February 2023 - “Black History Matters"
This Black History Month let’s acknowledge that the College Board is nearing finalization of the first Advanced Placement course in African American Studies. Unfortunately, is it happening in the context of a backlash against teaching honestly about race in America. This both worried and inspired artist Jonathan Harris who painted Critical Race Theory, a haunting depiction of famous Black historical figures being covered over by whitewash.
Since January of 2021, more than thirty-five states have rejected critical race theory as too divisive to be taught in school. It’s surprising what seems too divisive these days. Parents in Tennessee protested elementary students learning about Ruby Bridges role in integrating elementary schools, a staple of civil rights lessons when I was a youth.
But in Florida today it is the AP course which is most under attack. Goaded on by Gov. DeSantis, the Board of Education rejected the AP class because it “lacks educational value.” The Board insists that factual and objective teaching must “define American history” as “the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Not only is this narrow definition contentious, (see Kim Roosevelt’s The Nation that Never Was ), it denies students rich debates about our national roots.
The fact that this furor erupted during Black History Month would probably not surprise the originator of our month-long national celebration, the famed historian Carter G. Woodson. In 1926, when he first suggested it, the battle over the teaching about race was well underway. Woodson wrote of “the Redeemers,” those revisionist historians who described slavery as a positive good and the Civil War as a federal invasion. The Confederacy was glorified as a “Lost Cause” to be redeemed.
I’m sure Woodson knew of the prominent “redeemer,” Mildred Lewis Rutherford, active in the 1920s. Though her family enslaved hundreds of people, Rutherford saw the Confederacy as “blameless.” It was the cruelty of post-civil war Reconstruction, she insisted, that “made the Ku Klux Klan a necessity.” She advocated calling the Civil War “the War Between the States,” and praised slavery for keeping kidnapped Africans “well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.”
So effective were Rutherford and other Redeemers that in 1894, in his last major speech, Frederick Douglass admitted “the defeat of emancipation.” So thorough was the whitewashing of history that in 1968, a month before he was shot, Martin Luther King Jr. bemoaned how “the collective mind of America became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.”
The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. worked to keep racist myths out of the new Advanced Placement course. Despite that some changes were made to assuage political pressure, Gates defended the AP course as a step forward. Besides, he points out, the debate prompted by these “modern day redeemers” may actually engage more young people in real historical study.
Most students know that Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” The activism that Black Lives Matter stirred up has inspired students in multiple states to advocate for more African American history.
And in Florida, students have engaged civil rights lawyer Ben Crump to sue Gov. DeSantis for denying them a full education. What better lived history lesson can you give the future leaders of our democracy?
FURTHER ACTION:
1) Learn more about the changes in the AP African American History Course, such as: (a) taking the issues of “reparations” and “Black Lives Matter” out of the body of the curriculum and listing them only as optional research topics; (b) deemphasis of Black queer studies and “intersectionality;” and, (c) the removal of the name Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the creators of “critical race theory.” In addition, the name of one particular series of lessons was watered-down from “Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality” to “Black feminism and womanism” to “Black women’s voices in society and leadership.” The root word “intersection” was eliminated again when one lesson, “Intersections of Race, Gender and Class,” was renamed, “Overlapping Dimensions of Black Life.”
2) Share Carter G. Woodson critique of the “Lost Cause.” He wrote, “Starting after the Civil War, the opponents of freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind inasmuch as the freedom of the body has to be conceded.” “It was well understood, that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.” “If you can control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his action.”
3) Teach others about the parallels between today’s “redeemers,” such as those proudly displaying Confederate battle flags and fomenting rebellion against the federal government, and Mildred Lewis Rutherford. Of her twenty-five books and pamphlets, the most influential was, “A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries.” It instructed librarians to reject any book that “…speaks of the Constitution other than a compact between Sovereign States;” “…does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861;” “…calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion; “…says the South fought to hold her slaves;” and “…that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.” In 1923 she insisted that chattel slavery “taught the negro self-control, obedience and perseverance — yes, taught him to realize his weaknesses and how to grow stronger for the battle of life.” She added, “Far from degrading the negro,” the slave system “was fast elevating him above his nature and race.” Not surprisingly, many who embraced Rutherford’s perspective were also advocating a century ago for construction of many Confederate monuments.
4) Read and share this month’s New York Times column by Henry Louis Gate Jr.’s, Who's afraid of Black History?, (February 18, 2023)