Today’s Republican Party continues to lie about what Critical Race Theory is in their unending assault on education so they can keep people dumb enough to vote Fascist Republican.
Let’s start with this essay from Professor Ibram X. Kendi. ” ‘Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction’ – went the title of the first official police account. The man was stopped by police on May 25, 2020, Memorial Day, suspected of ‘forgery.’ When ‘two officers arrived’ on the scene, they ordered the man ‘to step from his car,’ the police account alleged. After he got out, he ‘physically resisted officers.’ As officers handcuffed the man, ‘he appeared to be suffering medical distress,’ the account stated, and officers ‘called for an ambulance.’ He was ‘transported’ to the hospital ‘by ambulance where he died a short time later.’ But a cellphone video by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier captured George Floyd handcuffed, facedown, and Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck for nearly 10 minutes as Floyd cried out ‘I can’t breathe,’ cried out for his mother, and eventually lost consciousness. Frazier’s video was uploaded to Facebook. In three weeks, nearly eight out of 10 Americans had seen some or all of the recording. By the summer’s end, between 15 and 26 million Americans in all 50 states took to the streets in the largest series of demonstrations in American history. Many parents were unprepared for this so-called reckoning. It’s not that there weren’t resources: Parents of younger children could have used the picture book ‘Something Happened in Our Town.’ Parents of teens could have used Angie Thomas’s ‘The Hate U Give’ or ‘All American Boys’ by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. After Floyd’s murder, just 34% of white parents of children ages 6 to 11 had conversations ‘on occasion’ with their children about ‘the need for racial equality.’ Teachers were as unprepared as parents. Only 14% of teachers said that year they had the training and resources to offer their students an antiracist education.”
Professor Kendi continues, “With state standards found to be inadequate, the textbooks used to meet those standards were also inadequate. One popular textbook, ‘The American Pageant,’ labeled enslaved people as ‘immigrants.’ A Florida middle school textbook, ‘Discovering Our Past,’ details Thomas Jefferson’s life without mentioning he was an enslaver. U.S. history curricula often ‘center on the white experience,’ as the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered prior to Floyd’s murder. As education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings once wrote, ‘All instruction is culturally responsive. The question is: to which culture is it currently oriented.’ Since 2010, a majority of states have adopted the Common Core standards, with its canon of classic works primarily authored by white people. Even the authors presented in the curriculum materials in the New York City public school system – whose student population is only 15% white – remained overwhelmingly white. All of this during our current renaissance of middle- grade and young adult authors of color, including Nic Stone, Darcie Little Badger, Elizabeth Acevedo, Vashti Harrison, Thanhhà Lai, Renée Watson, Erika L. Sánchez, Cherie Dimaline, B. B. Alston, Paula Yoo, Jasmine Warga, and Tomi Adeyemi. What students are not learning – the absences in their education – can be more harmful than what they are learning. Educators teach when they don’t teach. The duality of hardly teaching about racism and about the lives of people of color standardizes an education of racist ideas. When students don’t learn the racist policy behind the racial inequity in their communities, it can lead them to believe that white people have more because they are more. These racist ideas are reinforced when students see white people more in their curricula.”
According to Professor Kendi, “Students across the United States organized against this education of racist ideas during the summer of 2020. Petitions circulated around communities, like the roughly 1,700 students across 200 school districts who signed up to be organizers for Diversify Our Narrative. Students organized numerous demonstrations like one in mid-June 2020 with about 1,000 young people at the Baltimore School for the Arts. ‘We don’t know the truth,’ said Kayah Calhoun, a rising senior, speaking for her generation. Eleven-year-old Makayla Downs, who attended with her 12-year-old sister and their mom, said she wants to learn about ‘not just the Greek gods, but the African gods.’ An 18-year-old white organizer named Quinn Fireside bristled, ‘Everything is told through a white perspective.’ Educators tried to respond to the racial reckoning. Gladwyne Elementary School in suburban Philadelphia decided to teach age- appropriate lessons about racism, privilege, and justice during the last week of classes in June 2020. But parent Elana Yaron Fishbein ripped off a letter to the school superintendent. Fishbein omitted the roughly one-quarter of students of color at the school, complaining about ‘reprehensible resources designed to inoculate Caucasian children with feelings of guilt for the color of their skin and the ‘sins’ of their forefathers.’ These new lessons plan ‘to indoctrinate the children into the ‘woke’ culture,’ she wrote. And the old lessons? Were they indoctrination? When the teacher primarily imparts the literature and history of white people in a multiracial society, to be racist is to call that education. When the teacher refuses to instruct young people about racism in a society of widespread racial inequity, to be racist is to call that education. When the teacher strives to impart the literature and history of multiple racial groups in a multiracial society, to be racist is to call that indoctrination. When the teacher instructs young people about racism in a society of widespread racial inequity, to be racist is to call that indoctrination. By this illogic, in a society of widespread racial inequity, racism exists is a doctrine and racism doesn’t exist is not a doctrine. By this illogic, teaching the literatures of multiple racial groups in a multiracial society is brainwashing children while primarily teaching the literatures of white people in a multiracial society is not.”
Dr. Kendi also tells us, “Trained in social work with no expertise in curriculum design, Fishbein thought what was helpful for her child was harmful. She launched a campaign against a barely budding antiracist education movement and named her group No Left Turn in Education. In no time, Fishbein’s group was also advocating against teaching about sex and climate change in schools. By the summer’s end, Fishbein’s group had organized a handful of chapters and fewer than 200 Facebook followers. But in September 2020, she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show. She ‘was totally taken by the harsh criticism’ of her letter to the school superintendent. ‘And in fact,’ she said to Carlson, ‘in some places I told them that they are like lynching me.’ In fact, people who were lynched, like George Floyd, don’t live to tell Tucker Carlson they were being lynched. The manufactured problem of ‘left-wing indoctrination in our schools’ went dormant in the final months of 2020. The actual mayhem came in the new year. After losing the 2020 presidential election by 74 electoral votes and more than 7 million popular votes, Trump indoctrinated his supporters with the Great Lie that the election had been stolen from him – and therefore them. Trump and his GOP operatives lied constantly that ‘illegal votes’ in cities with large Black and brown populations – namely Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Las Vegas and Phoenix – had stolen the election from (white) patriots who voted legally.”
We learn, “One of the founders of CRT, law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, defined CRT as ‘a way of looking at the law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country.’ But Trump Republicans made up their own definition of CRT and condemned it. ‘Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,’ Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said. ‘Critical race theory says America is fundamentally and irredeemably racist. Critical race theory seeks to turn us against each other and, if someone has different colored skin, seeks to make us hate that person.’ Drumming up outrage against what they defined as CRT were Republican think tanks and periodicals. They drove countless white parents to speak out against CRT at school board meetings in 2021. ‘[My daughter] is one of the most innocent little girls in the whole world, and she has friends, Black and white kids in her classroom, and she doesn’t see any difference,’ a blond-haired white mother said at a school district meeting in Eureka, Missouri (a clip of her speech went viral). ‘Just because I don’t want critical race theory taught to my children at school doesn’t make me a racist, dammit.’ ‘The aggrieved white parent is perhaps the most potent reactionary figure in this country,’ writer Esther Wang explained at the time. And the force driving these reactionary figures: ‘the need to protect (and save) white children.’ Trump Republicans proclaimed antiracism as dangerous to children, not racism. It was like saying a virus that had been clearly harming the American people wasn’t the existential threat to children; the threat was the effort to protect the children from the virus. Ironically, this idea actually arose at around the same time, in the form of disinformation about the COVID vaccines: Vaccines were dangerous, not COVID-19. How many parents would spend 2021 resisting antiracism, vaccines, and mask mandates in the name of protecting their children? How many children were harmed?”
We also learn, “The attack on antiracist education repackaged the attack on desegregation. The Brown decision outlawing segregated schools ‘has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding,’ stated 101 members of Congress in the Southern Manifesto of 1956. And those Jim Crow segregationists were only repackaging the attacks of enslavers. In response to the proliferation of abolitionist literature, proslavery state legislators passed a series of bans and censorship laws in the 1830s. Recognizing how much this campaign led by the plantation class had succeeded, Maine-born traveler John Abbott observed in 1860, ‘There is not another spot on the globe where the censorship of speech, and of the press, is so rigorous as it is now in the slaveholding States.’ The maintenance of racism has required the public’s ignorance of racism. The public’s ignorance of racism requires a perpetual undermining of public education. Enslavers resisted the establishment of free public schools for poor white southerners and made it illegal to teach enslaved Black people to read and write prior to emancipation. After the Civil War, white congressmen declined to pass a bill first proposed in 1881 to provide equal funding to (segregated) Black and white public schools. The Trump Republicans’ efforts to create an atmosphere of conspiracy theories, alternative facts, disinformation, and Great Lies to control people through ignorance have their antecedents in the enslaving South. ‘In the South, ignorance is an institution,’ abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher said at the time. ‘They legislate for ignorance the same way we legislate for school-houses.’ They still legislate for ignorance.”
Next we look at this essay from Professor Keisha Blain. “In the latest saga of the misguided attacks on ‘critical race theory,’ a group of educators given the assignment of recommending curriculum changes to the Texas State Board of Education proposed that American slavery be described to second grade social studies classes as ‘involuntary relocation.’ If the educators suggesting such phrasing thought they were improving the curriculum, they should know they are doing the opposite. Framing slavery as simply ‘involuntary relocation’ is not only reductionist, but it is also an egregious attempt to whitewash American history that disregards the terror and brutality of slavery. Framing slavery as simply ‘involuntary relocation’ disregards the terror and brutality of slavery. The working group made its recommendation months after Texas enacted SB 3, which requires teachers discussing ‘controversial issues’ to ‘explore that topic objectively and in a manner free from political bias.’ That same law also says a teacher may not describe ‘slavery and racism’ as ‘anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States.’ Even so, the working group’s recommendation to call slavery something other than slavery hasn’t been well received. The chair of the state board said in a statement Thursday that the board had ‘directed the work group to revisit that specific language.’ Slavery in the United States was far more than ‘involuntary relocation.’ As Kidada Williams, associate professor of history at Wayne State University, explained, ‘Slavery in the most basic terms was an economic and labor system focused on maximizing wealth in the production of cash crops, extraction of natural resources, or use of domestic or urban laborers.’ Unlike other forms of unfree labor throughout history, including domestic slavery in west and central Africa and indentured servitude in Europe, slavery in the United States — known as ‘chattel slavery’ — kept Black people and their descendants in bondage for life. For enslavers, the economic gain from chattel slavery constituted a greater priority than the actual well-being of enslaved Black people. As a result, enslaved people had no social, political or economic rights. They were, for example, barred from owning property, acquiring literacy skills and developing any form of independent economic power.”
Professor Blain also writes, “The experience of slavery was brutal — and well documented in the historical record. To maximize wealth, enslavers attempted to strip enslaved people of their humanity and agency. And, as historian Jacqueline Jones explained in ‘Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow,’ enslavers ‘extracted as much labor as possible’ through unrelenting terror and violence. Although enslaved people actively resisted slavery and devised a range of survival strategies, the violence, pain and trauma of these experiences cannot be overstated. ‘Work, work, work’ is how Hannah Davidson, a formerly enslaved Black woman who was interviewed as part of the Works Progress Administration’s ‘Slave Narratives’ in 1937, described her life of bondage. ‘I been so exhausted working, I was like an inchworm crawling along a rood. I worked till I thought another lick would kill me.’ Forced relocation was indeed part of enslavement. Not only did slave traders bring captive Africans to the Americas, but enslaved families in the United States could be torn apart in an instant, and it was common for enslaved children to be sold at whim by enslavers — without any regard to the emotional and psychological trauma associated with such separations. Charles Ball recounted the constant fear of being separated from his family in ‘Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man‘ (1836). These realities were further compounded by the social conditions on the plantation, which motivated Ball to contemplate taking his own life. ‘What is life worth,’ he asked, ‘amidst hunger, nakedness and excessive toil, under the continually uplifted lash?’ “
Professor Blain concludes, “In ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl‘ (1861), Harriet Jacobs, who was sexually harassed by her enslaver, emphatically stated, ‘Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.’ In addition to physical, economic and social challenges associated with slavery, enslaved women faced additional burdens associated with motherhood, childbirth, sexual exploitation and sexual harassment. Students — and all Americans, for that matter — need to know exactly what slavery was and what it was not. Though the law Texas passed last year mandates that slavery be taught as a deviation from America’s founding, UCLA scholar Kyle T. Mays emphasized in ‘An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States‘ that ‘the foundations of the United States, its current power and wealth, were built on enslaved African labor and the expropriation of Indigenous land.’ These realities cannot be sugarcoated. Students — and all Americans, for that matter — need to know exactly what slavery was and what it was not. Second graders deserve to know the truth about the nature of slavery, and hiding this truth only causes further harm. Relegating a violent, exploitative and dehumanizing practice to “involuntary relocation” may appease those who value feelings over facts. But it egregiously distorts the historical record.”
This story from Oklahoma tells us Gov. Stitt is continuing the racist campaign. “Oklahoma’s largest school district is under investigation for allegedly violating the state’s Critical Race Theory ban, the state’s governor announced Thursday. Oklahoma banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in May 2021, prohibiting discrimination through the teaching that ‘one race or sex is inherently superior to another.’ Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt vowed to ‘get to the bottom’ of what is happening in Tulsa Public Schools and announced he was opening an investigation into alleged critical race theory lessons being taught in the district. ‘We’ve got allegations and reasons to believe that they hired a Critical Race Theory kind of instructor and were violating state law. We want to make sure that we hold people accountable,’ Stitt told the DCNF. ‘The will of the Oklahoma people is to teach kids not indoctrinate them. We want the auditor to check into that and see if those allegations were true.’ ” There is, of course, not a word of truth there. It’s just part of the assault on education because educated voters don’t vote for today’s Fascists Republicans.
The article continues, “Though it’s not clear which incident is the subject of the investigation, a possible violation by the school district was first brought up at a June School Board of Education meeting, according to Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The staff training occurred in 2021 and allegedly violated the state’s Critical Race Theory ban, according to the governor’s announcement. The training session was titled ‘Changing Discourse’ and put on by the National Equity Project, which aims to transform ‘the experiences, outcomes, and life options for children and families who have been historically underserved by our institutions and systems’, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs reported. The National Equity Project website also includes wording such as saying its mission is to ‘acknowledge and make meaning of the historical and ongoing impacts of racism and white supremacy,’ according to its website. Tulsa Public Schools is listed on the National Equity Project’s list of clients. Tulsa Public Schools told the Daily Caller News Foundation they were made aware of a complaint about a professional development training from March 2022 by the Oklahoma Department of Education regarding a ‘race and ethnic education’ training by Vector Solutions, a national group that has seminars to “create safer and more inclusive schools for students and staff’. ‘We do not know what the Governor is referring to in his video. We have not had an official parent complaint this school year,’ Tulsa Public Schools said in a statement to the DCNF.”
With this article we learn, “In the early 1990s, two Alabama historians tried to write textbooks that defied Lost Cause myths and gave detailed accounts of Reconstruction. But their ventures would cost them more than just time and money. ‘I learned way more than I ever wanted to learn about textbooks, and way more than I ever wanted to learn about Alabama politics,’ said Robert Norrell, a former University of Alabama history professor and textbook publisher. Experts have pointed out that a national debate about ‘critical race theory’ – which is often connected to critiques of one book in particular, The 1619 Project – contain echoes of prior debates about whether evolution and sex ed should be taught in schools. In Alabama, it hits even closer to home for Norrell, whose Alabama history books were taught in classrooms up until the early 2000s, when he said he no longer had the energy to fight conservative groups opposed to his accounts of slavery and Jim Crow. And to date, no district has taken historian Richard Bailey up on his offer to provide free copies of his book on Reconstruction. ‘There was always a group or two that wanted [social studies books] to stay as we had had it previously,’ said Ed Richardson, who led the state department of education at the time. ‘No matter what has happened since then to correct that part of history.’ Republican lawmakers are currently pushing a pair of bills, SB292 and HB312, that would stop educators from ‘compelling’ students to believe certain theories about race, gender and religion. The effort mirrors a series of actions this fall by the state school board, which voted to ban CRT in K-12 schools and recently postponed a review of its social studies standards for several years.” That’s ridiculous, of course. Teachers can’t even compel students to believe doing homework is good or that reading books will help them.
The article also tells us, “It’s not the first time Alabama officials, educators, parents and politicians have battled over school textbooks and how to discuss history. After Reconstruction, the United Daughters of the Confederacy curated narratives about Confederate heroes. The first state history textbooks defended segregation. And at the end of the 20th century, groups like the Eagle Forum left a growing imprint on education policy in the state. ‘It is a continuation or even a recreation of the 90s,’ said Wayne Flynt, a retired Alabama history professor. ‘People who in that time wanted to have books make a ton of money for them as public school adoptions had to understand: That was not an educational process. It was not an intellectual process. It was not a historical process. It was a political process.’ Political interest in textbook content waned in the 80s, Flynt said. But then, throughout the 90s and 2000s, as Republican politicians gained power, textbook publishers and school board members found themselves in the midst of numerous debates over how children should learn about social issues and scientific theories. Richardson, who served as state superintendent until 2004, attributed the heightened scrutiny to a crackdown on school performance. ‘The fact that questions were being raised as to what’s going on in education, that would cause a number of people to look at textbooks and curriculum and behavior and special education,’ he said. ‘There just were a number of issues that were bubbling because of the numerous reports that came out in the 80s about the inadequacies of public schools.’ “
The article continues, “Eunie Smith, who founded the Eagle Forum of Alabama in 1976 and was its longest-serving president, viewed the group’s attention to textbooks as one of its most influential efforts. The Forum helped amend the textbook law to expand people who served on the state committee. They also recruited scores of textbook reviewers, ranging from ‘interested citizens’ to engineers at the power company. They then presented that information to a textbook committee, who voted to approve or reject materials. ‘It was a big issue because we felt we had a responsibility,’ Smith said. Leslie Whitcomb, an Eagle Forum board member who worked with Glencoe Publishing in 1998, said she felt the updated committee provided more rigor and balance. Some of her company’s books got rejected, she said, but she stressed that the committee was fair and always gave specific reasons for their decisions. ‘I did feel like it was both, it was not just books that maybe would be considered more in the CRT line today,’ she said. ‘It was everything. They just rejected a lot of books.’ Flynt, who has written extensively on religious politics in the state, said a ‘much larger movement’ of evangelical Christian groups like the Eagle Forum banded together in what he called an attempt to ‘stop the secularization of America.’ ‘From the 1990s on, the question of how good your history is became secondary to how completely did you conform to Alabama culture,’ Flynt said.”
We learn, “According a Birmingham News article from 1998, some authors were also asked to complete a survey questioning their position on birth control, abortion, homosexuality and other topics. ‘Do your book, materials and illustrations pander to political correctness? How do you deal with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’ the questionnaire asked. A visit to his daughter’s fourth-grade classroom in the late 1980s was enough to convince Norrell, then a history professor at the University of Alabama, to start his own textbook company. ‘I thought, My god, this is horrible,’ he said, noting that the chosen textbook was boring and didn’t engage his daughter, who was an avid reader. ‘I thought, You know, this is a real travesty, and I’m going to do something about this if I can.’ Back then, local districts had four Alabama history textbooks they could choose from for fourth and ninth-graders, including a version of ‘Know Alabama.’ The book’s original 1960′s version, historians say, was vetted by the UDC, contained terms like the ‘War Between the States’ and was notorious for justifying Klan violence and romanticizing slavery. Norrell spent years writing and researching about African American soldiers fighting to end slavery, efforts to end convict leasing and the long history of Klan terrorism. He published photos of enslaved Alabamians that didn’t just feature their feet or dilapidated barracks, but the expressions of their faces. And he said he spent $100,000 of his own money to ensure those stories got into the hands of Alabama children. Norrell sold more than 30,000 copies of his Alabama history textbooks, he said, which included ‘The Alabama Story,’ ‘The Making of Modern Alabama’ and ‘The Alabama Journey.’ “
We also learn, “But things changed after he moved to Knoxville in 1998. By then, skeptics had begun to write him off for hiring a lobbyist to fight his battles at the state school board, he said, but he felt it was a necessary move to keep his books on the shelf. ‘The people who want to prevent people from learning about the past, they were very organized,’ he said. ‘Alabama Journey,’ his first full-color book, published in 1998, was a big hit, and was eventually adopted by nearly half of Alabama school systems. Then, he said, he felt targeted by the Eagle Forum. The Forum did hold presentations at the time about textbooks and preserving a Christian, Western view of American history. Members remember discussing social issues, though not necessarily Alabama history or Norrell’s book in particular, and dispute a characterization that Norrell was targeted by the founder of Birmingham’s chapter. Members did care about having good textbooks, Joan Kendall, a member who dealt with education issues at the time, said. ‘Those that were not the best books were either boring, manipulative, biased, unscholarly – and I’m sure there were other reasons, but those were the more objective reasons why a book we would feel was not in the best interest of children of Alabama,’ she said. ‘But I can assure you, I have a pretty good memory, and I don’t remember Frances Wideman ever objecting to a textbook, or that book ever being an issue.’ In 1998, a committee rejected Norrell’s book, ‘An Alabama Story,’ along with a life skills series. Board member Stephanie Bell, who currently serves on the state Board of Education, objected to language about welfare and birth control, as well as an error about the Battle of Shiloh in the history book. The state school board later approved the history book. ‘We came to the conclusion that it was important to teach all of Alabama history – good, bad and indifferent – and depend upon the teachers to do it in an appropriate way,’ said Bradley Byrne, who served on the board at the time. ‘And that we felt like that textbook could be a tool, not necessarily had to be a tool, but could be a tool to help teachers do that.’ But the ordeal was enough to discourage Norrell from fighting for his new fourth-grade book in the next adoption cycle, and eventually, none of his books were state-recommended anymore. ‘There was no recourse. I knew that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have any fight left.’ “
The article also says, “In 1901, John William Beverly became the first Black author to have an Alabama history textbook approved by the state. It took another century for Bailey, a Montgomery-based historian, to become the second. ‘What I have found is that there is a genuine interest, at some level, for Alabama history,’ Bailey said. ‘But the follow through is not there.’ Bailey went to a segregated school named for Booker T. Washington, but said he was taught little about the Black Alabamians who made his own education possible. History instruction at the time, he said, barely touched on Reconstruction or any other events that would have challenged positive views of slavery and segregation. He recalled the black and green lettering of the original ‘Know Alabama’ textbook, which he read as a Montgomery fourth-grader in the 1950s. ‘It didn’t mention anything about Nat Turner, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have said anything about a slave getting whipped, or a slave trying to run away,’ he added. ‘You wouldn’t dare mention anything about that.’ According to Hilary Green, an associate history professor at the University of Alabama, some Alabama teachers at the time had practiced ‘fugitive pedagogy,’ meaning they built classroom libraries or came up with alternative assignments to teach Black history and other topics that were ignored or misrepresented in state-approved textbooks. But that practice wasn’t widespread, and educational politics continued to prevent a variety of texts from getting approved. ‘Textbooks were all about your politics, and all about how you felt about race,’ Flynt said, recounting one textbook, a ninth-grade companion to ‘Know Alabama,’ that showcased a Confederate battle flag on its front cover. Bailey’s curiosity led him to write the first known comprehensive report on Reconstruction in Alabama, ‘Neither Carpetbaggers Nor Scalawags.’ In 1993, nearly a century after the state adopted Beverly’s ‘History of Alabama,’ an Alabama textbook committee approved Bailey’s book alongside Norrell’s.”
The article continues, “The 300-page report was supplemental. But it quickly garnered international recognition, and Bailey felt it was a crucial addition to instruction on one of the most important, he said, eras in Alabama history. ‘It was a period of jubilee for African Americans,’ he said. ‘And for a person of my generation or the generation preceding me to learn about Reconstruction – that person would have grown up with a huge sense of pride.’ So each year, he drove to a different corner of the state, hoping to convince school librarians and district leaders to buy his book. He called lobbyists and estimated that he mailed about 81 copies of the book to systems statewide. But decades later, he said, not a single school has adopted it. ‘I’m not pointing fingers, but it just didn’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘And I think part of that was that having books dealing with African Americans just wasn’t in vogue at the time.’ Today, Norrell worries that those who opposed him decades ago for writing ‘honestly about the Civil War’ are again empowered to limit discussions on race and racism in the classroom. ‘And you know, that’s pretty much where we are right now,’ he said. ‘This critical race theory bullshit – It’s just about the same thing.’ This summer, Eagle Forum of Alabama advertised meetings in a handful of towns across the state, where they invited conservative experts to speak to mostly white audiences about ‘critical race theory’ and how to identify it. State officials have received complaints about Black History Month events and a teacher diversity training. CRT isn’t taught in K-12 schools, state leaders say, but conservative groups across the state have used the term in broad reference to diversity, equity and behavioral practices in schools. Smith, with the Forum, agrees that the two time periods are linked — and she believes conservative concerns today are warranted. ‘It’s some of the same that parents are concerned about now,’ Smith said of textbook debates in the 90s. ‘But the infusion of social emotional learning and critical race theory, it’s just throughout all areas of the academic disciplines, and that is very concerning. And we didn’t see that back then.’ For Bailey, the worry is less about what might get taken out of Alabama classrooms – it’s about what is rarely mentioned at all. If discussion of Reconstruction is often squished into a small section of one semester, he said, many students fail to learn about the first Black banks, or Black schools, or even the significance of labor unions and churches to Alabama’s history.”
The article ends, “Instead, he said, many are left with traditional interpretations of the period, which tend to reduce African Americans to tropes: That Black officeholders were ignorant, that they couldn’t read and write, that they were merely tools of the Republican Party. ‘I am convinced that we are in much worse of a situation today,’ he said. ‘…You don’t discuss Black success, Black achievement.’ As anti-CRT bills advance in the legislature, even former textbook publishers, like Whitcomb, say they’re not sure what the impact will be. ‘Are we just not going to teach history at all in our schools in Alabama?’ she said. ‘…I’m not sure how that’s going to play out and what they’re going to do about that.’ Former superintendents and board members said school boards should expect pressure if the bills pass, but not let it get in the way of classroom instruction. ‘You can’t have a rational discussion about racial issues in Alabama or across America if you don’t know the facts, and we need our children to know the facts,’ Byrne said.”
Student of the American Civil War 