The Story of Where We Come From

We need history now, not more propaganda

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, history is written by the vict… captors. That’s not just pithy observation: Here in the United States, it was legislated. Anti-literacy laws of the 1800s made it illegal to teach enslaved people — and anyone else who posed an economic threat to wealthy white landowners — how to read and write, severely limiting their ability to preserve their stories.

No other country is known to have enacted such laws, and it doesn’t take much imagination to…