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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe lies our textbooks told generations of Virginians about slavery
The seventh-grade edition of the history textbook issued to Virginia pupils from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds
By Bennett Minton
Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.
July 31, 2020 at 9:35 a.m. EDT
A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our states history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery, included these sentences: A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes. The masters knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection. Enslaved people went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons. It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness. Color illustrations featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably.
This was the education diet that Virginias 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. Today, Virginias symbols of the Lost Cause are falling. But banishing icons is the easy part. Statues arent history; theyre symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as history is harder to dislodge.
How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginias White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters 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 isnt finished.
Historian Adam Wesley Dean explored the origin of my textbook in his 2009 article ?Who Controls the Past Controls the Future: The Virginia History Textbook Controversy. It was President Harry Trumans 1948 integration of the armed forces that spurred Virginias 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 Scribners 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: Some 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. And General 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.
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HAB911
(8,890 posts)and our History teacher REFUSED to allow us to refer to the "Civil War", it was "The Wah between the States" only.
brush
(53,771 posts)HAB911
(8,890 posts)brush
(53,771 posts)the states and the Civil War? I still don't get it.
she was elevating the status of the conflict from an internal rebellion, to that of two equal countries fighting each other. I understood that Yankees were more prone to call it a Civil War or rebellion. Having experienced how eat up with it all VA is, I assume it to be hardheadedness.
Mariana
(14,854 posts)Lost Causers like to insist that the Confederacy was legitimately a separate country, and not part of the United States. Therefore it could not have been a Civil War.
brush
(53,771 posts)Gotta change it. It's one of those coil fluorescent bulbs. It lasted five yearsmuch longer than the old incandescent bulbs, longer than the confederacy too for that matter.
Ok, I'm a smart ass, but I still get a kick out of how long the devotion to a treasonous and losing blib in history has gone on. It was nothing to be proud of.
yardwork
(61,599 posts)HAB911
(8,890 posts)not a rebellion
DBoon
(22,357 posts)csziggy
(34,136 posts)And railed against the Yankees who invaded the South.
AleksS
(1,665 posts)The War of Northern Aggression which Ive also heard.
Wheres Gen. Sherman when we need him?
DownriverDem
(6,228 posts)Only heard it as the Civil War. Also it was about slavery.
brush
(53,771 posts)about enslavement and great generals. No wonder the racism is so deeply ingrained.
riversedge
(70,197 posts)malaise
(268,949 posts)<snip>
Top private schools are looking to decolonise their syllabuses following Black Lives Matter protests, The Telegraph can reveal.
Several of Britains top fee-paying schools have said they are adopting the measures following demonstrations across the UK and around the world.
Prestigious schools such as Winchester, Fettes, Ampleforth and St Pauls Girls are undertaking reviews of their curriculums in order to better educate their students.
A cross-party group of more than 30 MPs has already demanded that the national curriculum should be re-evaluated by BAME leaders and historians to better reflect black history and the UK in the context of slavery.
On Friday Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, said the country should be "proud" of its history after being asked whether Britain's role in the slave trade should have more focus in the national curriculum.
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Williamson is proud of slavery
JustABozoOnThisBus
(23,338 posts)By some charts, it looks like the trade to Jamaica was three times as large as to the American colonies and United States.
https://www.statista.com/chart/19068/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-by-country-region/
I'm assuming the Jamaican trade, like the start of America, was run by England. Did Jamaica have many more slaves, or did they suffer death in sugar more quickly than America's cotton and tobacco cash crops?
Regards, and congratulations on this latest hurricane missing your home.
malaise
(268,949 posts)perspective. There was a major fight a few years ago over teaching Marcus Garvey in our primary and high schools.
Former colonial countries really need to wake up - all these bullshit mottos like "Out of Many One People" must be challenged. They all mean non-whites at the bottom permanently.
Yonnie3
(17,434 posts)I knew the slavery description was bullshit thanks to my parents, but it was hard not to internalize some of the depictions of the noble, brave, honorable, etc. Confederate leaders. It took a while to learn the truth.
Wounded Bear
(58,647 posts)and not just in Southern states. The real plight of enslaved black Americans is seldom touched on. I certainly don't remember much being said aobut it, and I grew up in WA state. I do know there was heavy segregation, because there weren't many blacks around where I lived, though there were quite a few East Asians.
Good to see there is a real effort to change that and teach real history.
yardwork
(61,599 posts)Only by confronting the lies we were taught can our country's people rise above racism and rebuild our country. These racist myths are woven into our culture. We have to take it apart and start over, based on the truth.
sandensea
(21,624 posts)To be fair, this wasn't just a Southern textbooks problem.
Im 62, started school in 1963. I never remember any nonsense like that being taught. If it was, I certainly dont remember it, which means it wasnt very effective. I never thought slavery was anything but heinous. Maybe it was my parents, I dont know.
sandensea
(21,624 posts)I remember, growing up, that the history teachers seemed incapable of going over that subject without inserting that phrase, and/or "they were better off than they were in Africa."
Even as adults, I've heard more than one Republican say that - usually followed by someone snickering "I wish they'd stayed in Africa!"
Auggie
(31,167 posts)we can do it
(12,184 posts)Auggie
(31,167 posts)over the years I've surmised that one (or several) textbook companies were responsible for this content, or a variation of this content, and depending on your location and your school system's choice of textbook supplier, that was the history you were taught.
I very distinctly remember my history teacher's lecture on slavery. He made it sound "not so bad." I realize now he was simply repeating what was in the textbook, and could have been taught the very same lesson 15 or so years earlier.
we can do it
(12,184 posts)Auggie
(31,167 posts)dlk
(11,560 posts)Republicans have a history of sanitizing textbooks to rewrite history to suit their political aims. They are a clear threat to the continuation of our democratic republic in myriad ways.
leanforward
(1,076 posts)In my middle years, I was still dumb and ignorant from what I had been led to believe.
In the military no one is left behind. Weve had ill willed people feed a lot of glorification of southern culture hiding the horrendous treatment of POC.
Personally, I remember reading about a pogrom in SE Arkansas similar to Tulsa.
BumRushDaShow
(128,892 posts)over 30 years ago and what happened? In comes people like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Diane Ravitch to make sure that the whole concept would not only get distorted, but completely discredited from their manufacturing all sorts of nonsensical paternalistic gobbledygook regarding many of the educated scholars and department heads who actually did the work.
I fully expect that their bullshit will eventually be resurrected and repackaged with new forwards, in order to build a coffin and try to put a final nail in it in order to address the great historic awakening happening right now that threatens their supremacist ideals.
ooky
(8,922 posts)It was the lead in to the kind of teaching we would receive in this 7th grade history book. I grew up in the Roanoke, VA school system. I recall hearing about the "Virginia History Trip" from the first grade on, until we were rising 4th graders. It was a day long field trip where we were loaded into Greyhound buses for a day long field trip to various historical sites, going as far as Monticello, to Appomattox, to wrapping up at Natural Bridge, where we all went shopping for our confederate gear. When we returned just about every kid was waving the confederate flags they had bought at Natural Bridge. The entire purpose of the trip was to pump the Confederacy, and Robert E. Lee was portrayed as a god. The way the Confederacy was portrayed in our school system you would have thought they had won the war.
TheRickles
(2,057 posts)ooky
(8,922 posts)My sister was 6 years behind me and she went on the trip in 1968. I don't know how much longer it went on.
That trip was pretty much our indoctrination into confederate worship and racism in the school system.
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)I read somewhere that you can't even buy a Nazi flag of any sort in Germany. Imagine our doing the same to the Confederate flag...good idea, IMO.
DBoon
(22,357 posts)The swastika is illegal, so they pick the closest legal substitute
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)Buckeye_Democrat
(14,853 posts)... was somehow the icing on that ridiculous cake for me. Good grief.
It was nearly the opposite in my early history classes. It wasn't until taking a history class devoted to Africa in college that I had a more accurate picture of the history. It was still horrible, but my childhood history teachers had portrayed the whole ugly affair even worse.
BobTheSubgenius
(11,563 posts)"Once the Germans were warlike and mean
But that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then."
Historic NY
(37,449 posts)Abolitionists, underground railroad. I've seen instances where elders referred to slaves as servants here. I instantly snap back at them. There is a lot of misplaced sentiments or shame connected to it and rightfully so. We don't have any known descendants of slave owners left but we do have some of the slave descendants. NY began manumitting slaves before 1800, I have transcribed manumits from the town records, oddly enough in many cases they were usually given a stake. Inventories of owners that died along with wills provide some clues to the institution here. In some a young female or so would remain until the death of a spouse. My city colleague and myself never shy from the stain of slavery, don't celebrate it, but we are able to pull individuals from that past. From revolutionary war soldiers, to prosperous builders, to endeared free persons in the community. The slave turned M-E preacher, Rev. William Seymour 1786-1847 shunned by whites at first, but embraced in the end. He has one of the largest tombstones in the M-E church graveyard. In the 1750's we had a public school here, young black children were taught at the end of the day when others left. SUNY University of NY at John Jay has methodically worked on a slave/owner database. There was a scourge of slavery it wasn't all peaches and cream either. We have collections of runaway notices. Indentured servitude is seldom talked about also, selling yourself out to learn a trade. Another form was being sold off for welfare reasons, being too poor or infirmed, orphaned etc. the community would find someone to take them for expenses. Social welfare system wasn't exactly a workhouse, but people were expect to help contribute to their care.Its interesting to see how people dickered to get an increase in monies from the town coffers.
In 1799 NY passed a bill ordering the gradual emancipation of slavery, by 1817 it became a law that it would by gone by 1827. The worst of the worst owners scrambled to sell off their slaves...I found a so called respected Dr. in the western part of the county trying to get rid of his. The first census of 1790 showed a number of free black men in town. I think that the main reason I see the number of slaves dwindling in my town were from the fact that it was the heart of Presbyterianism and Methodism with strong preachers in the pulpit and community from 1760's forward.
[link:https://www.voanews.com/usa/history-slavery-ny-examined-through-runaways-notices |]
[link:https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/|]
I would recommend Professor Gates program on Reconstruction its 4hrs on PBS. Its jaw dropping what went on in the south, and still goes on in places and spirit today.