Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
In January 2021, a presidential-commissioned study on the teaching of U.S. History titled “The 1776 Report” condemned the teaching of so-called critical race theory, identity politics, an emphasis on political oppression, and a tendency to look at “groups” rather than exceptional individuals. Given that Donald Trump left office that same month, the report had no executive enforcement. And yet, in its aftermath, the United States witnessed an escalation of censorship in public schools and libraries. From 2021 through 2023, multiple news outlets reported that 44 states heard legislative proposals that would have restricted how Black history, racism and white supremacy, violence, sexuality, and social movements could be taught; and 18 of the 44 states passed laws censoring curriculum that dealt with race and sex (Giles, 2023).
In 2022, Florida captured the headlines with the passage of the Individual Freedom Act (known as the Stop WOKE Act), which banned critical race theory in the state’s schools and employment training (Samuels, et al, 2023). A Florida school district then contemplated banning Disney’s 1998 film about Ruby Bridges because it “taught racial hatred” (Wong, 2023). Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, expanded both its chapters, its advocacy for “parental rights,” and its censorship of books (Butler, 2022). As a new Advanced Placement (AP) course in African American history worked through the pilot stage, the Florida state government again intervened, and the College Board changed its national standards, raising concerns about how the political ambitions of a state’s Republican leadership could influence the history taught to the nation’s high school students (Samuels, et al, 2023). Faced with such attacks, a 21st century version of the Freedom Schools took root in Black churches across Florida, seeking to teach a history erased from the state’s public schools.
While Florida captured headlines, the effort was nationwide. Arkansas declared that students taking the AP African American History course would not receive college credit for it. In April 2022, South Dakota’s Governor signed an executive order restricting how race and equity could be taught in the classroom, limiting African American and Native American history in the public schools (Medrano, 2023). The American Library Association cataloged over 695 attempts to censor library materials in just seven months in 2023 (Giles, 2023). Parent Bill of Rights legislation worked its way through several states. These censorship campaigns became signature policies in several of the nation’s gubernatorial campaigns.
While these campaigns seemed energized by hyper-partisanship—a reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement or opposition to “The 1619 Project”— they were rooted in a much longer history. Advocates of white supremacy and white segregationist women had long seen public education as a necessary training ground for Jim Crow citizenship.
In the 1920s, white southern women tasked with shoring up the relatively new system of racial segregation turned to censorship and historical erasure. In the early 20th century, Carter Woodson’s Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, among others, sought to challenge the rise of racial segregation through education (McRae, 2018; King, 2017). They encouraged the writing of Black history, teaching of Black history, and creation of “Negro History Week.” White southern segregationists responded in turn, and former United Daughters of the Confederacy president Mildred Lewis Rutherford published a checklist for white Southerners, school boards, principals, and textbook selection committees to use in their evaluation of school textbooks. Her list included the following: “I. The Constitution of the United States Was a Compact between Sovereign States and Was not Perpetual nor National; II. Secession Was not Rebellion; III. The North Was Responsible for the War between the States; IV. The War between the States Was not Fought to Hold the Slaves; V. The Slaves Were Not Ill-Treated in the South and the North was largely Responsible for their Presence in the South” (Rutherford, 1920). Because southern states moved first to statewide textbook adoption, savvy white women lobbied the committees to follow this list, and many did. Publishing houses seeking higher profits, promised by statewide contracts, also met many of these dictates. Soon the nation’s textbooks reflected the historical narrative demanded by segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Harriet Tubman disappeared from many texts, so did Frederick Douglass. In fact, two decades after the publication of “The Measuring Rod for Textbooks,” the Mississippi Educational Association conducted a survey of curriculum materials and, in 1938, found that if a student read all the textbooks in all the subjects from first through 12th grade, they would never meet one single African American by name (McRae, 2018).
This censorship was made all the more remarkable by the fact that it erased the very people who lived in their communities—Black southerners who had voted in the decades after the Civil War, held elected office, challenged railroad segregation in courts, joined the Knights of Labor, and catalogued the decades of lynching. Also erased were the stories of white supremacist violence. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre of Black Union soldiers surrendering at Fort Pillow disappeared, as did politicians, newspaper publishers, sheriffs, and public officials who had lynched Black men, overthrown elected city and county governments, and buried voting rights and equal protection under the law. Absent stories of the sustained political work and vigilante violence that it took to establish racial segregation, the Jim Crow system became a “natural” next step in the nation’s history (McRae, 2018).
These efforts continued in the aftermath of the Brown decision and in the face of widespread Black activism. As she witnessed the legislative end of school segregation, Mississippi segregationist Florence Sillers Ogden told her readers to subvert the high court’s ruling by “adopting such textbooks in Mississippi schools as we see fit.” In her formulation, these books would, among other things, teach something “of the development of the races.” Given the local and bureaucratic (rather than legislative) process of textbook selection, Ogden predicted that “even the Supreme Court will surely find… [that] difficult to prevent” (McRae, 2018).
The next year, the Women’s Activities and Youth Work subcommittee within the Citizens’ Council — a white supremacist, anti-civil rights organization — aimed to “indoctrinate the nation’s youth with patriotism, states’ rights, and racial integrity.” This effort involved writing handbooks on segregation for elementary children and conducting essay contests on the benefits of racial segregation for Mississippi’s white high school students—8,000 of whom participated in 1959. Using state tax dollars, another organization, the Paul Revere Ladies, funded a speaker series that featured “experts” who linked racial unrest to alleged communist agitators. In 1962, the Women for Constitutional Government, a regional organization of white women, disseminated pro-segregation reading lists and wrote that, while they did believe in racial segregation, it was only a facet of their larger crusade to restore constitutional government (McRae, 2018).
It was not simply a southern phenomenon. In Pasadena, California, Pro-America women lobbied against multi-cultural education in 1952, ousting the school superintendent (McRae, 2018). In 1974, West Virginian Sweet Alice Moore campaigned in Kanawha County to whiten the school curriculum, suppress teachings about Black radicals, Black Power, and the Black Panther Party, and purge “un-American” elements. Students could read Booker T. Washington, but they could not study Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s writings (Mason, 2009).
Faced with the demands to desegregate the nation’s schools, white segregationist women had turned their efforts to creating a curriculum that upheld white supremacy, censored what they deemed as radical thought, and erased Black history. Thus, in school board meetings and Parent Teacher Association meetings, the reassertion of a segregated, whitened national history happened without much fanfare. They knew history mattered and that the history students learned could reinforce the status quo or challenge it. Faced with the federal defeat in Brown, they decided to continue the fight through school curriculum.
While this effort continues today, the prominence of some of its advocates suggests that it is no longer a grassroots effort flying below the radar. In some places, the erosion and erasure has taken political center stage. However, outside of statewide elections and political campaigns, restrictions on the teaching of race and racism, specifically, has been occurring for more than a few years. A 2015 study conducted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture found that, despite educator’s enthusiasm about Black history, only one to two lessons in a typical U.S. History class were devoted to the subject. That same year, a McGraw Hill textbook used in Texas referred to enslaved Africans in the Transatlantic Slave Trade as “immigrants” (King, 2017). In 2016, the efforts of a Fairfax County Virginia mother upset about explicit passages in Toni Morrison’s Beloved resulted in a condemnation of the book on the floor of the General Assembly and the passage of a parental notification bill related to classroom materials (Weimer, 2023).
In a more comprehensive study on the teaching of the Reconstruction era by the Zinn Education Project, the failures of state standards to include Reconstruction effectively erased the history of Black education, land acquisition, political mobilization, and office holding after the Civil War. The paucity of attention to this era also minimized the impact of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Finally, ignoring Reconstruction also meant ignoring the widespread organized white political violence waged against the political power of Black men and women. In the report, 18 states received zeros on a ten-point scale for their specific treatment of Reconstruction in the state standards for social studies (Rosada, et al, 2022).
On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, a new generation of segregationists have returned to the censorship of curriculum materials and library books, the inculcation of white supremacist teachings, and the erasure of Black history. In the name of “parental rights” and “protection” of youth, they have linked fears of sex and sexuality with the censorship of Black history and white supremacist violence. This erasure of Black history compromises the ability of Americans to understand democracy, how it works, and what has challenged it. It segregates Black and Indigenous citizens from the history of the nation and conceals the violence that limited their political, economic, and social power. It teaches the nation’s students that a whitewashed history of the nation is “the” history leaving them unequipped to challenge persistent and corrosive inequities. Given the decline in the importance of textbooks in public education and the proliferation of information outside of school curricula, some have argued that this censorship cannot do what it once did. That may prove to be too optimistic. If history offers multiple lessons, one would be that, seventy years ago, it took a social movement to change the story the teachers told. It may require that again. n Elizabeth Gillespie McRae (mcrae@email.wcu.edu) is the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance (2018) and a historian at Western Carolina University, specializing in the history of race, education, and politics.
References
Butler, Kiera. “The Most Powerful Moms in American Are the New Face of the Republican Party.” Mother Jones, August 22, 2022.
Giles, Mark. “Banned Black History Can Teach Us How to Fight Right-Wing School Censorship.” Truthout. October 7, 2023.
King, LaGarrett J. “The Status of Black History in U.S. Schools and Society.” Social Education. 81: 1. National Council for Social Studies, 2017.
Mason, Carol. Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974 Kanawha County Textbook Controversy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Medrano, Lourdes. “States Were Adding Lessons about Native American History. Then Came the Anti-CRT Movement.” Hechinger Report. April 12, 2023.
The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. “The 1776 Report.” January 2021.
Rosada, Ana, Gideon Coh-Postar, and Mimi Eisen. Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth about Reconstruction. Zinn Education Project, 2022.
Rutherford, Mildred Lewis. “A Measuring Rod to test text books, and reference books in schools, colleges and libraries”. Pamphlet. United Confederate Veterans. 1920.
Samuels, Christina A., Caroline Preston, and Javeria Salman. “How Do We Teach Black History In Polarized Times? Here is What It Looks Like in 3 Cities.” The Hechinger Report. August 7, 2023.
Weimar, Keith. “From Berkeley to Beloved: Race and Sexuality in the History of Book Censorship in Virginia.” Virginia Libraries 67, no.1 (2023): 3, pp 1-12.
Wong, Alia, “Black history is under attack across US from AP African American Studies to ‘Ruby Bridges.” USA Today, August 24, 2023.
