“Making History Go” at a Local Community Center: Popular Media and the Construction of Historical Knowledge among African American Youth

As a range of critical pedagogues have argued, the curricula that young people are exposed to today has broadened immeasurably, due to the ever-increasing prevalence of popular media texts and cultures. The implications for social studies educators here is far ranging though little explored. In this paper, I look at how historical knowledge is mediated to young people in popular culture, how young people choose to mobilize such knowledge, and the consequences they face therein. Focusing on the film Panther (1995) (about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), and drawing on a series of focus groups with African American adolescents at a local community center, I look closely at what popular texts young people resonate with as well as how they pick them up and deploy them to deal with historical contingencies, here a proposed march in town by the Ku Klux Klan. I stress, throughout, the importance of looking, in concrete and situated ways, at how young people make history relevant in the here and now, how they, to echo Della Pollock, “make history go.”