How to Acknowledge a Shameful Past - The Atlantic - 2 views
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the best of what America offers are owning up to shameful pasts, from slavery to the mistreatment of Native Americans. In some cases, the institutions are apologizing for past moral failings, as Longwood has in Prince Edward County. Others are going even further, with faculty incorporating the long-overlooked histories into their instruction and administrators reaching out to disenfranchised communities that were once excluded from campus life.
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"Ignoring our history doesn’t make it go away. It always ends up bubbling back up to the top at some point," Allen said. "It may be squished down for a while but it will always come up in different ways."
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This move prompted new academic programs at the university and, according to at least one advocate, served as a tipping point in the national trend toward confronting shameful pasts.
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"can really help to reshape the way the history of the civil rights movement is told and the way American history is told,"
