Presidents and Slaves: Helping Students Find the Truth

Teaching Activity PDF. By Bob Peterson. 7 pages.
How a 5th grade teacher and his students conducted research to answer the question: “Which presidents owned people?”

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During a lesson about George Washington and the American Revolution, I explained to my 5th graders that Washington owned over 300 people. One student added that Thomas Jefferson also was a slave owner. And then, in part to be funny and in part expressing anger — over vote fraud involving African Americans in the then-recent 2000 election and the U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent delivery of the presidency to George W. Bush — one of my students shouted, “Bush is a slave owner, too!”

“No, Bush doesn’t own slaves,” I calmly explained. “Slavery was finally ended in this country in 1865.” Short exchanges such as this often pass quickly and we move onto another topic. But this time one student asked, “Well, which presidents were slave owners?”

She had me stumped. “That’s a good question,” I said. “I don’t know.” Thus began a combined social studies, math, and language arts project in which I learned along with my students, and that culminated in a fascinating exchange between my students and the publishers of their U.S. history textbook. After I admitted that I had no clue exactly which presidents owned slaves, I threw the challenge back to the students. “How can we find out?” I asked.

Published by Rethinking Schools.

Related resource:

The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane (City Lights, 2010). This book was published after the class research project described in “Presidents and Slaves: Helping Students Find the Truth” and would have been a big help to the teacher and his students. It provides a comprehensive history of African Americans and the White House covering the full span of U.S. history.

Understanding Prejudice.org This website, referenced in the article by Bob Peterson, provides a quiz and information for students called Slavery and the U.S. Presidents.

Key words: African American, presidents, slave owner, slavery, Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Nixon’s Piano, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, racism, Robert Peterson.