There’s a certain delight in odd historical relics—old maps with dragons, forgotten festival customs, recipes calling for ingredients you’d need a 19th-century apothecary to decipher. Occasionally, however, history breaks through the cobwebs not with quirky charm but with blunt force, as was recently the case at Oakland’s Montclair Elementary School. As detailed in an ABC7 News investigation, parents picking up yearbooks for their eager K-5 students were confronted not by adorable candids or gleeful montage pages, but by a jarringly racist slice of 1940s Americana—uncensored, uncontextualized, and certainly un-vetted.
Paging Through the Past, And Stopping Short
The decision to celebrate the school’s centennial, in theory, is sound—nothing says “history is alive” like letting kids peek at stories of yesteryear. The execution, unfortunately, left much to be desired. Parent volunteers pieced together historic articles from The Montclarion for the yearbook. According to ABC7, one 1940 writeup colorfully (and very literally) described a carnival game using a racial slur as the main attraction, pulling the past into the present in a way that absolutely nobody had wished for.
Parents, including Natalie Golden and Brenda Mitchell, shared their shock and anger with ABC7, questioning why such material was allowed past the printing stage. Golden told the outlet, “I was mad. I was very upset,” while Mitchell said, “I was like, what the hell is this?” The principal, David Kloker, quickly sent an apology email describing the inclusion as “deeply hurtful and entirely unacceptable.” He also invited parents to a “restorative justice circle,” meant to address the broader concerns of racial hostility at the school, as described in the ABC7 coverage. His initial solution? Telling families to place a sticker over the page—an approach that failed to satisfy, or even placate, many.
KTUV’s reporting further confirms the sequence of events, highlighting that the offending term appeared “buried” in a republished 1940s article linked to a school carnival game. The outlet notes that confusion and outrage followed swiftly: a discovery no one wanted in a keepsake booklet.
Deep Dive (Or Lack Thereof)
The mechanical failure here is as revealing as the content itself. The PTA historian who found the article admitted in an email to parents—cited by ABC7—that she was so taken by the apparent historical interest that she read only the first paragraph and missed the problematic language entirely. The four-person yearbook team, she said, made the same oversight.
This lapse points squarely to the hazards of engaging with historical artifacts without adequate review or context. As further documented by ABC7, a Jim Crow Museum video—presented in the ABC7 segment, not directly by the current author—explains that the “N-word babies” game involved an actual child sticking his head through a hole and serving as a living target for a beanbag toss. A photograph from a 1942 Wisconsin camp brochure, also shown in the ABC7 review, offers disturbing confirmation of such games in practice. Historical artifacts like these are troubling, unsettling, and, when dropped into a modern elementary yearbook with no framing, understandably explosive.
The Quickest Fixes Aren’t Always the Best
The school’s first solution—passing out stickers to cover the page and offering refunds—met a notably skeptical reaction from families, according to ABC7. Brenda Mitchell questioned the logic, asking, “Put a sticker over it. What do you mean, put a sticker over it?” Parents also wondered why the yearbooks weren’t simply recalled and reissued with a new print run, as ABC7 highlights. The notion that it was up to children and parents to hide a glaring historical blunder is the sort of metaphor you generally get in satire, not real life.
Eventually, and possibly as a result of persistent parent feedback, PTA President Sloane Young confirmed to ABC7 that a revised yearbook was in production and would be made available to families upon request. Young stated, “We are doing another version. If you request it, you will have it and I will deliver it.” Meanwhile, the historian involved in the incident announced she would step down, also reported in ABC7’s account of the fallout. As for accountability, parents expressed ongoing frustration about proofing and oversight—questions now under consideration by the Oakland NAACP, according to the same article.
An Education, Unintentional
It’s an irony worthy of its own yearbook page: in attempting to engage with history, the committee managed to stage an unplanned lesson in both historical context and editorial due diligence. While there’s undeniable value in acknowledging unpleasant parts of the past, ABC7 and KTVU both affirm that these lessons typically require preparation, adult framing, and—not incidentally—some advance reading. Unexpectedly confronting children with a slur-laden primary source, with no explanation or warning, achieves little except widespread discomfort and hasty retractions.
Is there value in preserving the past, warts and all? Absolutely, but, as noted throughout ABC7’s reporting, context is everything. How often do the everyday rituals of school life lurch so spectacularly into the surreal? In this case, the past was not only uninvited—it crashed the party and demanded everyone grab a sticker on the way out.
In the end, the error wasn’t the idea to connect kids to bygone eras. The real failing was in the hurried swing from curiosity to publication, skipping the careful appraisal that’s the linchpin of ethical archival work. If there’s a lesson here, it’s probably as useful for would-be historians as for yearbook committees: reading beyond the headlines—and paying attention to footnotes—matters more than ever when the past refuses to stay quietly in the past.
