Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson Center focused on reviving American education and culture, the curriculum embraces the “ideas of family, faith, and entrepreneurship that have enabled all Americans – including black Americans – throughout history to move from persecution to prosperity.”
As 1776 Unites members wrote in an open letter to the National School Boards Association and local school boards, the curriculum “offers authentic, motivating stories from American history that show what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances.”
According to entrepreneur and civil rights leader Bob Woodson, it tells stories of “black Americans who seized their own destinies and flourished despite the harsh restrictions imposed by true institutional racism in the form of slavery and Jim Crow.”
The curriculum currently features 15 units for high school students on black entrepreneurs and philanthropists such as Biddy Mason, Elijah McCoy, and Paul Cuffe; athletes such as Jesse Owens and Alice Coachman; and important events from American history such as the Tulsa race massacre. Woodson says that the units released so far have purposefully “covered multiple lesser-known stories of black excellence and resilience from history.”
Access to the curriculum, which has already been downloaded over 20,000 times, is free with registration at the 1776 Unites website. Each unit contains a wealth of resources including lesson plans, primary sources, questions for classroom discussion, a Power Point presentation, multiple-choice questions, learning standards, and more. A curriculum for K-8 students will be released soon.
Woodson notes that most school curricula have been traditionally “short on inspiring stories of black achievement.” Instead, as seen with the New York Times’s 1619 Project, “the narrative of racial grievance has been corrupting the instruction of American history and the humanities for many decades – and has accelerated dangerously over the past year.” Woodson continues: “The most damaging effects of such instruction fall on lower income minority children, who are implicitly told that they are helpless victims with no power or agency to shape their own futures.”
For this reason, the 1776 Unites curriculum “maintains a special focus on stories that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture, and showcase African-Americans who have prospered by embracing America’s founding ideals.”
1776 Unites Curriculum Highlights the American Character
The former speaker of the house [Paul Ryan}] said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that what [Robert] Woodson showed him was life-changing. “One of the best things I did in my career was ask Bob Woodson to teach me about poverty,” he said.
Ryan said he spent about four or five years touring poverty-stricken areas on a monthly basis, making connections with people who can make a difference. “I did this with no media or anything like that, just to learn, and it was transformational to me,” he said. “And it’s helpful to what I do now.”
Last month the civil rights leader and president of the Woodson Center announced his retirement after four decades fighting the good fight, helping communities across the country improve their lives — often doing so outside the orthodoxy of more mainstream black institutions that rely heavily on government backing.
Woodson’s approach was based in experience, he said. He understood that just because people were living in a community on the edge, it didn’t mean they weren’t looking around it for examples of integrity, dignity, and honor. “My approach was to be that vehicle to provide those examples,” he said.
Woodson said he began his career at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in Philadelphia. “After years of being involved with the movement, I realized that the poverty programs aimed at making lives better for the poor only made life better for those who ran those places,” he said. “And that the movement was moving away from improving civil rights and into a race-grievance industry.”
“I looked around and decided that I was in the wrong struggle,” said Woodson. Eventually, in 1981, he founded the center to guide residents of low-income neighborhoods so that they could address the problems of their communities themselves.
“The man made a mould for using foundational principles to attack the problem of poverty at its root cause and to empower individual people to take control of their lives and their neighborhoods,” said Ryan. “And he never lost sight of his principles. He never lost sight of his goal. And he always, every time, thought about how we can make lives better for people in transformational ways.”
Ryan said Woodson moved the needle on poverty to where it is much more effective. “And he’s done it in a way by applying these timeless principles that we as conservatives believe in,” he said. “There’s just nobody else who has done anything like it. And he’s just a man who sees truth for how he sees it. And he speaks passionately about his sense of truth. And he’s always on a quest to learn.”
Indeed, Woodson does not lecture, nor in his career has he ever portrayed himself as someone who believes he is better or knows more than the people he is working with.
Ryan said Woodson made such an enormous difference in fighting poverty at root causes in such a way that those efforts could be scaled and replicated and can truly move the needle. He has dedicated a big part of his post-congressional career to taking Woodson’s legacy and building on it.
Robert Woodson retires after 40 years of empowering communities