At the Indigo Arts Alliance studio in Portland last month, journalist and musician Samuel James addressed a group of 7th graders.
"Can everybody here me, okay? Okay, I'm going to tell you all just a real quick history about being Black in America," he said.
That history, he said, hinges on two central concepts:
"One is what you brought with you, and the other is what you did with what you found, that was already here. And so, the best example of that, that I know, is this. Everybody see this?" he held up a banjo, an instrument created by enslaved Africans whose playing style, James said, has shaped American music for centuries.
For those 7th graders, including Hamza Isaak, that day was the culmination of a weekslong unit on Black history, part of a first-of-its kind African American studies curriculum being rolled out this year, with a focus on how that history unfolded in Maine's largest city.
"We're learning about Black people and how they struggled through slavery, and we are seeing like, where they did stuff," Isaak said.
Specifically, the students learned this by following the city's Freedom Trail, which marks important Black history sites around town, including many associated with the Underground Railroad.
Isaak, who's family is from Somalia, said many aspects of the curriculum, which range from African civilizations to Abolition and Reconstruction, have resonated with him personally.
"It feels good because I'm learning about my ancestors, and I'm learning like how Black people had a struggle, and like if I was in that time, I could have had that struggle," he said.
Fiona Hopper, social studies special projects coordinator with the district, said the impetus for the new curriculum came from the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
But while there was plenty of classroom-ready material on national and international history, hardly any of it was specific to Maine or New England.
"So that began a six-year journey to figure out like what is that history, what is that story? Who are the people who are holding that story and that information?" Hopper explained.
Hopper said the district convened a group of advisors to help guide this journey, bringing in educators, historians, and longtime members of Portland's Black community to craft curricula tailored to different grade levels.
She said the lessons highlight figures such as Ona Judge, a woman who escaped slavery on George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation and found refuge in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the state of Maine's expulsion of the multiracial community on Malaga Island near Phippsburg; and the far-reaching ramifications of slavery.
"So the Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Act," she said. "How did those things impact Portland? And then the abolitionist movement, which was led by African American people here."
That's what the 7th graders focused on. They made their way to the city's Eastern Cemetery, where journalist and historian Bob Greene explained the symbolism of a Freedom Trail plaque.
Greene, who was also an advisor on the curriculum, traced his own lineage in Cumberland County's Black community as far back as 1783. Many of those ancestors were buried here, he said, in Portland's oldest cemetery, a testament to the community's important role in building the city over those centuries.
"That's what people should understand: that we're not newcomers. We've been here," he said. "We helped build this. Everybody helped build."
The district is currently rolling out the curriculum for 6th grade and up and aims to expand it to K through five next year.
