World War II. This tangle was the result, not the cause, of the segregation and
discrimination African Americans faced. Black jockeys and mail carriers were
shut out, not because they were inadequate, but because they succeeded.
Recent textbooks point out more trees in the nadir forest. From The
American Way students learn that “By the early 1900s, [white workers] had
convinced most labor unions not to admit Blacks.” The Americans tells that
“African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods”
in the North. Boorstin and Kelley lets Woodrow Wilson off the hook for his
administration’s extreme racism but does blame Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer for inciting “excitable citizens” to “vent their fears and their hates
against any Americans who seemed ‘different,’ ” including “blacks, Jews, and
Catholics.” Several books tell about lynchings, although none includes a
picture. Three new textbooks mention the riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908,
in which whites drove out two-thirds of the black population, trying to make
Springfield a sundown town. All of the newer texts mention the rise of the
“second” Ku Klux Klan.
On the other hand, ten textbooks imply or state that Jackie Robinson was
“the first African American to play major league baseball,” in the words of
American Journey, even though he wasn’t. Students never learn that blacks
played in the major leagues until the nadir, so the usual textbook story line—
generally uninterrupted progress to the present—stays in place. None of the
books that treat the Springfield riot tells that its aim was to drive out the entire
black population of the city. No textbook even mentions sundown towns. The
Americans notes that the Progressives “did little” for African Americans,
which hardly does justice to the movement that removed black aldermen from
city councils across the nation by enacting at-large voting. Current authors do
emphasize that African Americans were not mere victims but did respond to
the new oppression that surrounded them. In the process, however, Journey
goes too far. “African Americans rose to the challenge of achieving equality,”
it assures us; subsequent subheadings are “Equality for African Americans”
and “Other Successes.” No nadir here! And none of the textbooks that do more-
or-less recognize the nadir ever analyzes the causes of the worsening.
Textbook authors would not have to invent their descriptions of the nadir
from scratch. African Americans have left a rich and bitter legacy from the
period. Students who encounter Richard Wright’s narrative of his childhood in
Black Boy, read Ida B. Wells’s description of a lynching in The Red Record, or