Why it’s not enough to teach our students that America is ‘no place for political violence’

For the past few years, I’ve watched the first episode of the HBO miniseries “John Adams” with my ninth grade U.S. History classes, as part of our unit on the American Revolution. The students enjoy it, but there’s one scene that always stands out.

In it, a tax collector in Boston Harbor is stripped, tarred, feathered, and paraded around by the Sons of Liberty, a paramilitary group. In the foreground, a gleeful mob cheers; in the background, a group of captive Africans stands by, in chains.

Watching on, a shocked John Adams demands answers from his more radical cousin Samuel Adams : “Do you approve of brutal and illegal acts to enforce a political principle, Sam?”

My students react viscerally to the scene, finding it sadistic and cruel. They also point out the irony: brutal acts being committed both in the name of liberty and in pursuit of slavery. This invariably leads to a rich discussion about political violence. Was the violence of the American Revolution justified by the ultimate result? Students tend to be split on this question.

So how do we answer John Adams’ question? How might it apply to other periods in American history, including our own?

In his Oval Office speech last week, President Joe Biden declared that “there is no place, no place in America for political violence or any violence ever, period.”

Those noble sentiments, which echoed comments he’d made following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, are ahistorical. Just about any high school student could tell you that.

Violence, especially state-sanctioned violence, has driven much of the nation’s development, from the slave trade to Westward expansion to the 20th-century wars that made the U.S. a superpower. The presidents widely viewed as America’s greatest — Washington, Lincoln, FDR — are heralded for successfully wielding violence during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, respectively.

In my classes, I encourage students to grapple with this legacy while critically assessing the uses of political violence in the American past. In my ninth grade classes, we follow up on our discussion of “John Adams” by reading the Declaration of Independence , which John Adams helped Thomas Jefferson draft. When the rights of the people are being systematically violated, Jefferson tells us, it is the right of the people to “abolish” or “throw off such Government.”

What, I ask my students, might this mean?

In 1776, Jefferson’s words were used to justify revolutionary violence. What about subsequent generations of Americans? Have they retained the right to overthrow their own government? If so, when is violence justified, and when is it not? This is one lens through which to discuss Jan. 6, for instance.

Similar questions emerge when we study the abolitionist movement. This past year, my ninth graders spent two weeks exploring various approaches to abolishing slavery in the mid-19th century, from moral suasion to petitioning to political organizing. Then we got to John Brown . Students were particularly interested to learn about Brown’s murderous attacks on pro-slavery men in Kansas, as well as his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. (Notably, Brown justified his actions in a “Declaration of Liberty” that reprised portions of Jefferson’s declaration.)

At a time when the abolitionist movement had reached a dead end, Brown reignited the national debate about slavery and, through his martyrdom, helped to bring about the war that freed the slaves. Some of my students saw him standing on the right side of history but were repelled by his tactics. Others argued that his violence was justified, and should even be celebrated, given what it achieved.

At Bard High School Early College in Queens, N.Y, where I teach, students finish up their standard high school classes by the end of 10th grade, then take college-level classes as juniors and seniors.

This fall, I’ll be teaching a college-level elective titled “Winning the White House, Then and Now,” in which we’ll trace the history of presidential campaigns since 1788 while also digesting the news unfolding in real time. Political violence will be a recurring theme, as it’s important to understand the key role violence has played in elections throughout American history.

The presidents widely viewed as America’s greatest — Washington, Lincoln, FDR — are heralded for successfully wielding violence during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, respectively.

Elections during the Reconstruction era, for instance, were rife with KKK antics, lynchings, riots, and murderous attacks on Black voters and their Republican allies. In Ellenton, South Carolina, in the run-up to the 1876 election, some 100 African Americans were massacred by a white mob. In the decades that followed, white supremacy would be reinforced with threats and acts of violence against African Americans who tried to assert their voting rights or build political power.

This brings up another theme I emphasize with my students: the constant interplay of government violence with efforts by ordinary people to resist, sometimes using violence of their own. In another college-level class I teach, “Cold War America,” we study 1960s radical self-defense groups, such as the Black Panthers, who despite initiating very little violence, were met with overwhelming police brutality and targeted assassinations by the FBI and local forces.

Another group that captured my students’ attention this past year was the Weather Underground , which became notorious in the late 1960s and ‘70s for setting off dozens of bombs . The organization, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, were resisting both racism and the Vietnam War. Their goal was to “bring the war home” — to make white Americans feel some element of the terror being experienced by Black people and the Vietnamese people. And yet they very deliberately avoided inflicting physical harm on their fellow citizens. (The only victims of their bombs were three of their own members who accidentally blew themselves up. )

My students were fascinated by these tactics, especially as they compared them to the much milder forms of protest being wielded by young people protesting the war in Gaza this past spring.

A highlight of the semester was a visit to our classroom by a former SDS leader and member of the Weather Underground, Jeff Jones. My students pressed him, respectfully, on the methods he’d deployed a half-century earlier. Jones said he wouldn’t recommend violent tactics to young people today; mass protests, he felt, tended to be more effective. But he emphasized that the violence being wielded by the U.S. government in his youth had been so overwhelming that he, like John Brown, had felt a moral imperative to act. And he continued to believe that his cause had been just. With that, the class agreed.

Political violence has always been, to quote the Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown, “as American as cherry pie.” Our students must learn that history if they are to understand and engage with the present.

Michael Woodsworth is an Associate Professor of History at Bard High School Early College, Queens, where he’s taught for 12 years. He is the author of “Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City.”