"Willie Earle Is Dead, Wish More Like Him Were": Lynching and Racial Violence in Social Studies Standards

• In Event: Global Neocolonialism and Curriculum and Pedagogical Materiality

Abstract

On February 16, 1947 twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle was lynched by a white mob in Greenville, South Carolina. Neither this event nor any of the 190 other lynchings in the South Carolina are mentioned in the state standards. In fact, lynching and instances of violence against Black folks does not appear in the U.S. history standards at all. In the southern United States alone, over 4,000 individuals were victims of what Ida B. Wells-Barnett called our country’s “national crime.” In this paper, we highlight the lack of attention given by state social studies standards to the practice of lynching and violence in general by looking more deeply at South Carolina’s standards.

Authors

• Brandon J. Beck, Univeristy of Maryland Baltimore County

• Meghan Moore-Hubbard, Kennesaw State University