New Jersey high school students learn how their communities shaped local Black history
For Rancocas Valley Regional High School students in Burlington County, New Jersey, their AP African American Studies class teaches more than the typical history lesson. More than a handful of students raised their hands proudly after learning their familiar neighborhoods played a critical part in shaping local Black history.
Josiah Hardy, an 11th grader, says he always passes by a small cemetery near the river that runs by his grandmother's home.
"There's a little graveyard of the soldiers from the Civil War, specifically Black soldiers," Hardy explained during class.
Hardy was referring to the Timbuctoo Cemetery, which was founded in 1854 as part of the Zion Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal African Church. It's also the only above-ground evidence of this historic South Jersey community.
Enslaved people at Timbuctoo were free 60 years before Juneteenth, which commemorates the day when Union troops freed enslaved Blacks in Texas two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Last year, CBS News Philadelphia visited the gravesite with Guy Weston, the founder of the Timbuctoo Historical Society and a seventh-generation landowner.
Weston has family documents dating back almost 200 years, and along with archaeologists, discovered more than 14,000 artifacts from the historic site.
Today, Weston is working with educators like Cheryl Cliver to create a special syllabus, whose goal is to "show that Black history is American history from the foundation to the present, and that Black people have shaped the nation," Cliver said.
There are 26 schools in New Jersey offering this AP Class, and that number is growing.
Senior Shasha Haynes says Cliver's class inspired her decision to attend Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., this fall.
"I think this class is really important," Haynes said. "I think there should be more diversity in the class right now. It's all-Black students, which is great. It's important to know the Black contributions in American society."
