Why the GOP Is Very Afraid of Students Learning the Real History of Reconstruction

[appalachiablue]

- Reenactors under the direction of performance artist Dread Scott retrace the route of one of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history on Nov. 09, 2019 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The 1811 uprising of slaves, mostly armed with hand tools, began in SE Louisiana, ultimately growing in size to roughly 200 to 500 slaves from sugar plantations in the area.
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- 'Why the GOP Is Very Afraid of Students Learning the Real History of Reconstruction.' This breathtakingly ambitious effort led by formerly enslaved people to eradicate a brutal and centuries-old form of racist exploitation—and to build an entirely new society—is rarely captured in state standards. Common Dreams, April 5, 2022. - Ed.

According to the state of GA's Standards of Excellence for teaching the Reconstruction era to 8th-graders, students ought to "compare & contrast the goals and outcomes of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Ku Klux Klan." That side-by-side framing of the federal agency tasked with supporting formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War with a group of White supremacist terrorists has two problems: It is not only an unsettling echo of the "both sides" language mobilized by then-President Trump following the 2017 deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, but is also an example of how state standards fail to help educate young people about one of the most important eras in U.S. history.

The economic, political, and social gains made by the formerly enslaved during the 1860s and 1870s were swiftly and violently reversed. In the first-ever comprehensive review of state standards on the Reconstruction era, "Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction," the Zinn Education Project found that most states tell a top-down story of government action that ignores the role of formerly enslaved people organizing for freedom. State standards include Black people more often as objects than subjects.

Equally troubling, several states' standards reveal the fingerprints of the Dunning School, an early-20th-century historical interpretation of Reconstruction named after the Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning, who deemed the era one of "scandalous misrule" by "carpetbaggers and Negroes." The narrative of Reconstruction perpetuated by many state social studies standards is part of a longer and larger struggle over the past, the latest episode of which can be seen in a rash of new restrictions on what teachers can tell young people about our nation's history.

According to Education Week: More than 17.7M public school students enrolled in almost 900 districts across the country have had their learning restricted by local action & the recent slate of laws & policies aimed to ban teaching concepts related to race, racism, & gender, and often deemed "critical race theory." These memory laws affirm Faulkner's famous adage: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The interpretation of the past always shines through the prism of struggles in the present, shaping what we can imagine & how we act today. For much of the 20th c., the Dunning School was the dominant narrative of Reconstruction- expressed not just in academic dissertations & books, but also in popular culture such as "Birth of a Nation" (1916) & "Gone with the Wind" (1936). It posited the era as a "failure" and, in the words of historian Eric Foner, "helped provide moral & historical cover for the Jim Crow system."...

More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/04/05/why-gop-very-afraid-students-learning-real-history-reconstruction

[Lovie777]

1. The GQP are afraid of education period . . .

[appalachiablue]

2. That's for sure, hiding the truth is toxic. In school

and college there was no coverage of Reconstruction, only a mild mention and then move on. Sunlight needed.

[sop]

3. "I love the poorly educated" - Trump

[Karadeniz]

4. We're seeing in Russia what can be put over on people when their knowledge is purposefully

manipulated. By limiting knowledge of the injuries inflicted on "others," Republicans can shout about what a fabulous job they (whites) have done throughout our history, so they should always be in charge. Only knowledge of harms done can counter that, so knowledge must be limited.

[modrepub]

6. Your Can "Learn" Your History

and know when it's BS. Back during the cold war people in the USSR knew the communist version of history and economics was a load of crap. If you think they actually believed what was fed to them by their government then why did so many people defect to the west? People have much better BS detectors than you give them credit for.

You can't legislate history. It's there for anyone who wants to explore. Pick up a book, especially the ones politicians (or certain news networks) don't want you to read.

[Karadeniz]

8. My apologies for being so unutterably stupid.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. Today's RepubliKKKans

also would not like it to be known that in the days of Reconstruction, Black men (the only people allowed to vote then were men) flocked to the Republican Party, the party they credited with giving them their freedom, and in places where they were in the majority, were able to elect Black Republicans to office. And they weren't self-hating Oreos like Tim Scott and Clarence Thomas, either. They were men like Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, and those men who successfully governed the city of Wilmington, NC, until a mob of white supremacist men couldn't stand it any more and in 1898, violently overthrew the legitimately elected biracial government there, expelled opposition Black and white leaders from the city, and killed a large number (some estimates say as many as 300) of people, mostly Black. Oh, and the RepubliKKKans don't want you to know that white people did that either, or your kids to learn about it in school. (Actually, I only learned about it myself around 2015, about the same time I learned about the Tulsa race massacre, because it wasn't taught in my northern high school in the 1950s either.)

[appalachiablue]

7. People, esp. in GOP run states need to learn this brutal

history- Wilmington, NC, Rosewood, FL, Tulsa, OK, the 'Red Summer' and more. Thanks for bringing this up, and yes, the history and truth weren't even taught in schools in Northern states.

[Jilly_in_VA]

9. I was lucky

to have had William A. Williams for American History at University of Wisconsin (Look him up on Wikipedia!) and we did cover Reconstruction, but we still did not get into those things. This was 1965. The same was true at my high school in Madison, where I had very good teachers. Stuff just didn't get taught. Bet it is taught there now, because my old high school is now super-diverse.

[appalachiablue]

10. Williams is very impressive, glad for you. Despite opposition

I hope the reality of that period reaches the public, in schools somehow. Years ago when I was in HS I hung around a few older students at the local college including one who'd graduated from UWisc. Law School. I met his friends/classmates in Boulder, Co. at a wedding in the mountains, an interesting group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Appleman_Williams

Slavery By Another Name, excellent PBS series based on Douglas A Blackmon's Pultizer awarded book,
https://www.pbs.org/show/slavery-another-name/