Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (23 page)

CHORUS: Nigger Doodle's al! the go, £7"c.

Blubber lips are killing sweet, And kinky heads are splendid;

And oh, it makes such bullyfeet To have the heels extended.

CHORUS: Nigger Doodle's all the go, Ot I have shared these lyrics with hundreds of college students and scores of high school history teachers. To get audiences to take the words seriously, I usually try to lead them in a singalong. Often even all-white groups refuse. They are shocked by what they read. Nothing in their high school history textbooks hinted that national politics was ever like this.

Partly because many party members and leaders did not identify with the war effort, when the Union won Democrats emerged as the minority party. Republicans controlled Reconstruction. Like slavery, Reconstruction is a subject on which textbooks have improved since the civil rights movement. The earliest accounts, written even before Reconstruction ended, portrayed Republican state governments struggling to govern fairly but confronted with immense problems, not the least being violent resistance from racist ex-Confederates. Textbooks written between about 1890 and the 1960s, however, painted an unappealing portrait of oppressive Republican rule in the postwar period, a picture that we might call the Confederate myth of Reconstruction. For years black families kep! the truth about Reconstruction alive. The aging slaves whose stories were recorded by WPA writers in the 1930s remained proud of“ blacks' roles during Reconstruction. Some still remembered the names of African Americans elected lo office sixty years earlier. ”I know folks think the books tell the truth,“ said an eighty-eight-year-old former slave, ”but they shore don't."60 As those who knew construction from personal experience died off, however, even in the black community the textbook view took over.

My most memorable encounter with the Confederate myth of Reconstruction came during a discussion with seventeen first-year students at Tougaloo -ollege, a predominantly black school in Mississippi, one afternoon in January 970.1 was about to launch into a unit on Reconstruction, and I needed to find out what the students already knew. “What was Reconstruction?” I asked. “What nages come to your mind about that era?” The class consensus: Reconstruction was ihe time when African Americans took over the governing of the Southern S, including Mississippi. But they were too soon out of slavery, so they :d up and reigned corruptly, and whites had to take back control of the state governments. I sat stunned. So many major misconceptions glared from that statement was hard to know where to begin a rebuttal. African Americans never over the Southern states. All governors were white and almost all legisla, had white majorities throughout Reconstruction. African Americans did : Jniess up“; indeed, Mississippi enjoyed less corrupt government during econstmction than in the decades immediately afterward. ”Whites" did not take back control of the state governments; rather, some white Democrats used force and fraud to wrest control from biracial Republican coalitions.

For young African Americans to believe such a hurtful myth about their past seemed tragic. It invited them to doubt their own capability, since their race had “messed up” in its one appearance on American history's center stage. It also invited them to conclude that it is only right that whites be always in control. Yet my students had merely learned what their textbooks had taught them. Like almost all Americans who finished high school before the 1970s, they had encountered the Confederate myth of Reconstruction in their American history classes. I, too, learned it from my college history textbook. John F. Kennedy and his ghost writer retold it in their portrait of L. Q._C, Lamar in Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Compared to the 1960s, today's textbooks have vastly improved theii treatments of Reconstruction. All but three of the twelve textbooks I surveys paint a very different picture of Reconstruction from Gone with ihe Wind.' No longer do histories claim that federal troops controlled Southern society decade or more. Now they point out that military rule ended by 1868 in all three states. No longer do they say that allowing African American men to vo set loose an orgy of looting and corruption. The 1961 edition of TriumphoU American Nation condemned Republican rule in the South: “Many of the 'c petbag' governments were inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt.” In stark conti the 1986 edition explains that “The southern reconstruction legislatures stafl many needed and long overdue public improvements , . . strengthened pub education . . . spread the tax burden more equitably . . . [and] introdu overdue reforms in local government and the judicial system.”

Like their treatment of slavery, textbooks' new view of Reconstruc represents a sea change, past due, much closer to what the original sources I the period reveal, and much less dominated by white supremacy, Howeve: the way the textbooks structure their discussion, most of them inadvertently I take a white supremacist viewpoint. Their rhetoric makes African Ameri rather than whites the “problem” and assumes that the major issue of struction was how to integrate African Americans into the system, econotnif and politically. “Slavery was over,” says The American Way. “But the South' ruined and the Blacks had to be brought into a working society,” Blacks' already working, of course. One wonders what the author thinks they had j doing in slavery! Similarly, according to Triumph ofthe American Nation, 1 struction “meant solving the problem of bringing black Americans intQ mainstream of national life ” Triumph supplies an instructive example myth oflazy, helpless black folk: “When white planters abandoned their plantations on islands off the coast of South Carolina, black people there were left helpless and destitute.” In reality, these black people enlisted in Union armies, operated the plantations themselves, and made raids into the interior to free slaves on mainland plantations. The archetype of African Americans as dependent or others begins here, in textbook treatments of Reconstruction. It continues to ihc present, when many white Americans believe blacks work less than whiles, even though census data show they work more.

In reality, white violence, not black ignorance, was the key problem during Reconstruction. The figures are astounding. The victors of the Civil War executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandant of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders and other Unionists, white and black,64 In Hinds County, Mississippi, alone, whites killed an average of one African American a day, many of them servicemen, during Confederate Reconstructionthe period from 1865 to 1867 when ex-Confederates ran the governments of most Southern states. In Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 persons, mostly African Americans and white Republicans.5 In one judicial district in North Carolina, a Republican judge counted 700 beatings and 12 murders.

lustration of armed whites raiding a black neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, L866 riot, exemplifies white-black violence during and after Reconstruction. Forty .Mean Americans died in this riot; whites burner! down every black church in the city.

Although the narratives in textbooks have improved, some of the pictures havei Four of the twelve textbooks feature this cartoon, “The Solid South” represented i delicate white woman. She is weighed down by Grant and armaments stuffed I carpetbag, accompanied by bluecoated soldiers of occupation. Textbook autfiors I discuss this cartoon to encourage students to analyze its point of view. The Ami Way at least asks, “How do you interpret this cartoon?” The other three tex merely use the drawing to illustrate Reconstruction: "The South's heavy burden tions Triumph of the American Naiion.

Moreover, violence was only the most visible component of a broader pattern of white resistance to black progress.

Attacking education was an important element of the white supremacists' program. “The opposition to Negro education made itself felt everywhere in a combination not to allow the freedmen any room or building in which a school might be taught,” said Gen. O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau. “In 1865, 1866, and 1867 mobs of the baser classes at intervals and in all parts of the South occasionally burned school buildings and churches used as schools, flogged leachers or drove them away, and in a number of instances murdered them.”''

With the exception of The American Way and Discovering, American History, each of the twelve textbooks includes at least a paragraph on white violence during Reconstruction. Six of twelve textbooks tell how that violence, coupled with failure by the United States to implement civil rights laws, played a major role in ending Republican state governments in the South, thus ending Reconstruction. Hut, overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Conjvdfrates, not African Americans, into the new order. As soon as the federal government stopped addressing the problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since textbooks find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity. Triumph presents the end of construction as a failure of African Americans: “Other northerners grew weary of the problems of black southerners and less willing to help them learn their new roles ;is citizens.” The American Adventure echoes: "Millions of ex-slaves could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians,

farmers, and businessmen.“ Because I too ”learned" that African Americans were the unsolved problem of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma was an 'e-opening experience for me. Myrdal introduced his (944 book by describing the change in viewpoint he was forced to make as he conducted his research,

When the present investigator started his inquiry, the preconception was thai it had to be focused on the Negro people. . . . But as he proceeded in his studies into the Negro problem, it became increasingly evident that little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves. . . . The Negro problem is predominantly a white . .. problem.

This is precisely the change textbook authors still need to make. Their I failure to make it lies behind the appalling results of a 1976 national survey of first-yearcollegestudents,amajorityofwhomventuredthatReconstructionled I to “unparalleled corruption among the entrenched carpetbagger governors and I their allies in the black dominated legislatures of the defeated states”precisely I the Confederate myth of Reconstruction.70 Textbooks in 1976 no longer said I that. But they failed and still fail to counter this pervasive myth with an analysis I that has real power. As one student said to me, “You'll never believe all the stuff I learned in high school about Reconstructionlike, it wasn't so bad, it set up I school systems. Then I saw Gone wiih the Wind and learned the truth about I Reconstruction!” What is identified as the problem determines the frame of I rhetoric and solutions sought. Myrdal's insight, to focus on whites, is critical to I understanding Reconstruction.

Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding thefl period Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”: the years I between 1890 and 1920, when African Americans were again put back into! second-class citizenship. During this time white Americans, North and South, I joined hands to restrict black civil and economic rights. Perhaps because thcfl period was marked by such a discouraging increase in white racism, ten of thH twelve textbooks ignore the nadir. The finest coverage, in American History, sunn marizes the aftermath of Reconstruction in a section entitled “The Long Night j Begins.” “After the Compromise of 1877 the white citizens of the North lurnfl their backs on the black citizens of the South. Gradually the southern statfl broke their promise to treat blacks fairly. Step by step they deprived them ofthe right to vote and reduced them to the status of second-class citizens.” America History then spells out the techniquesrestrictions on voting, segregation in public places, and lynchingswhich southern whites used to maintain wbH supremacy.

Triumph ofthe American Nation, on the other hand, sums up in these bUflil words; “Reconstruction left many major problems unsolved and created newifl equally urgent problems. This was true even though many forces in the NolB and the South continued working to reconcile the two sections.” These sen tences are so vague as to be content-free. Frances FitzGerald used an earlierB sion of this passage to attack what she called the “problems” approach American history. “These 'problems' seem to crop up everywhere.” she deli panned. “History in these texts is a mass of problems.”“ Five hundred pifl later in Triumph, when the authors reach the civil rights movement, race rtfctions again becomes a ”problem." The authors make no connection between failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

In fact, during Reconstruction and the nadir, a battle raged for the soul of the Southern white racist and in a way for that of the whole nation. There is a parallel in the reconstruction of Germany after World War II, a battle for the soul of the German people, a battle which Nazism lost (we hope). But in the Uniied Slates, as American History tells, racism won. Between 1890 and 1907 every Southern and border state “legally” disfranchised the vast majority of its African American voters. Lynchings rose to an all-time high, (n 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. No textbook explains the rationale of segregation, which is crucial to understanding its devastating effect on black and white psyches. Describing the 1954 Supreme Court decision that would begin to undo segregation, The American Way says, ''No separate school could ttuly bv equal for Blacks," but offers no clue as to why this would be so.