There are countless stories of Black people that aren’t told in American history books. The absence of those stories has prompted a local lecture series.
It’s called "Things Your History Teacher Didn’t Teach You: Blacks in History."
Derek Mosley leads the lecture series. He’s the director of Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
Mosley has built a reputation for posting stories about Black people in American history on his social media every day during Black History Month—for more than a decade.
He decided to take those stories and share them in a different way—a lecture—to give them additional context. This year’s lecture, "Things Your History Teacher Didn’t Teach You: Blacks in History — Part 2" is a follow-up to the one he gave last Black History Month.
Mosley says the title is true to his own experience.
"My mom and her siblings all went to high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so when I was growing up, my mom told me about the Tulsa Race Massacre," Mosley says.
When Mosley was in fifth grade, his mom asked if he had learned about it in school. He mentioned it to his teacher, who said the massacre never happened.
"So, I remember going home and telling my mom, and told my mom, ‘Hey, the teacher says it never happened.’ And she blew up," Mosley says.
Mosley says from that moment on, his mom prioritized making sure he knew everything, and he does the same for his kids.
And he’s sharing what he knows with both his local and international community.
"I have so many stories because once you start on this journey, you realize—first of all, we were taught nothing. When I was in school, I learned about Martin Luther King, I learned about Rosa Parks, and I learned about Frederick Douglass. That was it," Mosley says. "Didn’t learn about Malcolm X because he was a little too radical. And it wasn’t until I started reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and listening to his speeches that I realized he really wasn’t that radical."
Mosley says it’s important to get a full picture of history so that we don’t repeat it.
And that full picture helps us understand how something that happened generations ago is still shaping what we see today.
For example, "When you drive in a car to the suburbs, you look around and ask, ‘Why is the suburbs 95% white?’"
Mosley says history helps explain it—like how the GI Bill helped launch white World War II veterans into the middle class compared to Black veterans.
"So, they served their country, and then they got the GI Bill. They got low-interest loans, they got free college, they got free loans for houses. Free farms to try to farm—to make them, you know—this is our thank-you from the country," Mosley says. "But what we don’t tell is that 1 million Black soldiers were denied the GI Bill."
Mosley says when these stories aren’t heard, people feel like things are happening for the first time and assume they’re getting the full picture of America—when they’re not.
"And then they say things like, ‘Well, why do we have a Black History Month? We don’t have a White History Month,’" Mosley says. "But you only hear that when you don’t know the story. The educated person who knows that story would never, ever say that."
Mosley’s "Things Your History Teacher Didn’t Teach You: Blacks in History — Part 2" lecture takes place Wednesday, Feb. 5 at 12:15 p.m. at Marquette University’s Eckstein Hall.
