Chapter 4: Critical Family History as a Strategy For Multicultural History Education

As I am conceptualizing this chapter, I have just returned from my paternal side’s family reunion in Texas. For three decades, my family reunion has grown from a meeting in a small church to a large annual picnic attended by hundreds of family members split between four Texas cities: Dallas, Longview, Houston, and Port Arthur. Each city has host families and they select the venue, develop family friendly activities, and cook food, which of course is delicious Bar-B-Que. The day (and sometimes night) is filled with fun, laughter, and history.

One constant activity is the retelling of our family’s historical narrative. We begin with our patriarch, Tucker Davis, who was born in 1900 and lived to be 99 years old. He only had a third grade education, got married young, became a sharecropper, had seven children, became a widower, raised his children by himself, became a school bus driver and janitor in the school system, never remarried, and was able to obtain 100 acres of farmland while living during the nadir of African American life (Logan, 1954) in East Texas, one of the most violent and racist places in U.S. history (Fogg, 1999; Tuttle, 1972). As I have gotten older, we have begun remembering his children, my grandmother and great aunts and uncles who have passed; they serve as the seven branches to our family tree. Their history is filled with a legacy spanning the Harlem renaissance, the Great Depression, World War II, and legal Jim Crow.