institution. yeah. it s the oldest school in the country. it was founded in 1635 by a portion of the population of boston, england. it was all male. it was all white. it was all people of privilege. you know, i ve really come to believe that part of the purpose of history is to tell a story that unites us. yeah. but in order for that story to work, we have to see ourselves as being in the same boat to begin with. yep. we have to see ourselves as connected to other people. i really agree. so in your class today, how do you tell a story that helps these kids see themselves as connected to all the diverse people that surround them? well, it s important to talk about race and the history. and i want kids to understand that where we are today has its roots in the past, but it s really hard to convey the full scope of the way the history of this country plays out today.
civil war, my family are share croppers, come in the eras of jim crow, great migration moving throughout the south. i m a living part of that stream of history. and as a professor here at howard university, and particularly in africana studies, which is my field of study and area i work in, i devote a great part of my work understanding the implications of the civil war and reconstruction in terms of contemporary american life. what s this right here? deed of sale. deed of sale. these are reconstruction era documents. most people in the country don t no anything about that. you can say we saw the charter, we saw the deed of sale for the land. you know, you re the only teacher i ve filmed who is focused on the freed people s point of view when teaching reconstruction. how does teaching from that point of view make a difference for your students? i hope they will walk out with is a sense of human purpose that they have a stake in. there is always the threat of forgetting in terms