The latest Pageant actually claims that the Kennedys—Jack and Robert—
prodded SNCC and other civil rights groups to register blacks to vote. All
prodding went the other way around! Today many young African Americans
think that desegregation was something the federal government imposed on the
black community. They have no idea it was something the black community
forced on the federal government.^61 Meanwhile, many young white Americans
can reasonably infer that the federal government has been nice enough to
blacks. Crediting the federal government for actions instigated by African
Americans and their white allies surely disempowers African American
students today, and surely helps them feel that they “have never done anything,”
as Malcolm X put it.
Fortunately, the six recent textbooks do show some improvement. All six tell
how attempts by African Americans in Selma, Alabama, to vote led to attacks
by white police. All six note that the resulting march from Selma to
Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr., prodded LBJ and Congress to pass
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Three of the six current textbooks—Pathways to
the Present, The Americans, and American Journey—show that African
Americans forced the federal government to move on civil rights more
generally, although they claim that President Kennedy personally favored
them.^62 Along with American Adventures and Discovering American History,
these new books do show the basic dynamics of the civil rights movement:
African Americans, often with white allies, challenged an unjust law or
practice in a nonviolent way, which then incited whites to respond barbarically
to defend “civilization,” in turn appalling the nation and convincing some
people to change the law or practice. These books celebrate the courage of the
civil rights volunteers. But only Discovering American History, published in
1974, tells how the movement directly challenged the mores of segregation,
with the result that some civil rights workers were killed or beaten by white
racists simply for holding hands as an interracial couple or eating together in a
restaurant.
Textbooks treat the environmental movement similarly, telling how
“Congress passed” the laws setting up the Environmental Protection Agency
while giving little or no attention to the environmental crusade. Students are
again left to infer that the government typically does the right thing on its own,
and new books are no better than old ones in this regard. Many teachers don’t
help; a study of twelve randomly selected teachers of twelfth-grade American