The education of a historian often begins at home, rooted in family influences and personal experiences. The author's upbringing featured discussions about history that contrasted sharply with formal education. While school curricula neglected topics like slavery and modern racism, parents emphasized the injustices of the Jim Crow system and celebrated figures of dissent like Frederick Douglass. The fragility of civil liberties became a critical lesson as family members faced blacklisting and job losses due to their beliefs and activism, highlighting the precarious nature of freedom of speech and dissent.
Freedom is neither a fixed idea, nor the story of progress toward a predetermined goal. My education as a historian began at home.
The history that my brother Tom and I absorbed was quite different from what we were taught at school. There, slavery and modern-day racism were rarely, if ever, mentioned.
Our parents instilled in us the conviction that the Jim Crow system was a scandalous injustice and that radical dissenters such as Frederick Douglass were among the most heroic Americans.
The fragility of civil liberties was an important historical lesson learned through my family's experiences with being blacklisted and losing their jobs.
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