Madeline Morgan Fought for the Teaching of Black History in Schools. 80 Years Later the Fight Isn't Over

“...we still haven’t got all our rights, and that’s that.”

The words were written by Louis Brown,* a Black eighth grader at Emerson Elementary in Chicago. I first read them in late 2020, against a backdrop formed by the racial and economic inequities exposed by the pandemic, the seemingly daily drumbeat of police killings, and the surging protest movement for Black Lives. They struck me in their rawness, their immediacy. Brown, however, had written his words in the spring of 1943, sitting at a desk in school that had long since been shuttered.

I was reading his work in the archives of the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library and its Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, where much of the city’s African American past is preserved. As a historian of education, finding the voices of students in historical archives is rare. When those voices speak to the present in ways that collapse the distance of nearly 80 years, it is even more remarkable.

Brown’s statement about what the nation owed its Black citizens, and the still unpaid nature of that debt, was sparked by the introduction of a pioneering Black history curriculum at his school. Called the Supplementary Units for the Course of Instruction in Social Studies, it was adopted and used in Chicago schools between 1942 and 1945.

Back when most social studies texts marginalized or ignored Black Americans as a matter of course, the Supplementary Units were a groundbreaking contrast. Lessons included material on West Africa and its connection to the Black diaspora; honest accounts of the brutality of the slave trade; information on slave revolts, abolitionism, and Black military service during the Civil War; and descriptions of the accomplishments of Black artists, intellectuals, explorers, and inventors.

The lessons prompted students to think deeply and critically about Black history and about American history more broadly. Oftentimes those discussions also led to questions about the present, especially as the U.S. championed democracy on the battlefields of Europe while continuing to tolerate Jim Crow laws, lynching, restrictive covenants, a segregated military, and separate schools at home.

The Supplementary Units and their author, Madeline Morgan (later Madeline Stratton Morris) are the subject of my forthcoming book, “A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight For Black History in Schools.” In it, I follow Morgan from her childhood in Bronzeville, the beating heart of Chicago’s Black intellectual and cultural scene, through her education at Chicago Normal College (now Chicago State University) and Northwestern University, and into the classroom, where she began the push for Black representation. Her efforts ultimately manifested in the Supplementary Units.