Brian JonesMother Jones illustration; Courtesy photo

On a frigid Thursday afternoon in late January, in a now-viral video, employees at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park were captured removing interpretive signs about slavery posted at the President’s House Site—where George Washington and John Adams both lived, and where Washington enslaved nine people.

The outdoor exhibit, installed in 2010 after years of advocacy by Black activists and historians, was intended to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals of freedom, equality and democracy and the brutal system of slavery it maintained. When a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked one of the park employees why the signs were being removed, he replied, “I’m just following orders.” 

Months after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump directed national parks and museums to root out “divisive, race-centered ideology,” specifically targeting Independence Hall—where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted—in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary.  

“We’re living in a time…where people are really trying to constrain what we learn,” said Brian Jones, an author, longtime educator in New York City public schools and senior director of reading and engagement at the New York Public Library. “Sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the sensors come along and remind us how powerful they are.”

After nearly a decade as an elementary school teacher, Jones earned a doctorate in urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research there on “a really explosive chapter in Black education history,” the 1968 student uprising at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute—which Jones’ father attended—would become the subject of his first book and propel him to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, first as a scholar-in-residence and later as staff. The more Jones studied Black history, the more he came to believe that Black history was for everyone—the title of his latest book, published with Haymarket Books.

As America nears its semiquincentennial, February also marks 100 years of Black history commemorations, a tradition started by the historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926 and officially recognized by president Gerald Ford during the 1976 bicentennial.  

“We are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It’s usually more that we didn’t go far enough.”

Some sixty years ago, in yet another period of social and political upheaval, the writer James Baldwin delivered an address to teachers in his native New York in which he concluded that the source of the country’s troubles was its own slippery sense of self, built on “a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” 

The role of education in such a time, Baldwin argued, was to produce free-thinkers capable of questioning these myths and willing to challenge society in order to save it. By teaching an inclusive and unvarnished view of history, and creating an opportunity for Black students to see themselves in the classroom, educators could liberate all students, he suggested. 

To better understand Black history, the liberatory power of education, and how ideas of race and nation shape American identity, I spoke with Jones in early January about Black History Is for Everyone—a book born out of the belief that Black history is an “invitation to rethink everything,” and that studying it “offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves, whether you identify as Black or not, in a new way.”

This conversation has been edited for........

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