As numerous new histories center racial tensions in the fabric of America’s history, there’s been a furious pushback arguing that these works and revised educational curricula, including an attention to ethnic issues, distort the story of the nation’s past. Really? Perhaps the outrage should be directed instead at distortions that 90 million or more still harbor from what we learned or had transmitted to us in past decades.
The new book Teaching White Supremacy by Donald Yacavone details how history textbooks for most of the nation’s past have perpetuated a sympathetic if not overtly white supremacist view of America’s race relations. For most Americans, a high-school history course has provided the one comprehensive whack at learning the nation’s heritage.
I searched eBay for my own high-school text used nationwide in U.S. history classes from the 1950s into the 1980s. Here’s some of what I learned and did not learn in 1967 about U.S. racial history at a suburban San Diego school from The American Pageant by noted Stanford Professor Thomas Bailey — shortcomings that are finally being addressed more than a half-century later.
Bailey detailed the political turmoil over slavery’s extension leading to the Civil War, but took a strangely dispassionate approach to the human component of bondage. His sparse descriptions of plantation life avoided harsh judgments. “Savage beatings were normally not administered without some provocation” because a slave’s resale value might drop.
I don’t recall wincing in class that attempts for freedom were obvious provocations. And neither I nor my peers internalized our learning to question the school’s long-standing “Slave Day” auction of athletes to raise campus club funds. Bailey argued that Northern “hothead” abolitionists shared as much blame as extremist Southern planters for failure of compromises for “gradual emancipation, possibly with compensation.”
But it’s the post-Civil War narrative on Reconstruction where Bailey whitewashed or ignored racial events. He indicted arrogant Northerners for using “Negro puppets” in an “orgy of hate and corruption” and derailing a slower, sensible path to a postbellum social order. Integrated state legislatures symbolized “enthroned ignorance,” Bailey wrote, explaining that “goaded to desperation, respectable Southern whites resorted to savage measures against Negro-carpetbag control” such as the Ku Klux Klan, “whose original purposes were [later] partly subverted.”
Bailey presented the Black Codes passed by recrudescent white legislatures after 1877 (strangling property, labor and voting rights for Blacks) as reasonable responses to ensure a stable workforce because too many ex-slaves “were restless,” although he allowed that some codes “were undeniably too severe.” With that, Bailey never again broached “Jim Crow” laws or the horrific cruelty that cemented a segregated and unequal South, nor did he mention Plessy vs. Ferguson, the seminal 1896 Supreme Court case that enshrined legal segregation for nearly 60 years.
In fact, after 1877 Blacks disappeared from the narrative for hundreds of pages as the decades rolled by. In the entire thousand-page text, a single Black was given a voice: early 20th-century vocational educator Booker T. Washington, who merited a paragraph. There was scant discussion of the centuries of labor that Blacks toiled to help build the nation economically. Unmentioned are the massacres against Blacks in Tulsa, Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere.
The Civil Rights movement after World War II was introduced within a Southern context. Bailey cited the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools not as Brown vs. Board of Education but from a southern viewpoint as the “reverberating ‘Black Monday’ decision.” Meanwhile, discrimination against other ethnic groups went all but unnoticed in the text save for a few sentences here and there. Bailey stereotyped the vital labor of Chinese immigrants in building the transcontinental railroad through the Sierras as that of “pig-tailed coolies with picturesque basket hats and flapping pantaloons— cheap, efficient and docile laborers.”
With this historically-bankrupt depiction (or similar as Yacavone shows) of race relations as the one remembered by tens of millions who still vote and by many with political power, it’s not shocking that reactions to new more accurate accounts have often been those of confusion, denial or grasping at bogeymen such as Critical Race Theory. The text reflected a longstanding interpretation of America’s racial history promulgated by prominent Columbia Professor William Dunning. Its very gradual demise began in the 1940s, but we’re now in 2024 and the consequences still course through much of the popular historical mindset and shape presentations at physical monuments, as writer Cliff Smith reminds us in How the Word Is Passed.
There is hope, however, as the pipeline of new books indicates. My high school’s American history texts now include a free online collaborative work from Stanford of more than 300 scholars nationwide called The American Yawp. (Yawp: a raucous noise.) The title symbolizes the nation’s history in both its glory and shame — as a complicated past, not a pageant. The text covers legal and political influences that promoted or hindered equality, courageous individuals who fought prejudice, and contemporary struggles for a more just society. Author John Meacham points out that America has existed only 60 years as a nation with institutions truly committed to equality.
New histories and textbooks around the country can begin to surmount the urgent challenge to infuse popular culture with more honest stories of our racial past.
David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.