How Bacon's Rebellion Invented Race in the U.S.
And more lessons from Dr. Brian Jones on black history
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.
A transcript of our conversation about his latest work, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to us on the Skipped History podcast:
Ben: What was Bacon’s Rebellion, and why do you think it should be taught alongside the American Revolution and the Civil War?
BJ: Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project taught us that 1619 marked the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia. But when I teach this history, I ask students, “When did it become common sense to put people in a category that they can never escape from? To make skin color a badge of degradation that people can never wash off?”
It takes a long time for that to happen. Some of those early African arrivals became free. Some of them owned land. Some of them owned people. Things changed with Bacon’s Rebellion.
It happened in 1676, a multiracial uprising led by Nathaniel Bacon, a rich white man. He wasn’t as rich as he wanted to be, and he was angry at the other rich people, so he whipped up a crowd. There was such a tinderbox of grievance and anger that people burned Jamestown to the ground. Servants joined in. Africans joined in.
Virginian authorities needed support from English ships to crush the rebellion, which they eventually did. In the aftermath, they said, “Okay, this is unsustainable. How are we going to preserve this system of producing tobacco with very, very low labor costs, but without creating a total tinderbox?” So they made new rules: it would no longer be possible for people of African descent to become free and become landowners. That way, it would be impossible for white servants to see Africans as fellow members of the community with whom they might have common cause and common interests.
That division of society marked a huge turning point in U.S. history. It codified the idea of race as this immutable thing, marking you with a social status that is unchanging and unchangeable, setting the pattern for U.S. society as a whole.
Ben: You talk about the first friend you ever had who, at the age of four, pointed out differences in your skin color and what they might imply. It’s stunning to think about the origin of those rules of race, so to speak, in the 1670s.
BJ: It’s wild. One of the things I ask students is: “Okay, after 1619, when would officials make a rule, for example, saying Africans can’t vote?” They didn’t write that rule down until 1723. The fact that it’s more than a hundred years later shows us that ideas of race had to be built over time.
Ben: Another piece of history that you emphasize as seminal around the globe is the Haitian Revolution. How come?
BJ: We’re in a kind of bumper crop moment for scholarship about the Haitian Revolution. More and more people are recognizing its significance and writing about it. It’s the sort of thing where you read one book and you think, “I have to learn more.” So then you read two books on the same topic and you feel like you’re an expert and you need to tell everyone about it—
Ben: —then start a history newsletter and podcast—
BJ: Haha, exactly! But then, if you keep going and read a third book on the same topic, you’ll realize that things are so much more complicated than you could ever articulate.
Still, the biggest reveal to me was the fact that the mortality rate in Haiti at the time of the revolution—end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th centuries—was so high that the majority of people who made the revolution were born in Africa. One Haitian scholar I cite quite a bit, Jean Casimir, says it doesn’t even make sense to call them slaves. They didn’t even have time to internalize that status. It’s more appropriate to think of them as captives: people who remembered their homelands within one lifetime. They grew up in one society, were kidnapped, brought to a strange, cruel world—and within one lifetime, they broke that society, overturned it, and fought off the best European armies.
Learn more about the Haitian Revolution below:
Once you’re free, once you’ve beaten these militaries and established your independence, how do you make your way in the world? How do you fit into an increasingly global market economy? What are you producing and exporting? It’s not easy to be born into a global capitalist economy, and it didn’t go well for Haiti. The European powers didn’t want it to go well.
Ben: You’re touching on another point you emphasize. Abolition is hard. Rebuilding is harder.
The history of education seems to really embody this idea for you.
BJ: Yes. The further back you go, all the way to enslavement, to secretive fugitive efforts at literacy and their equating of literacy with liberation, black people have an uninterrupted struggle for learning.
There’s this amazing line from the great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, about Reconstruction. “Public education for all at public expense,” he says, was “a Negro idea.” Many young white people went to school for the first time because of the advocacy of their black neighbors during this brief moment after the Civil War when the whole South was turned upside down. It almost harkens back to the days before Bacon’s Rebellion, when things could have been different, when society could have proceeded with different rules.
In terms of education, we often think of the high point as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but so many black communities experienced that moment as disempowering. White officials decided what desegregation would mean, and too often it meant the destruction of what black people had built up.
Reconstruction’s a very different example. It’s an example of building democratic schooling for everyone, in an educational movement led by black people. They were creating a social democratic model of education: free, tax-supported, and open to everyone. It was part of this moment where black people, with their radical allies in the Republican Party, embarked on an experiment in genuine biracial democracy.
Ben: In your examination of education history, you weave standardized testing into a legacy of curricular suppression that goes back to Reconstruction and beyond. Why?
BJ: I throw standardized testing in because I come out of working with so many teachers. I was an elementary school teacher in New York City for nine years and still feel very connected to K-12 teachers. So many of us were challenging standardized testing and saw it as a problem.
There’s a place for testing, but when the stakes of those tests get higher and higher, and you add in private corporations writing the tests, all of a sudden, they’re determining what history should be learned. But why does McGraw-Hill know the best questions to ask?
We want students to be curious and be people who produce, not regurgitate, knowledge. Standardized testing has had the effect, especially high-stakes standardized testing, of doing the opposite: of narrowing the curriculum. So we experienced testing as a kind of curriculum ban.
Ben: This book isn’t your first attempt to combat curricular bans. In 2014, you ran for lieutenant governor. On the other ticket was Andrew Cuomo who, at the time, was promoting spending a lot of money on contracts for more high-stakes standardized tests.
BJ: Yes, he was…
There’s a reason that black histories are being banned. When people learn about this history, they get ideas about how they might want to change things. It opens their eyes to possibilities. Black people have steadily been testing the boundaries of what’s possible, pushing the envelope in creative and wonderful ways.
I tell a story in the book of citizens of Savannah trying to stop Haitian ships from coming after the revolution because they didn’t want Haitians; they didn’t want Haitian ideas. Today, we are trying to stop information from arriving at the port of our classrooms because we don’t want the same: the ideas. We don’t want the information to spread.
But black history is something that you are thinking about, even in trying not to think about it. It’s interwoven into our world, and our students and young people deserve to grapple with things in their complexity, to wrestle with bigger questions without patriotism as a thematic starting point.
Ben: You write that teaching history should have “nothing to do with ‘hating’ or ‘loving’ the United States, or trying to prove that one nation is ‘bad’ or another is ‘good.’” Rather, “If we let go of superiority and embrace humility, we become open to genuinely learning from others.”
What sounds more fun than that?!
BJ: Amen.
Amen. As a European American who grew up during segregation I was well aware that our history textbooks weren’t telling the truth. And our IQ tests were biased in favor of middle-class European Americans.
Ashe. Sadhu. Well said.