You learned about cherry trees—
but not the teeth
pulled from Black mouths
to build Washington’s smile.
You learned about manifest destiny—
but not the treaties burned,
the villages drowned,
the bones under every railroad spike.
You learned about Watts, about L.A.—
but not Tulsa, not Wilmington,
not how fire can erase a city,
how history can be buried alive.
You learned about ghettos,
but not Black Wall Street.
You learned about crime,
but not the red lines drawn—
not the doors locked,
not the loans denied,
not the futures caged
before they could begin.
You learned about the New Deal—
but not who got left out,
who pressed their faces to the glass,
who heard wait your turn
in a language that meant never.
Tommie Smith’s fist still hangs in the air.
They showed you the stance
but not the price.
They never said they took his medals,
his name scrubbed from the books
like an error.
They taught you black crime—
but never white mobs,
never the hands behind the badge,
never the real architects of fear.
They called it states’ rights,
but skipped the part where slavery
curled itself around ink—
seventy-three times.1
Count them.
They hope you won’t.
History is a neat stack of pages,
but the edges bleed if you hold them too tight.
They teach the parts that settle smooth.
But if you listen between the words,
if you dig where the ground is uneasy—
you will hear the things
they swore
you were never meant to know.
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- The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States. American Battlefield Trust. ↩︎
Earl David Freeland is a poet, mathematician, former cartographer, and teacher who spends his days balancing logic with the chaos of human experience. His poetry leans into the tension between precision and rawness, structure and disorder, often landing somewhere in the spaces most people try to smooth over. As president of his local teachers’ union, he fights for the voices that get ignored—both in education and in history. His work doesn’t aim to comfort; it aims to be honest.
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