{"id":22922,"date":"2020-09-02T15:54:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T19:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/?p=22922"},"modified":"2020-09-03T21:22:07","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T01:22:07","slug":"lies-our-textbooks-told-my-generation-of-virginians-about-slavery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/lies-our-textbooks-told-my-generation-of-virginians-about-slavery\/","title":{"rendered":"Lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
By\u00a0Bennett Minton<\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh, and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state\u2019s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled \u201cHow the Negroes Lived Under Slavery<\/a>,\u201d included these sentences: \u201cA feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.\u201d The masters \u201cknew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.\u201d Enslaved people \u201cwent visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons.\u201d \u201cIt cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness.\u201d Color illustrations featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

This was the education diet that Virginia\u2019s leaders fed me in 1967, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stall, issued me the first book in the series deep into the second decade of the civil rights movement.\u00a0Today<\/a>, Virginia\u2019s\u00a0symbols<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0Lost Cause<\/a>\u00a0are\u00a0falling<\/a>. But banishing icons is the easy part. Statues aren\u2019t history; they\u2019re symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as \u201chistory\u201d is harder to dislodge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginia\u2019s White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters \u2014 and why for all of my six decades we have been intermittently dismantling the myth that the Confederacy represented anything noble. That dismantling began with Reconstruction 155 years ago and still isn\u2019t finished.<\/div>\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n
Historian Adam Wesley Dean explored the origin of my textbook in his 2009 article \u201c?\u2018Who Controls the Past Controls the Future\u2019: The Virginia History Textbook Controversy<\/a>.\u201d It was President Harry Truman\u2019s 1948 integration of the armed forces that spurred Virginia\u2019s leaders to create it. A state commission took control of the history curriculum from local school boards, choosing the writers and supervising the text. The publisher, Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, sold the books to every public school for the three grades. All students were taught the same narrative. My fourth-grade edition included this: \u201cSome of the Negro servants left the plantations because they heard President Lincoln was going to set them free. But most of the Negroes stayed on the plantations and went on with their work. Some of them risked their lives to protect the white people they loved.\u201d And \u201cGeneral Lee was a handsome man with a kind, strong face. He sat straight and firm in his saddle. Traveller stepped proudly as if he knew that he carried a great general.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

The lead historian for the seventh-grade edition was Francis Simkins, of Longwood College in Farmville. His 1947 book, \u201cThe South Old and New,\u201d was an articulation of the Lost Cause. Slavery was \u201can educational process which transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilized person endowed with conceits, customs, industrial skills, Christian beliefs, and ideals, of the Anglo-Saxon of North America,\u201d he wrote in that book. During the Civil War, enslaved people \u201cremained so loyal to their masters [and] supported the war unanimously.\u201d During Reconstruction, \u201cblacks were aroused to political consciousness not of their own accord but by outside forces.\u201d Spotswood Hunnicutt, a co-author, believed that as a result of post-bellum interpretations, students were \u201cconfused\u201d that \u201cslavery caused a war in 1861.\u201d The commission was \u201clooking after the best interest of the students.\u201d The \u201cprimary function of history,\u201d she concluded, was \u201cto build patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In the fall of 1967, I suppose I digested what I was fed. But later in the school year, I would absorb events that defined an era: the Tet Offensive and the erosion of our acceptance of the government\u2019s assertions; the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the riots outside the Democratic National Convention. By the time fifth grade started, I was reading this newspaper and questioning everything. My particular curiosity propelled me beyond my textbook. But only while watching city workers take down Stonewall Jackson\u2019s statue in Richmond did I wonder how that series of books came to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The next Lost Cause?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Here\u2019s what Simkins and Hunnicutt (and their colleagues) left out: the revolution that had begun in 1951 in their hometown. In Farmville, Black high school students went on strike over unequal facilities and then sued. The students, led by Barbara Johns, lost in trial court, but\u00a0Dorothy E. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County<\/i>\u00a0became one of the five cases consolidated in the Supreme Court\u2019s\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Mrs. Stall, bless her heart, didn\u2019t mention that Virginia students \u2014 perhaps some of my classmates\u2019 siblings \u2014 didn\u2019t go to school for several years as state leaders executed \u201cMassive Resistance\u201d in response to\u00a0Brown<\/i>\u2019s directive to integrate schools. We weren\u2019t taught that most of the state\u2019s newspapers participated in an allied effort coordinated by the editor of the Richmond News Leader, James J. Kilpatrick, who went on to a respectable career as a columnist and a slot on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d opposite Shana Alexander.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

No one told us that state Attorney General J. Lindsey Almond Jr., who described himself as \u201cthe most massive of all resisters,\u201d Dean writes, was invited to edit the seventh-grade text. Or that (White) voters elected Almond governor with 63 percent of the vote in 1957, the year the textbooks first appeared in classrooms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Massive Resistance collapsed in 1959, when federal and state courts ruled, on the same day, that closing public schools was unconstitutional. Arlington schools, where I started kindergarten in 1963, quickly admitted Black students (I, a White kid, remember none in mine, after attending a predominantly Black preschool), but other districts slow-walked integration long after the\u00a0Supreme Court\u00a0<\/a>ruled against Prince Edward County again in 1964.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
With the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Virginia politics shifted, but the books stayed. The State Board of Education renewed them in 1966 for six years despite growing criticism. In 1968 the board, led by Lewis F. Powell Jr., proposed a unit in \u201ccitizenship education\u201d emphasizing \u201cthe rule of law, now so gravely endangered by crime, disorders, extremism and disobedience.\u201d The board\u2019s\u00a0proposal<\/a>\u00a0contended: \u201cThere is abroad in this country an escalating unrest which has led already to unprecedented crime, discord and civil disobedience. If unchecked, this unrest could lead to revolution and the end of all freedom.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Is this why President Richard Nixon asked Powell to join the Supreme Court in 1969? Powell had not yet written the\u00a0confidential memo\u00a0<\/a>for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling for a coordinated campaign to defend American capitalism. He was only a name partner in the law firm that had defended Prince Edward County, the champion of \u201ccitizenship education\u201d and, he told Nixon, an inadequate choice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Teaching slavery<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Powell joined the court in 1972. Days after he was sworn in, the education board voted unanimously to withdraw the books. Yet they remained: Pat Lang, a McLean mother, protested my fourth-grade book in a letter to The Washington Post in October 1977 \u2014 the fall I started at the University of Virginia and two decades after its initial dissemination. \u201cRoll over, Kunta Kinte,\u201d Lang wrote, appalled, and went on to quote some of the lies her fourth-grade daughter was being taught.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
The books by Simkins and his colleagues are gone, but everyone wants to make sure that young minds don\u2019t read the \u201cwrong\u201d history. Some schools across the country intend to teach slavery by way of \u201cThe 1619 Project<\/a>,\u201d the essays published in the New York Times last year that won the Pulitzer Prize. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is so against its version of history that he has\u00a0introduced a bill<\/a>\u00a0barring the use of federal funds to teach it. \u201cAs the Founding Fathers said,\u201d Cotton told an interviewer in defending his stance, slavery \u201cwas the necessary evil upon which the union was built.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Two days after Richmond dismantled Stonewall Jackson\u2019s statue, President Trump went to Mount Rushmore and\u00a0claimed<\/a>, in language recalling Powell\u2019s: \u201cOur nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Well, yes, that\u2019s what political leaders have done for generations. Just read my Virginia history textbook.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"
Minton with Tawna Sanchez, member of the Oregon House of Representatives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bennett Minton was a member of the Unitarian Universal Church of Arlington from 2001 to 2018, when he moved from his domicile of nearly six decades to Portland, Oregon. As he was at UUCA, he remains involved in politics as an organizer and lobbyist, paid by no one. He writes on politics and history on his blog, TransformationalCitizenship.com, from which this article was adapted.<\/span><\/p>\n

Washington Post\u00a0<\/a><\/div>\n
July 31, 2020<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Bennett Minton   A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh, and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state\u2019s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled \u201cHow the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,\u201d included these sentences: \u201cA feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.\u201d … Continue reading Lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1313],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22922"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22943,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22922\/revisions\/22943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uusj.net\/wp1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}