Lies My Teacher Told Me (23 page)

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.