Lies My Teacher Told Me

armaments stuffed into a carpetbag, propped up by bluecoated soldiers of occupation. Two new textbooks do ask students to interp ...

Because I, too, “learned” that African Americans were the unsolved problem of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal’s An America ...

coverage, in American History, summarizes the period in a section entitled “The Long Night Begins”: “After the Compromise of 187 ...

Supreme Court said in Brown, “[Some] Negro and white schools involved have been equalized or are being equalized, with respect t ...

Once Northerners did nothing to stop what came to be called the “Mississippi plan”—that state’s 1890 Constitution that “legally” ...

These cartoons by Thomas Nast mirror the revival of racism in the North. Left, And Not This Man? from Harper’s Weekly, August 5, ...

In politics, the white electorate had become so racist by 1892 that the Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the White Ho ...

by Birth of a Nation, which opened in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan rose to its zenith, boasting more than four million members. For a ...

remained overnight. Thus were created thousands of “sundown towns”— probably a majority of all incorporated communities in Illin ...

World War II. This tangle was the result, not the cause, of the segregation and discrimination African Americans faced. Black jo ...

sing aloud Big Bill Broonzy’s “If You’re Black, Get Back!” cannot but understand the plight of a people envisioning a narrowing ...

Lynch mobs often posed for the camera. They showed no fear of being identified because they knew no white jury would convict the ...

It is true that some immigrant groups faced harsh discrimination, from the NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs in Boston to the lynching o ...

some blacks and many whites. It is all too easy to blame the victim and conclude that people of color are themselves responsible ...

6. JOHN BROWN AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE INVISIBILITY OF ANTIRACISM IN AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS It is not only radical or current ...

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN,” 1859^3 We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and mor ...

doing, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the new fault lines that will spread ou ...

much fuller account, but one that is far from neutral. The fanatical figure of John Brown now stalked upon the Kansas battlefiel ...

pieces” (they weren’t).^7 Of all eighteen textbooks, another of the new books, Pathways to the Present, is the most sympathetic ...

refused to halt when challenged. (After the raid the state indicted eleven of them for these actions.) Well after the raid, loca ...