History Thread: Propaganda and Poppycock in "The Land of the Free"

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Rick Perlstein
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Anti-"CRT" panic, ca. 1965.

History Thread: Propaganda and Poppycock in “The Land of the Free”
By the mid-1960s, many expected the next Civil Rights battleground to be in education. Martin Luther King lamented that “the history books, which had almost completely ignored the contributio…
the-avocado.org
1:03 PM · Jul 6, 2021

By the mid-1960s, many expected the next Civil Rights battleground to be in education. Martin Luther King lamented that “the history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy.” Adam Clayton Powell expressed the same viewpoint in Congress, demanding that “something should be done about racially distorted and offensive textbooks” that downplayed slavery and racism, if not ignoring African Americans altogether.

It wasn’t coincidental, of course. Institutional racism ensured that any books emphasizing Black accomplishments generated protest. “When a publisher goes before an adoption committee in a southern state,” one executive commented, “the first question he is asked is, ‘Are there any pictures of Negroes in these books of yours?'” But it wasn’t just the South that pushed backwards attitudes of race, particularly slavery and the Civil War. A popular postwar textbook asserts that “Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears…suffered less than any other class in the South from its “peculiar institution.”

As battles over desegregation and expanded Black Studies courses raged, King, Powell, the Congress for Racial Equality and other allies pressured states to develop textbooks that “correctly portray the role and contribution of the American Negro and members of other ethnic groups.” In 1965, the State of California commissioned a new textbook for 8th and 11th Graders seeking to correct these shortcomings. The decision proved the curtain raiser on a particularly heated period in public education.

Battles over public education weren’t new, of course. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 was the most notorious example of a nationwide battle against teaching evolution in school. In 1940, the American Legion rounded on Harold Rugg’s social studies book Man at Work, which they deemed “threats to the American way of life” and burned in bonfires. The ’50s Red Scare, of course, saw widespread attacks on public education, both in banning “subversive” books and firing teachers. More generally, there was ongoing leeriness towards the progressive education pioneered by John Dewey, which stressed curiosity and pluralism over ironclad certainty.

*snip*