Today, Dr. Brian Jones reframes some stories we thought we knew—and reveals a few others we were never taught.
In Black History Is for Everyone, Dr. Jones takes us through Bacon’s Rebellion, the Haitian Revolution, and Reconstruction, connecting centuries-old curricular bans to today’s battles over standardized testing. His argument? That students deserve complexity, not sanitized myths, and that flattening history does us all a disservice. Moreover, black history isn’t a niche subject. It’s the story of how America actually works.
Dr. Jones has taught many ages and grades in New York City’s public schools and at the City University of New York. He served as the inaugural director of the Center for Education and Schools at the New York Public Library and as the associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I spoke with him a couple of years back about another book he wrote, The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History.
