Why I Taught Romanian Students about America’s Black Freedom Movement
The Course
In the fall of 2021, I was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Timișoara, Romania.
I had retired in 2018 after almost four decades teaching Political Science to American college students.
My academic specialty was American politics.
Being selected for The Fulbright Scholar Program in retirement gave me an opportunity to ask myself this question:
What stories about America would give Romanians the most comprehensive picture America’s struggle to live up to its Founding ideals?
The answer came to me in the spring of 2021 when my partner Rebecca and I were touring the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
I asked our guide, a young African-American man, why he worked at this outdoor museum honoring the 4400 black Americans lynched by other Americans.
He replied:
Because they tried to eradicate us.
This young man gave me the answer to my question.
To understand America, I and my Romanian students needed to read, hear, and see the voices of my fellow country-persons who had been on the receiving end of this kind of hatred.
A hatred I had never experienced.
So I created a course with the voices of black artists, intellectuals, politicians, activists, and scholars.
I titled the course The Black Freedom Movement and American Democracy.
On the first day of class, I shared with my students the power point in the photo above and told them we would:
Read, listen, and watch the work of:
Langston Hughes, Nina Simone, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen (Artists)
James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass (Intellectuals)
President Barack Obama (politician)
Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcom X (activists)
Isabelle Wilkerson, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Richard Johnson, Thomas Holt, Vincent Harding, Ta-Nehisi Coates (scholars)
One student raised her hand and asked:
Why Black Voices?
Why not American Indian voices?
Linda had lived in America and had worked with Native Americans.
I said a good way to learn about a country is to see it from the edge, from people who were not included as full citizens. In America, that list is long and does include Native Americans, women, Latinos, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and the LGBTQ community.
I chose Black Americans because of the centrality of the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow to the development of American society.
And because of the centrality of the Black Freedom Movement to the development of American Democracy.
And because many liberation movements in America and around the world learned lessons from America’s Civil Rights Movement.
Including Romanians, in 1989.
I then asked the class:
Why is voice important in a Democracy?
My Romanian students were doing a Master’s Degree in American Studies.
Many were elementary or secondary school teachers; most worked full time.
We met once a week, for 90 minutes. Each student took 6 or 7 courses each semester in this two year graduate program.
All spoke excellent English.
Their parents were part of the first generation that had experienced democracy after almost 50 years of ruinous Communist rule.
They were busy, mature, curious, and opinionated.
So I waited for an answer.
Alexandru said “My voice is important because my interests are different from yours.”
Bingo.
I clicked to the second slide with this quote by Jennifer Richeson, a Yale Psychologist.
My lab is in an old engineering building and there’s exactly one women’s bathroom. No one noticed. And then slowly, Yale began adding women to the department, and they noticed it. They complained. Now there was friction. What had gone unnoticed by those in power in one era was unacceptable to those gaining power in another. When new people show up, they notice things and begin making demands.
This is the power of voice, of voices, in America.
Self published 9/26/22
