This episode originally aired on January 5, 2026.
Narratives of public education in the early United States generally describe three phases: before the United States even existed, the primary role of education was religious literacy. Around the time of the American Revolution and the decades after the role of education shifted toward political necessity, with founders believing that a republic could not survive without an educated citizenry capable of self-government. And then what we think of as “public” education, that was funded and standardized, began in the 1830s with what was called the Common School Movement. The common narrative describes a public system designed to allow people to gain knowledge and access to advancement in their lives.
Throughout this narrative arc, what’s often left out is the role race has always played at the root of education in America. And that’s what the new book, “America Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation” explores in great detail. It makes the case that the exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education systems all the way back to this country’s founding. It lays out how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students and funds from the U.S. War Department developed native boarding schools. We talk with its author to dig into this aspect of American history.
Guest:
Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, Professor of Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University
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Transcript
Mike Kiniry
From WGCU News, this is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Narratives of public education in the early United States generally describe 3 phases. Before the United States even existed, the primary role of education was religious literacy. Around the time of the American Revolution and the decades after, the role of education shifted toward political necessity, with the founders believing that a republic could survive without an educated citizenry that was capable of self-government. And then what we think of as public education that was funded and standardized began in the 1830s with what was called the common school movement. The common narrative describes a public system designed to allow people to gain knowledge and access to advancement in their lives. Throughout this narrative arc, what's often left out is the role race has always played at the root of education in America. And that's what the new book, American Grammar Race, Education and the Building of a Nation explores in great detail. It makes the case that the exploitation of black and indigenous people played an essential role in building American education systems all the way back to before this country's founding. It lays out how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students and funds from the U.S. War Department developed native boarding schools. Its author is Dr. Jarvis R. Givens. He's professor of education and African and African American studies at Harvard University. The book was released in October. I spoke with him on December 17th. Dr. Givens, welcome to the show.
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike Kiniry
So I want to know, first of all, when did you begin the process of writing this book, American Grammar? How far back is that timeline?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Yeah, so I began writing and researching for American grammar back in 2019 when I was teaching a class called the American School in Racial Formation. And a lot of questions that emerged for me and for my students in that class really sparked my interest in doing some work to kind of revise the early history of US education. And so that process began back in 2019. Though a lot of the research and reading that came to inform the questions that I asked began a long time ago, back to when I was in graduate school. And even undergrad, I remember taking some Native American studies courses where the history of Native education came up. And I would revisit some of those questions later on as a faculty member when I began to do this comparative work between Native white and black education. So there's really many, a lot of beginnings to my relationship to this topic and to this particular book. But actively researching and writing 2019.
Mike Kiniry
So it lines up pretty well with the rise of the use of the idea, probably misused in most cases, of critical race theory being a boogeyman in this country, which I found interesting because when it's published, what was it published, October of 25, so just a few months ago. And I bring that up because I want to just highlight that. So on the Harvard website, your areas of expertise are listed as diversity, equity, and inclusion. And those 3 words here in Florida have been prohibited by our state government and our Florida State Board of Education for the Florida college system. And so I just thought that was interesting that your book gets into the history of education in this country and highlights things that most people probably wouldn't think of. at a time when we're seeing what seems to be kind of an echoing of the past. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. Well, let's leave that there for now and let's get into the actual book. So by the way, I really enjoyed it. I listened to it, so I listened to the whole thing. Can you, for starters, describe what would be traditionally thought of when it comes to how education developed here in the US and where race and particularly indigenous people and black people fit into the story of the sort of traditional worldview?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Yeah, thank you so much for asking that fundamental question. So in terms of the historical scholarship that exists that for generations have really framed how we think about the origins of public education in the US, it's a story about public education developing as a part of the kind of broader democratic project of the United States. And it really, a lot of the kind of origin stories trace back to, just after the American Revolution, you have the founding fathers who are working to try to pull together this fledgling Republican, create coherence among, you know, the rebels who just broke away from the British crown, these former colonies, but having to do the work of trying to unify, the newly independent republic and schools became. one of the most important kind of social instruments for helping to create that kind of coherence and to develop a citizenry that had the capacity for self-government and to be self-determined. And so the idea was that providing education for common schools, for the common folks would be in support of the common good of the nation. And so the origin story is really this idea of public schooling as this radical, egalitarian institution that's developed in the context of America, before it's kind of widely developed in any of the other kind of modern Western nations. And that's kind of been the narrative that's been developed in terms of how public education is conceived of as an essential political institution for the context of the US. And for the most part, there's a lot of scholarship that doesn't really attend to the particularities of race at all, but there are some who do attend to it. And when it comes to the way in which, black folks are included in this narrative, a lot of historians for, quite a while would say that unfortunately, despite the great promise of democratic schooling in the form of public education at the core of the US, unfortunately, black communities and African Americans were not included and understood as equal citizens. And so were therefore excluded from this kind of radical democratic project of public schooling. And gradually they would have to kind of fight to then be included in opportunities for public education. When it came to Native Americans, For the most part, it's that Native Americans were kind of outside the mainstream political sphere of America on reservations or off on and beyond the American frontier for the early parts of US history and therefore were not really critical or part of the story. And so therefore we got a frame of the origins of public education in the US that centered the experiences of white students and that centered the experiences of and the perspectives of kind of major white education reformers and political leaders. And After reading both, histories of US education that overwhelmingly focused on white education in early America, but also studying the history of black education and native education, I arrived at a point of kind of taking issue with that particular narrative because it really distorted some of the really important aspects about how public education developed. And that language of exclusion when it came to Black education wasn't completely true, right? Even as Black people were not always included in common school classrooms with white students, to say that means that they were not really a part of the story has really masked a lot of the central ways that race actually shaped how public schooling was economically and politically developed. And so that's where the book really comes in to offer some revisions for how we think about the origin story of public schooling by looking at the relationship, for instance, between slavery and capital generated from slavery and how it shaped funding of early public schooling, but also looking at even as native folks are not always physically present in mainstream American public schools early on, how native land dispossession is a really central part of the funding mechanisms used to kind of drive the development of public schooling in the early periods of the United States.
Mike Kiniry
Yeah, it's like the foundation of the story we've been told is capital being the land that we were able to take from the indigenous people and labor that we were able to get from forcing chattel slavery.
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Yeah, absolutely. Except those things are just not are conveniently absent from the narrative for generations that written about. And so when it came time for me to write this book, it became really easy to kind of piece together, to kind of fill in the gaps because, a lot of historians for generations had said, the early public school funds in whether it be Massachusetts or New York or in, Florida or Georgia were established by selling public lands. And then for me, as someone who's, taking some time to read native and indigenous interpretations of US history that pushed me to question, well, how did these lands become quote unquote public lands? How do we not take those things for granted, but be honest about the kind of political and economic history that actually shapes the formation of like land, these public lands that are then available to sell and then establish literary funds or school funds across states, so on and so forth. But yeah, absolutely what you're saying is that, you know, these things were essential to the economic development of schooling very early on, but were just conveniently absent in so much of the historical scholarship.
Mike Kiniry
And early on, schooling was something that was sort of encouraged by the government, but it wasn't really until the schools for the indigenous students that it became a federal project. Is that a fair way to put it?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
I think that that's absolutely true. So it's both yes and no. So when it comes to The federal, so one of the things I really point to early on is so at a national level, there are mechanisms that are put in place for the establishment of public education. So this is, for instance, the land ordinances of 1785 and 1787, where the 16th plot of every new township was supposed to be devoted to a public school or a common school. So this is essentially the kind of founding framework of the US in terms of how new states would be added to the union is that all of these different townships that would then make up the states had to kind of have a specific plot of land that was devoted to common schooling. And so you have a way in which public schooling is required to be baked into the kind of formation of new towns, of new states as the US was to expand moving forward. However, a lot of that was relegated to like a local level in terms of how it's managed. The thing with Native education that's really interesting is that very, very early on, we have this kind of federal involvement and oversight about the development of Native education because it's such a political priority for national leaders. So Secretary of War very early on becomes the person who's responsible for dispersing funds for what was called the Civilization Fund Act that was passed in 1819, which is where we see, you know, for the first time, a line item in the federal budget for the disbursement of funds specifically for education, and it's specifically for Native education. And it's managed by the US War Department, and the Secretary of War essentially partners with missionaries and various different kind of institutions that are facilitating Native education because Native education at this time is seen as a kind of a supplement to or perhaps a cheaper alternative to costly Indian wars. And so this is where we have this really interesting early example of this infrastructure being developed at a national level with funding from the federal government also going to a very specific educational project. And we don't see anything comparable when it comes to white or black education at the time.
Mike Kiniry
And those schools were, while there was education happening in terms of maybe literacy, it was more about just trying to raise people to not complain about what was happening to their people.
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Absolutely. And that's one of the other things in the book that I've really tried to kind of push against. To a certain degree, the way in which the argument around assimilation being the kind of primary aim of Native schooling, because the idea of like assimilating into mainstream American culture is the idea that ultimately the goal is for Native folks to kind of be fully immersed in kind of white American society at some point on equal terms, one would assume, but I cast doubt on whether or not that was actually the aim or the intention of many of these early architects of Native education in the federal government because they're explicitly identifying their primary motivation being to educate Native people to become less resistant to the process of US expansion and the accumulation of native land. So one of the primary educational objectives for native students in particular is to teach native people to be in a new kind of relationship with land because at the foundation of American, you know, of the American social order is the idea that land is about land and property. And the idea that land is to be communally owned or communally stewarded by tribes and indigenous nations was something that was seen as an impediment, as a roadblock to US expansion. And so one of the primary objectives very, very early on is, yeah, teaching native people how to learn to read and write, but for the purposes of communicating and translating ideas that would disrupt the way in which indigenous peoples organize their societies, and particularly when it came to how they organize their societies in relationship to land.
Mike Kiniry
I'd like to take a moment to reintroduce my guest. Dr. Jarvis Givens is Professor of Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. We're discussing his newest book, American Grammar, Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. It was published in October. If you'd like to engage with the show about this topic or any of our episodes, find us on social media. We are WGCU Public Media on Instagram and Facebook. So I was about 1/4 of the way through your book when I wrote down this note. Education, these are my words. Education, when done properly, opens minds, and if those minds are opened and given access to accurate information about the past, some of those people will invariably become aware of things that are going to be harmful to the mission of the white supremacist arm of the project of the United States of America. Then, like almost immediately after I got to this part in your book, a woman named Zit Kalasa, is that how you say it? She was a Native American activist born in 1876. You quote her writing as saying, here lies the risk always embedded in the process of education. For even when such educational projects are constructed with nefarious objectives, there is always some modicum of freedom when it comes to matters of the mind, which seemed to be an echo of what I was getting at. That's kind of at the root of all this, is you can't teach somebody truly and not expect them to gaze truly at what's going on.
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Yeah, absolutely. This is one of these kind of, the way in which kind of there's always this kind of power dynamic and power struggle at the core of education, even when there are, very particular aims, even if the aims are to kind of oppress in a particular way, there are ways in which, individuals in the kind of human mind and human desire for freedom, kind of, there's no way of fully kind of controlling that, right? This is, there are all these examples, even when we think about the history of enslavement, where very, the way in which kind of religious instruction, used with the intention of trying to kind of quail black resistance, But then there's no control over how the enslaved people would then reinterpret aspects of biblical teachings and religious teachings in service of their own liberatory aims, or how they would use the written word for more than just kind of mimicking or parroting the ideas that they were taught to accept and to teach among themselves, but that how they kind of raised questions and kind of pushed back and recreated their own visions of education that were oftentimes at odds with the kind of the people who introduced them to certain kinds of religious teachings or the English language, so on and so forth. And you definitely see that kind of resistance when it comes to native education and when it comes to black education, even as there's always this story also of a very, very, very violent history of racial domination through schooling for both black and native people. The point that I was emphasizing at that point in the book that you just quoted from is that, you know, I didn't want to tell a history that's just about Native and Black people being victims because that would just be dishonest and not true. In the Black and Native context, we see throughout early American history the ways in which these communities resisted, completely rejected certain kinds of Western education, but then also ways in which they appropriated and worked to retool things that they were being taught in the context of Western American education in service of the particular needs of their communities. And I think that that's one of the really, really important lessons about the way in which there's always some kind of space for kind of liberatory dreaming and imagination and resistance in education, even when there might be very kind of oppressive aims in terms of what's motivating the people that's trying to impose education on a particular group.
Mike Kiniry
And that idea taken to its extreme is what lay behind anti-literacy laws among slaves, right?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. This is one of the things where there's this, at one point, there's an emphasis on teaching literacy because of the desire to require enslaved people to, well, in some cases, to kind of be useful for various kind of jobs and responsibilities in service of the people that own them or, but oftentimes learning to read and write for the purposes of religious instruction. in hopes that by teaching a particular kind of religious doctrine, it would force the enslaved people to be complicit and to be docile. However, you then start to see when enslaved people utilize the written word for their own purposes as self-determined, living, breathing human subjects, that it becomes seen as a threat. And so we have the earliest example of an anti-literacy law, even before the United States exists. So in American grammar, I talk about anti-literacy laws, these laws that were created to criminalize reading and writing among enslaved and in many instances, free black people as well, as the very first example of education policy in the United States, because the earliest example was in 1740. in response to a slave uprising called the Stono Rebellion in colonial South Carolina. And the colonial South Carolina legislature said that they began to prohibit teaching enslaved people how to write because it might bring about what they refer to as quote unquote great inconveniences. And so then you have slave masters deciding, well, maybe we don't need to teach them literacy for religious instruction. We can teach them religious tenets and teachings orally, right? You have all these examples of strategies being circulating among enslavers about how to effectively manage enslaved populations once it becomes seen that teaching them to read and write might bring about these kind of inconveniences.
Mike Kiniry
Your book focuses on the five tribes, which were, I guess they were considered to be the five civilized tribes. Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. They were the ones that owned slaves, as I understand it, which is interesting to me that that's the civilized tribes. Did they have anti-literacy laws before white people showed up?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
No. I see no evidence of this, but finding, learning about the anti-literacy laws was a great, was kind of in many ways, just to be honest, mind blowing to me, because I'd never heard about these anti-literacy laws in the context of native tribes. And to be honest, you know, I had always, for some time, I had learned I'd heard a little bit about the history of racial slavery among what's referred to as the five civilized tribes. They're called the five civilized tribes by white American government officials because they were seen to be the ones that most willingly adopted certain kind of Western styles of Western lifestyles, education, traditional Western gender roles, religion, and also education. And also they practiced racialized slavery, right? So all of these things that were central to American civilization early on, right, quote unquote, they kind of mimic these things in the context of their tribes. And it's important to note that they did these things oftentimes as a way of trying to say, look, I'm doing the things that you say I need to do to model civilization now allow us to run our own sovereign nations and maintain our own lands the way that we want to do it if we're doing these kind of core things that you, as the kind of American settlers said, are kind of like foundational to civilized society, right? So you have this idea among these five tribes of doing things that were seen as kind of essential to kind of American culture and white Western culture in order to kind of, in some ways, resist continued infringement on their land and on their ways of life. And slavery was one of those things. And I just never even thought to really explore the history of black education among the five tribes, but that proved to be a very fascinating context for thinking about some of these fundamental questions around race, power, and education within the American social order, because they're drawing so heavily that are developing around race and education in the US in the way that it's developing internally among these particular five tribes.
Mike Kiniry
So back to the beginning, there has been an overt groundswell or however you want to put it in recent years of the right at school boards being against public education funding, against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, even language around it. Do you see that as a extension or resurgence of this notion back in the early days of education, especially with the indigenous populations of indoctrinating and not opening minds?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
I definitely see a kind of a relationship between the two experiences. And it's not a one-to-one relationship, but ultimately what I see is that there is a very long tradition in the context of America where education is as a central kind of site for the tug of war between power dynamics when it comes to kind of race and opportunity in the context of the US. And the reason I'm saying this is because at certain points, when it comes to particular groups of people and particular interests, you have the pendulum swinging in a particular direction where it's about demanding the opening of doors of opportunity for creating educational opportunities in order to kind of strengthen the nation. But then you also have lots of examples in the history of the US where simultaneously that's happening even as we also see efforts to kind of withhold educational opportunities for very particular political and economic motivations. So I guess what I'm saying is that it's always been both hand in hand. The demands for education for some and education in service of the kind of best interests and the flourishing of particular aspects of American society. And oftentimes those interests are articulated by the taking away or the restricting of educational opportunities for others, or the taking away or restricting of educational knowledge and information that's accountable to particular communities because of the political or economic aims of a particular group in power. So it's really been, I guess what this book was trying to show was that, the history of American education was not just a story about opening up the doors of opportunity. It's like, yeah, that was part of the story for some, but those doors of opportunity were being opened and they were built and that was happening by and through the kind of domination and subjugation of others. And we see a different kind of iteration of that in this particular moment, where we have educational visions for the kind of prospering and the comfort and the ease of particular communities. And they're choosing to kind of operate toward that goal, even if it means kind of removing and shutting the doors of opportunity and honest engagement with the experiences of other communities. And this is something that's always happened simultaneously, but we see it kind of really surging to the fore right now because of various things that have developed and progress, I would say, that have been made within the context of American society within recent decades.
Mike Kiniry
I would like to sort of end with where you begin the book with a woman named Susan McCoy Rashears, if I've got that right. who you didn't, as I understand it, you didn't really come across her until toward the end of your process for writing the book, but it's your great, great, great grandmother who she was a freed Choctaw person in Oklahoma. So she had black and Indian roots and you are related to her. Is that all correct?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Correct.
Mike Kiniry
What would you think that she wouldn't think if she knew that however many 180 years later or something that her great, great, great grandson would be writing a book telling this story?
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Yeah, you know, I, honestly, it's really hard for me to even put myself in her shoes because I just think, here's a woman who was born in the 1850s as an enslaved woman, a black enslaved woman enslaved by Choctaw owners, even though her mother was an African woman of African and indigenous ancestry, and her father was a man of European ancestry who was adopted by the Choctaw tribe. So she's someone of native African and European ancestry, trying to make sense of her own identity in relationship to these very rigid categories of race, right? When she's going up to be for the enrollment process at the end of the 1900s. And she's forced to kind of choose either a Choctaw Freeman or Choctaw By Blood. And she's like, well, me and my children don't really fall easily into any category. I want to believe that she would be very proud that the action she took to resist the US government and to kind of file a petition to challenge the way that she was written out of her rights by the Dawes Commission. I want to believe that she would be proud of the fact that I was able to make meaning of her experience as a woman who didn't have access to education because of anti-literacy laws, but to still be able to kind of invite people to think about the deeper meaning of education and the politics of education in the world that we live in. I want to believe that she would be really proud to know that her story was useful in that way and that her act of trying to resist, decisions made by white members of the Dawes Commission to kind of further alienate her as a black woman would become a really important lesson, you know, over a century later. And it was really, you know, jaw-dropping for me because I did not expect to really incorporate that aspect of my family history into the book, but it was really a gift, if I might be honest. And it felt like an affirmation that what I was writing about was, that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing essentially. And so that was a really beautiful moment for me. So I appreciate you for lifting that up.
Mike Kiniry
Dr. Jarvis Givens is Professor of Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. We've been talking about his new book, American Grammar, Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation. Dr. Givens, thank you so much for your time and for the book. I've really learned A lot.
Dr. Jarvis Givens
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
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