Teaching Black History as World-Making: Dr. Jarvis Givens on Carter G. Woodson, Memory, and the Work of Black Teachers

What does it mean to teach Black history in a moment marked by backlash, erasure, and renewed struggle? And what does the 100-year journey of Black History Month ask of educators today? In this episode of the Black Teacher Project Podcast, Dr. Micia Mosely, Founder and Executive Director of BTP, is joined by Dr. Jarvis R. Givens, professor of Education and African American Studies at Harvard University, for a deeply grounded conversation recorded during the centennial of Negro History Week. Together, they reflect on the legacy of Carter G. Woodson and the long history of Black history being treated as contraband, contested, and actively suppressed in schools.

 

Drawing from his scholarship, including Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), and American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (2025), Givens shares concrete historical examples of Black teachers navigating hostility, confiscation, and surveillance while continuing to teach truthfully. He also discusses his forthcoming book, I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026), which traces how Black educators, families, and communities sustained this tradition across generations.

Throughout the conversation, Givens names Black teachers as memory workers, institution builders, and world-makers who have always taught toward collective freedom, even in schools never designed for Black thriving. This episode invites listeners to understand Black History Month as a living inheritance and teaching as a responsibility that reaches far beyond the classroom.