“They’re not hearing about the education that started to blossom and bloom in Louisiana during Reconstruction, and they’re not hearing about other things,” she said.ĭarrell Cobbins, the only Black member of the Tennessee State Board of Education, wants history to hit home for students and said part of learning it is putting it in the context of today and using it to inform society. “If all Black students are hearing about their history is enslavement, enslavement, enslavement, then they’re not hearing about the civil rights movement,” she said. “But we never talked about anything like that.” “It was 10th or 11th grade … there was a shelf in the back and the entire shelf was the book ‘Roots,’” he said. Frederick Webb, an actor who graduated from a high school in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 2004, had to do his own research to uncover that history, including borrowing a copy of Alex Haley’s “Roots” from an English teacher. It lasted for generationsĪll too many times, they had to do their own work to learn that history. They took ordinary moments, like preparing food or fixing hair, to tell stories of Black achievement.Ĭonfederate reckoning: Southern newspapers were vocal supporters of the Confederacy. They passed family stories onto children and grandchildren. Parents and grandparents pushed back against the school lessons given to their children. Black historians mounted challenges to Lost Cause mythology as early as 1913. “That’s often overlooked.”īut Black Southerners refused to accept these distortions. “With all the attention they received in terms of reference to the monuments, I think their most lasting impact was in controlling and censoring textbooks,” said Kevin Levin, a historian who has written on the Civil War in American memory. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades shaping and reshaping textbooks to put a strong emphasis on Lost Cause views of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which glorified the white supremacist foundations of the Confederacy and was used to justify segregation and authoritarian Jim Crow governance. The same forces that took over public spaces to erect monuments to the Confederacy and its white supremacist tenets also kept a tight grip on the history taught to Southern pupils. “It should be noted that slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States,” a 1961 Alabama history textbook said, falsely. The evils of slavery got cursory acknowledgments - and quick dismissals. Textbooks celebrated the violent overthrow of democratically-elected, multiracial governments. Civil War battles got described in detail. Teachers taught students to sing Dixie and memorize long lists of forgettable governors. Watch Video: Confederate Reckoning: The teaching of the history of the Confederacyįor much of the 20th century, southern classrooms treated Black history - when they touched the subject at all - as a sideshow to a white-dominated narrative.
0 kommentar(er)
