Counter-Memory and Race: An Examination of African American Scholars' Challenges to Early Twentieth Century K-12 Historical Discourses

This article examines how African American scholars during the early twentieth century employed the genre of curriculum writing to challenge existing discourses of race. Drawing from the findings of a qualitative document analysis of textbooks created by Carter G. Woodson and Charles H. Wesley, this article illustrates how these authors used texts and images to counter dominant racial theories found in school text, academia, and the wider society. This work is significant because while the field of curriculum studies provides exhaustive texts about early twentieth-century contributions to curriculum, few of these texts seriously explore the foundational and theoretical insights of African American scholarship schools.