Donald Yacovone - Teaching White Supremacy: Americas Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity

When the teacher fails to meet the intellectual wants of a child, it is the case of asking for bread and receiving a stone; but when he fails to meet its moral wants, it is giving a serpent.

Horace Mann, Thoughts, 1872

I learned firsthand the reality of Horace Manns warning when I enrolled in a teacher-training program in the 1970s. My college sent me to a high school in central Connecticut for my first classroom experience on the other side of the teachers desk. Student teaching was to be the capstone experience of my undergraduate educationas it turned out, far more than I ever imagined. I will never forget the first time I entered the schoolteachers lounge, a disheartening space with an awkward array of tired, empty seats placed against the four walls. The worn linoleum floor remained empty except for a few teachers and an old wooden armchair strategically placed in the center of the room. In it sat an orating grandee, likely a department head, whose painfully white skin and frizzy bald skull were accentuated by his thick black-rimmed glasses. As I passed into the small chamber, I could not avoid him, nor could I ignore his gesturing arms or his sermon about the white mans burden. Then and there, I decided that high school teaching would not be in my future.

But scholarship would, and I have spent most of my career studying abolitionism and nineteenth-century African American history. Several years ago I began a study of the antislavery movements legacy. I focused on the century after 1865 to understand how the collective or popular memory of the original freedom struggle helped create the modern civil rights movement. As part of this project, I wanted to measure how abolitionism had been presented in our nations K12 school textbooks. I navely imagined a quick look at a few volumes and then a speedy return to my primary research. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by the collection of nearly three thousand U.S. history textbooks, dating from about 1800 to the 1980s, at the Monroe C. Gutman Library at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Education. I stared at the shelves in shock. But it also proved inspiring. I immediately plunged in and resurfaced with a solid sense of what schoolbooks were like before 1865so I could fully grasp the later history of the history I wished to understand. But in a clear inversion of Robert Frosts The Gift Outright, I was the collections before the collection was mine. Within a short time, I found myself immersed in a study of how slavery, race, abolitionism, and the Civil War and Reconstruction have been taught in our nations K12 schoolbooks from about 1832 to the present. Hence, this book.

One morning as I examined a library cart bursting with about fifty elementary, grammar, and high school history textbooks, a bright red spine reached out to me through time and space. Why is this familiar? I wondered. As I opened the books still-crisp white pages, my gasp must have jolted those wonderful librarians working near me. It all came rushing back. Somehow I had never forgotten the books image of Eli Whitney, included not for his notorious cotton gin but instead for inventing the concept of interchangeable partsthus laying the groundwork for industrialization. Exploring the New World, by O. Stuart Hamer, Dwight W. Follett, Benjamin F. Ahlschwede, and Herbert H. Grosspublished and reprinted between 1953 and 1965had been assigned in my fifth-grade social studies class in Saratoga, California.

Just like a legion of the early textbooks I had been reading, Exploring the New World never mentioned the antislavery movement. Slaves, on the other hand, proved necessary to pick cottonWho else would do the work? the authors asked. This textbook, and nearly all the texts I reviewed, was not published by a Southern segregationist press, and certainly not by the Klan or other far-right publishersalthough such presses emerged with a vengeance in the 1920s and still operate, especially online. No, the thousands of textbooks that have stained the minds of generations of students, from the elementary grades to college, were produced almost entirely by Northern publishing houses, situated mostly in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and by Northern-trained scholars and education specialists. Indeed, several of the most famous and influential American historians of the first half of the twentieth century, nearly all trained at Northern colleges and universities, produced some of the most racist texts I had the displeasure to read.