by Hope Kelham

A conversation with Ziyen Curtis on their research and re-writing the American textbook

Ziyen Curtis (she/they) came to the Department of African American Studies in 2024. They started their Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction and began taking African American studies courses. By the time they’d taken three courses, a faculty member suggested they apply. Now a 2026 graduate of our M.A. program, Ziyen has just finished a thesis on Black history education in Georgia and Virginia during the 1950s. This research grew from a question they’ve been noticing since high school, sitting in class, reading a textbook, thinking: this narrative can’t be right. “I opened a book and everything was white, white, white, white colonialists,” they share. “And then you had Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks…but also mass genocide…but we’re not going to talk about any of it.” In the archive, Ziyen has asked why that avoidance of truth exists, and how far back the problem goes. 

The common assumption is that desegregation changed conditions, and that once schools were forced open, the curriculum followed. Ziyen’s research suggests otherwise. “Black history education was never desegregated,” they say. “Our social studies textbooks were never integrated. It never happened.” When schools were forcibly desegregated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Black educators were pushed out of their jobs en masse. Black principals lost their positions. The intellectual traditions that had sustained Black education in schools, in churches, on the radio, and in professional organizations, were displaced from the institutions that integration was supposed to transform. The first court case to challenge the whiteness of American textbooks before the Supreme Court didn’t arrive until the 1970s, and it was led by a white educator and a white textbook maker. The books themselves, in the meantime, were left alone.

Ziyen’s thesis excavates what Black history educators were doing inside all that history: teaching in Georgia and Virginia during the 1950s under Jim Crow, the Red Scare, the deaths of key figures in the Black history education movement, and resistance from both white and Black communities. Ziyen found persistence, and a coherent argument by comparing archives and zooming out. “They continued to prosper in Black history education and promote it as a tool to build worlds,” Ziyen says, “a tool to build better futures for students and for youths and for their communities.”

One flag Ziyen noted in her research involves the internal debate within Black communities over Black History Week. Some community members felt that maintaining a separate week for Black history was itself a form of segregation and that if the goal was integration, Black history should be folded into American history. Ziyen found that in 1950, these two conversations were running parallel, often colliding; the push for school desegregation and the debate over Black History Week were, for many, the same argument. “Those conversations about desegregation were synonymous,” Ziyen says. “And I think that’s such an interesting twist and analysis, because then you’re thinking about the ways that Black educators are thinking about the civil rights movement and what they can do in their own work.” The educators understood that the textbooks weren’t going to integrate themselves, and nobody in power was going to make them. This connects, Ziyen notes, to the history explored by the Black communities who opposed integration because they could already see the harm it would bring to Black youth and Black institutions. 

All of which leads Ziyen to a vision: what if every textbook in the country was pulled, archived, and rebuilt from scratch by historians, community members, elders, and children? They urge that this process would get repeated every ten years to reflect. “If everyone in the country can agree that all the textbooks need to change and all the textbooks are removed (not burned, put them in a library, put them in an archive), then we can get community members, historians, elders, and children to recreate these textbooks,” they explain, “the world would change.”