[As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No
society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into
the present.”]
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WHO’S AFRAID OF BLACK HISTORY?  
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
February 17, 2023
New York Times
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_ As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No
society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into
the present.” _

, Photo illustration by Billie Carter-Rankin; photograph via Library
of Congress

 

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida,
over the content of a proposed high school course in African American
studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of
slavery and race in American classrooms.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t
believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor
DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.”

School is one of the first places where society as a whole begins to
shape our sense of what it means to be an American. It is in our
schools that we learn how to become citizens, that we encounter the
first civics lessons that either reinforce or counter the myths and
fables we gleaned at home. Each day of first grade in my elementary
school in Piedmont, W.Va., in 1956 began with the Pledge of Allegiance
to the flag, followed by “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).”
To this day, I cannot prevent my right hand from darting to my heart
the minute I hear the words of either.

It is through such rituals, repeated over and over, that certain
“truths” become second nature, “self-evident” as it were. It
is how the foundations of our understanding of the history of our
great nation are constructed.

Even if we give the governor the benefit of the doubt about the
motivations behind his recent statements about the content of the
original version of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African
American studies, his intervention falls squarely in line with a long
tradition of bitter, politically suspect battles over the
interpretation of three seminal periods in the history of American
racial relations: the Civil War; the 12 years following the war, known
as Reconstruction; and Reconstruction’s brutal rollback,
characterized by its adherents as the former Confederacy’s
“Redemption,” which saw the imposition of Jim Crow segregation,
the reimposition of white supremacy and their justification through a
masterfully executed propaganda effort
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Undertaken by apologists for the former Confederacy with an energy and
alacrity that was astonishing in its vehemence and reach, in an era
defined by print culture, politicians and amateur historians joined
forces to police the historical profession. The so-called Lost Cause
movement was, in effect, a take-no-prisoners social media war. And no
single group or person was more pivotal to “the dissemination of the
truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially,”
than the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,
Mildred Lewis Rutherford, of Athens, Ga. Rutherford was a descendant
of a long line of slave owners; her maternal grandfather owned slaves
as early as 1820, and her maternal uncle, Howell Cobb, secretary of
the Treasury under President James Buchanan, owned some 200 enslaved
women and men in 1840. Rutherford served as the principal of the Lucy
Cobb Institute (a school for girls in Athens) and vice president of
the Stone Mountain Memorial project, the former Confederacy’s
version of Mount Rushmore.

As the historian David Blight notes, “Rutherford gave new meaning to
the term ‘die-hard.’” Indeed, she “considered the Confederacy
‘acquitted as blameless’ at the bar of history, and sought its
vindication with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of
propaganda in any twentieth-century dictatorship.” And she felt that
the crimes of Reconstruction “made the Ku Klux Klan a necessity.”
As I pointed out in a PBS documentary on the rise and fall of
Reconstruction, Rutherford intuitively understood the direct
connection between history lessons taught in the classroom and the
Lost Cause racial order being imposed outside it, and she sought to
cement that relationship with zeal and efficacy. She understood that
what is inscribed on the blackboard translates directly to social
practices unfolding on the street.

“Realizing that the textbooks in history and literature which the
children of the South are now studying, and even the ones from which
many of their parents studied before them,” she wrote in “A
Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools,
Colleges and Libraries,” “are in many respects unjust to the South
and her institutions, and that a far greater injustice and danger is
threatening the South today from the late histories which are being
published, guilty not only of misrepresentations but of gross
omissions, refusing to give the South credit for what she has
accomplished, … I have prepared, as it were, a testing or measuring
rod.” And Rutherford used that measuring rod to wage a systematic
campaign to redefine the Civil War not as our nation’s war to end
the evils of slavery, but as “the War Between the States,” since
as she wrote elsewhere, “the negroes of the South were never called
slaves.” And they were “well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.”

Of the more than 25 books and pamphlets that Rutherford published,
none was more important than “A Measuring Rod.” Published in 1920,
her user-friendly pamphlet was meant to be _the_ index “by which
every textbook on history and literature in Southern schools should be
tested by those desiring the truth.” The pamphlet was designed to
make it easy for “all authorities charged with the selection of
textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to
measure all books offered for adoption by this ‘Measuring
Rod,’_ _and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the
South.” What’s more, her campaign was retroactive. As the
historian Donald Yacovone tells us in his recent book, “Teaching
White Supremacy,” Rutherford insisted that librarians “should
scrawl ‘unjust to the South’ on the title pages” of any
“unacceptable” books “already in their collections.”

On a page headed ominously by the word “Warning,” Rutherford
provides a handy list of what a teacher or a librarian should
“reject” or “not reject.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a compact
between Sovereign States.”

“Reject a textbook that does not give the principles for which the
South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences
with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which
caused secession.”

“Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or
rebel, and the war a rebellion.”

“Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel
and unjust to his slaves.”

And my absolute favorite, “Reject a textbook that glorified Abraham
Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless,” she adds graciously,
“a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and
vilification before 1865.”

And what of slavery? “This was an education that taught the negro
self-control, obedience and perseverance — yes, taught him to
realize his weaknesses and how to grow stronger for the battle of
life,” Rutherford writes in 1923 in “The South Must Have Her
Rightful Place.” “The institution of slavery as it was in the
South, far from degrading the negro, was fast elevating him above his
nature and race.” For Rutherford, who lectured wearing antebellum
hoop gowns, the war over the interpretation of the meaning of the
recent past was all about establishing the racial order of the
present: “The truth must be told, and you must read it, and be ready
to answer it.” Unless this is done, “in a few years there will be
no South about which to write history.”

In other words, Rutherford’s common core was the Lost Cause. And it
will come as no surprise that this vigorous propaganda effort was
accompanied by the construction of many of the Confederate monuments
that have dotted the Southern landscape since.

While it’s safe to assume that most contemporary historians of the
Civil War and Reconstruction are of similar minds about Rutherford and
the Lost Cause, it’s also true that one of the most fascinating
aspects of African American studies is the rich history of debate over
issues like this, and especially over what it has meant — and
continues to mean — to be “Black” in a nation with such a long
and troubled history of human slavery at the core of its economic
system for two-and-a-half centuries.

Heated debates within the Black community, beginning as early as the
first decades of the 19th century, have ranged from what names “the
race” should publicly call itself (William Whipper vs. James McCune
Smith) and whether or not enslaved men and women should rise in arms
against their masters (Henry Highland Garnet vs. Frederick Douglass).
Economic development vs. political rights? (Booker T. Washington vs.
W.E.B. Du Bois). Should Black people return to Africa? (Marcus Garvey
vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should we admit publicly the pivotal role of
African elites in enslaving our ancestors? (Ali Mazrui vs. Wole
Soyinka).

Add to these repeated arguments over sexism, socialism and capitalism,
reparations, antisemitism and homophobia. It is often surprising to
students to learn that there has never been one way to “be Black”
among Black Americans, nor have Black politicians, activists and
scholars ever spoken with one voice or embraced one ideological or
theoretical framework. Black America, that “nation in a nation,”
as the Black abolitionist Martin R. Delany put it, has always been as
varied and diverse as the complexions of the people who have
identified, or been identified, as its members.

I found these debates so fascinating, so fundamental to a fuller
understanding of Black history, that I coedited a textbook that
features them, and designed Harvard’s Introduction to African
American Studies course, which I teach with the historian Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, to acquaint students with a wide range of them in
colorful and sometimes riotous detail. More recent debates over
academic subjects like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s insightful theory of
“intersectionality,” reparations, Black antisemitism, critical
race theory and the 1619 Project — several of which made Mr.
DeSantis’s hit list — will be included in the next edition of our
textbook and will no doubt make it onto the syllabus of our
introductory course.

As a consultant to the College Board as it developed its A.P. course
in African American studies, I suggested the inclusion of a “pro and
con” debate unit at the end of its curriculum because of the
inherent scholarly importance of many of the contemporary hot-button
issues that conservative politicians have been seeking to censor, but
also as a way to help students understand the relation between the
information they find in their textbooks and efforts by politicians to
say what should and what should not be taught in the classroom.

Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good
class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought
voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long
course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country. In
fact, in my experience, teaching our field through these debates is a
rich and nuanced pedagogical strategy, affording our students ways to
create empathy across differences of opinion, to understand
“diversity within difference,” and to reflect on complex topics
from more than one angle. It forces them to critique stereotypes and
canards about who “we are” as a people and what it means to be
“authentically Black.” I am not sure which of these ideas has
landed one of my own essays on the list of pieces the state of Florida
found objectionable, but there it is.

The Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson, who in 1926 invented
what has become Black History Month, was keenly aware of the role of
politics in the classroom, especially Lost Cause interventions.
“Starting after the Civil War,” he wrote, “the opponents of
freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would
enslave the Negroes’ mind inasmuch as the freedom of the body has to
be conceded.”

“It was well understood,” Woodson continued, “that if by the
teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his
superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always
been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race
is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.”

“If you can control a man’s thinking,” Woodson concluded, “you
do not have to worry about his action.”

Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the
contents of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American
studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a
contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook
campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company
that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African
American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to
censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a
determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not
embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her
agenda.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society
can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the
present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to
them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can
only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological
spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been
engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

Throughout Black history, there has been a long, sad and often nasty
tradition of attempts to censor popular art forms, from the
characterization of the blues, ragtime and jazz as “the devil’s
music” by guardians of “the politics of respectability,” to
efforts to censor hip-hop by C. Delores Tucker, who led a campaign to
ban gangsta rap music in the 1990s. Hip-hop has been an equal
opportunity offender for potential censors: Mark Wichner, the deputy
sheriff of Florida’s Broward County, brought 2 Live Crew up on
obscenity charges in 1990. But there is a crucial difference between
Ms. Tucker, best known as a civil rights activist, and Mr. Wichner, an
administrator of justice on behalf of the state, a difference similar
to that between Rutherford and Mr. DeSantis.

While the urge to censor art — a symbolic form of vigilante policing
— is colorblind, there is no equivalence between governmental
censorship and the would-be censorship of moral crusaders. Many states
are following Florida’s lead in seeking to bar discussions of race
and history in classrooms. The distinction between Mildred Lewis
Rutherford and Governor DeSantis? The power differential.

Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the
apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s
narrative about the history of race and racism. Mr. DeSantis has that
power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this
misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of
inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a
stand.

_HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. (@HenryLouisGates
[[link removed]]), a university professor and the
director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American
Research at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “Stony the
Road
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Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow” and the
host of the documentary “Reconstruction: America After the Civil
War. [[link removed]]” He is the host of
the PBS television series “Finding Your Roots
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* Black History
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* Education
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* slavery
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* Racism
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* freedom struggle
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* white supremacy
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