VA-7th-grade textbook circa 1961. "I trust you and your family had a pleasant crossing."

[Bucky]

46. You're not wrong if we were talking about the Middle Passage

But that's not what we're discussing. Yes, those horrible things were... horrible.

The clues to what's going on the pic with guys in the suits are pretty clearly laid out in the snippits of text seen in the picture. Is this propaganda? Of course! Pro Virginia, pro white supremacy propaganda, and only indirectly pro slavery.

We have no argument about it being bad history.

The question we're disputing is whether the black family is meant to be slaves. The text in the book tells you what this is. No one would buy that as a depiction of enslaved people. To think that, you have to categorically ignore the evidence right in front of your face.

Don't take it personally. There's a lot of that going around in this country lately. But this picture of historic cherry picking is about the colonization of Liberia (departing, not arriving), which anti-slavery white supremacists intended as a benign form of ethnic cleansing in the pre-war years.