
          The Last Innocents: The Civil Rights Movement and the Teaching of
High School History
          By Loewen, James W.James W. Loewen
          Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 14-17
          
          In 1974 Pantheon published the first revisionist textbook of state
history in the United States, Mississippi: Conflict
and Change, edited by Charles Sallis and myself. The Southern Regional Council awarded the book the 1976 Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction, but the State of Mississippi rejected it for use as a public school text. This led to the lawsuit Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed, et al., which we finally won in 1980. As a result, Mississippi was ordered to adopt our textbook for six years beginning in 1980.
          Rewriting Mississippi history helped me see the problems in
American history, for I came to realize, especially after moving to
Vermont, that in history teaching as well as other areas, Mississippi
in the 1960s merely exaggerated tendencies that unfortunately
permeated the United States. Gradually I became aware that American
history textbooks simply do not tell high school students what
historians tell each other in their professional monographs and
articles. For my most recent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, I selected twelve commonly used high school history textbooks and spent much of ten years surveying what they tell students about our past.1
          The distortions begin with what textbooks say about the Indians,
continue as authors retell the familiar (though largely false) legends
about Columbus and the Pilgrims, carry on through astonishing
omissions about historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller,
and Woodrow Wilson, and even affect what history books predict for the
future. Let me illustrate, however, with a topic which most readers of
Southern Changes know intimately: the story of the Southern civil rights movement and its complex relationship with the federal government.
          Between 1960 and 1968, the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed to the federal government for protection and enforcement of federal law, but governmental response was woefully inadequate, especially during the Kennedy administration. In Mississippi, movement offices displayed this bitter rejoinder:
There's a street in Itta Bena called Freedom. There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty. There's a department in Washington called Justice.
          From their start investigating alleged Communists during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the Federal Bureau of Investigation had a long history of antagonism toward African Americans. Although the last four years of that administration saw more anti-black race riots than any other time in our history, agents focused on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks' civil rights. Hoover explained the Washington, D.C., anti-black race riot of 1919 as due to "the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women."
          In the beginning the FBI had a few black agents, but by the early
1960s the Bureau had none, although Hoover tried to claim it did by
counting his chauffeurs.2 Many FBI
agents in the South were white Southerners who cared what their white
Southern neighbors thought of them and were themselves white
supremacists.
          Even in the 1960s, Hoover still thought the 1954 Supreme Court
decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a
terrible error. Beginning in 1963, Hoover decided to try to destroy
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the
approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he tapped the
telephones of King's associates, bugged King's hotel rooms, and made
tape recordings of his conversations with and about women. The FBI
then passed on the lurid details, including photographs, transcripts,
and tapes, to Senator Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists,
reporters, foundation administrators, and of course the president. In
1964, a high FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having
sex, along with an anonymous note suggesting that King kill himself,
to the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). When King went to Europe to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, the
FBI tried to sabotage receptions in his honor. Hoover called the civil
rights leader "the most notorious liar in the country" and tried to
prove that SCLC was infested with Communists. Hoover
also passed along disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project, organizations such as CORE and SNCC, and other civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson. At the same time, the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death threats made against him and repeatedly claimed that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not its job.
          In 1962, SNCC sued Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to force them to protect civil rights demonstrations. Desperate for ways to force the United States to care about enforcing the law in the Deep South, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie Moore and Robert Moses then hit upon the 1964 "Freedom Summer" idea. The FBI finally opened an office in Jackson after the national outcry prompted by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia,
Mississippi. But later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention at Atlantic City, agents tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Martin Luther King, at the request of President Johnson.
          After Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, students from a nearby black college demonstrated against an Orangeburg, South Carolina, bowling alley which refused to obey the law. State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding twenty-eight--many in the soles of their feet as they threw themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire. The FBI responded not by helping to identify which officers fired in what
became known as "the
Orangeburg Massacre," but by falsifying information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.
          Federal harassment of black organizations was not limited to Dixie. In California, Chicago, and elsewhere, the Bureau tried to eliminate the breakfast programs of the Black Panther organization, spread false rumors about venereal disease to break up Panther marriages, helped escalate conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in bed in 1969. The FBI warned black leader Stokely Carmichael's mother of a fictitious plot to murder him, prompting Carmichael to flee the United States.
          The FBI also investigated pro-black faculty members at colleges across America. The institution at which I taught, Tougaloo College in Mississippi, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to "neutralize" the entire college, because among other things its students had sponsored "out-of-state militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and lectures... [and] condemned various publicized injustices to the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi." Obviously high crimes and misdemeanors!
          The FBI's conduct and the federal leadership that tolerated and sometimes requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s, alongside such positive achievements as the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. As historian Kenneth O'Reilly put it, "when the FBI stood against black people, so did the government."
          How do American high school history textbooks treat this legacy?
          First, they leave out everything bad the government ever did, as if
it never happened. Textbooks do not even want to say anything bad
about state governments: ten textbooks include part of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but nine of them censor his negative comments about the governments of Alabama and Mississippi.
          Not only do high school text books fail to blame the federal
government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many
actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the
advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what
we might call the Hollywood approach to civil rights. Hollywood's main
feature film on the movement, you may remember, was Alan Parker's
notorious Mississippi Burning. In that
movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five
minutes; for the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single
civil rights worker or black Mississippian over the age of twelve with
whom the viewer could possibly identify. Instead, Parker concocts
two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary "good cop/bad
cop" formula and in the process, double-handedly solve the murders. In
reality, everyone in east Mississippi knew for weeks who did
it. Supporters of the civil rights movement, including Michael
Schwerner's widow, Rita, and every white northern friendthe movement
could muster pressured Congress and the federal executive to force the
FBI to open a Mississippi office and make bringing the murderers to
justice a priority.3 No innovative
police work was involved; the FBI finally apprehended the conspirators
after giving one of them $30,000 to testify against the others.
          American high school history textbooks offer a Parker-like analysis
of the entire civil rights movement. Like the arrests of the Klansmen
in Mississippi Burning, advances in civil
rights simply result from good government. Federal initiative in
itself "explains" milestones like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F. Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon
Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we have them
today. Or, in the immortal passive voice of one textbook,American History, "Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed." Several textbooks even reverse the time order, putting the bills first, the civil rights movement later.4
          Much of the civil rights movement consisted of various tactics to
force the federal government to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments and other civil rights laws. Omitting this dynamic not only makes it impossible for students to see how citizens can get the government to act, but also makes for inaccurate history. Instead, textbooks tell us about the "outstanding leadership" of John F. Kennedy on civil rights. Challenge of Freedom provides a typical treatment:
President Kennedy and his administration respondedreponded to the call for racial equality. In June1963 the President asked for congressional action on far-reaching equal rights laws. Following the President's example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963 more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D. C. (611-13)
          This account reverses leader and led. In reality, JFK first tried to stop the march, then sent his vice-president to Norway to keep him away from it, because Kennedy felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights. Even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a Kennedy partisan, notes dryly in his assessment of the administration that "the best spirit of Kennedy was largely absent from the racial deliberations of his presidency."
          Similarly, when describing the attack on segregation
that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision,
Triumph of the American Nation makes no mention that
African Americans were the plaintiffs and attorneys in
Brown v. Board of Education or that prior cases also
brought by the NAACP prepared the way. Today many black students think
desegregation was something the federal government forced on the black
community. They have no idea it was something the black community
forced on the federal government.5 No wonder some young African
Americans now view Brown as part of a government conspiracy to destroy black institutions! Meanwhile, young white Americans can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to blacks, so why does it need to do more?
          However, it is boring to read about all the good things the
government did on its own.  Moreover, revelation after revelation of
misconduct and deceit in the federal executive branch have shattered
the trust of the American people, including high school
students. Since they are unwilling to say bad things about the
government, high school textbook authors come across as the last
innocents left in America. When students encounter so little material
in school about the bad things the government has done, especially
when parents and the daily newspaper tell a different story, this
"makes all education suspect," according to education researcher
Donald Barr.
          Nor can the servile approach of textbook authors to the government teach students to be effective citizens. Not one of the history books I surveyed educates students about the dynamics that should characterize the interrelationship between the people and their government in a democracy.6 Consequently none of the books tells how citizens can, and in fact have, forced the government to respond to them. According to Patrick Ferguson, many teachers only reinforce this passive image: his study of twelve randomly selected teachers of twelfth-grade American government courses found that about the only way they suggested that individuals could influence local or national governments was through voting.
          By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance of the executive branch or the growth of the CIA, National Security Council, and other covert agencies into what some analysts call a fourth branch of government. By taking the government's side, they encourage students to conclude that criticism is incompatible with citizenship. And by presenting government actions in a vacuum, textbooks mystify the complex interrelationship between the people and their leaders. All of this encourages students to throw up their hands in the belief that the government determines everything anyway, so why bother, especially if its actions are usually so benign. In this way, our American history textbooks minimize the potential power of the people and, despite their best patriotic efforts, take a stance that is overtly anti-democratic.
          I hope to have persuaded you that the way history textbooks present
the relationship between the civil rights movement and the government
is incredibly incomplete and inaccurate, and that these errors have
consequences for our society today. The same holds for how history
textbooks treat Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus,
the War of 1812, the My Lai massacre, and even the Gettysburg Address,
as other chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me
demonstrate. Hopefully I have also persuaded you to put Lies My teacher Told Me in the hands of every
teacher of American history in the South, so that knowledge of our
past can become a tool for self-understanding and social change,
rather than another source of the social problems facing our
country.
          Portions of this essay appear in slightly
different form inLies My Teacher Told Me, and
are reprinted here by permission of the author.
           Lies My
Teacher Told Me (The New Press, 1995, 384 pages)lists and
describes these textbooks.
           Statements of fact are
footnoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me. This
paragraph, for example, relies on Kenneth O'Reilly, "Racial Matters"
and Charles Ameringer, U.S. Foreign
Intelligence.
          Meanwhile, Hoover tapped
Schwerner's father's telephone to see if he might be a
communist!
          One textbook, The United States--A History of the
Republic, does draw a connection between the Selma march and the
Voting Rights Act: "President Johnson pressed for further civil rights
legislation after the Reverend James J. Reeb, a black civil rights
worker, was shot during a voter registration campaign in Selma,
Alabama." Reeb was a white Unitarian minister who had come to Selma to
participate in the Selma to Montgomery march. Later A History of the Republic offers one of the fuller
accounts of the civil rights movement, but other that this half
sentence about Reeb, places it afterthe legislation
it influenced.
          Jury selection in the 1994
retrial of Byron de la Beckwith for his 1963 murder of Medgar Evers
revealed that young black Mississippians "Know little of Evers'
struggle for racial equality".
          In two vignette-chapters on
the Montgomery movement and Martin Luther King, American Adventurestell how the civil rights
movement pressured Congress to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but in
its vignette-chapter on Lyndon Johnson,Adventures gives the credit to LBJ and Robert
Kennedy.
          
            The twelve American history textbooks surveyed in Lies My
Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen:
            
              Social Science Staff of the Educational Research Council of
America, The American Adventure (Boston: Allyn and
Bacon, 1975).
            
            
              Ira Peck, Steven Jantzen, and Daniel Rosen, American
Adventures (Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1987)
            
            
              John A. Garraty with Aaron signer and Michael Gallagher,
American History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1982).
            
            
              Thomas A Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American
Pageant (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991)
            
            
              Robert Green, Laura L. Becker, and Robert E. Coviello,
The American Tradition (Columbus, Ohio: Charles
E. Merrill, 1984).
            
            
              Nancy Bauer, The American Way (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1979).
            
            
              Robert Sobel, Roger LaRaus, Linda Ann De Leon, and Harry
P. Morris, The Challenge of Freedom (Mission Hills,
Calif.: Glencoe, 1990).
            
            
              Allen Kownslar and Donald B. Frizzle, Discovering
American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1974).
            
            
              Carol Berkin and Leonard Wood, Land of Promise
(Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman, 1983)
            
            
              Philip Roden, Robynn Greer, Bruce Kraig, and Betty Bivins,
Life and Liberty (Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman,
1984).
            
            
              Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti, Triumph of the American
Nation (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986).
            
            
              James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, The United
States--A History of the Republic (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).
            
          
          
            James W. Loewen is a professor of sociology at the
University of Vermont and an expert in voting rights issues. His
previous books include the Smith Award-winning Mississippi: Conflict
and Change (with co-author Charles Sallis) and The Truth About
Columbus, a "subversively true" poster book which also resulted from
his research on American history textbooks.
          
        