Violencia Intrafamiliar en las Políticas Públicas

Not until the 1960s would black Americans rise up en masse against racist history, compelling the rest

of the country to take heed.

—Jonathan Zimmerman (2002, 53)

Antiblack racism is . . . intimately connected to misogyny.

—Lewis Gordon (1995, 125)

History has always provided me a way to reshape the future through reimagining the past.

As early as 1913, the historian William Dodd complained that “two distinct histories are taught in the schools” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 34). One was taught above the Mason-Dixon Line, the other below it. While the racialization of the public school curriculum—in the public (especially in the male and European-American) mind—would intensify after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, in Brown v. Board of Education, to desegregate the public schools, the racialization of the curriculum had begun at least 100 years earlier. But in the years surrounding the 1957 Sputnik incident, this racialization intensified and took the form of curricular control, which is to say an effort at intellectual control.

Pressured by public intellectuals and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson, the NAACP convened in 1932 a textbook committee to coordinate the efforts of local branches to examine history, literature, and civics schoolbooks, and to protest those that misrepresented the facts. It reis- sued this recommendation in 1938 and again in 1939, publishing a pamphlet entitled Anti-Negro Propaganda in School Textbooks as a guide for commu- nity activists. NAACP officials visited publishers to demand revision of their textbooks, while calling on the students themselves to join the fight (Zimmer- man 2002).

While the school curriculum reproduced the white racism of the nation at large, many hoped that correcting the curriculum might influence the larger society. To illustrate this hope, historian Jonathan Zimmerman (2002, 49) quotes a black Kansas City newspaperman: “I do not say that a change in our anti-Negro text-books will kill prejudice, but I am convinced it is a major step in that direction.” Zimmerman points out that as Du Bois came to reject the NAACP’s commitment to racial integration, he also came to doubt whether “integrated” textbooks could temper white racism. Carter Woodson re- mained committed to mixed-raced schools and to specialized black history courses in African-American schools (Zimmerman 2002).

The Cold War attack on textbooks was animated at first, and foremost (at least initially) by the paranoid anti-Communism of the right-wing. From elit- ists like William F. Buckley Jr. to low-brow anti-Semites like Allen A. Zoll, thousands of Americans converged on local school board and classrooms to protest textbooks’ allegedly “communistic” bias toward public housing, pro- gressive taxation, and other markers of presumed left-wing subversion (Zim- merman 2002).

Zimmerman points out that the three themes of right-wing assaults on textbooks in the 1950s—communism, internationalism (especially the United Nations), and sexual depravity—came to include, by mid-decade, a fourth one: race. Across the country, right-wing critics pressed publishers and school boards to omit any mention of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, or segre- gation. Teaching the truth about the racial violence in the United States amounted to complicity with the Communist plot, as such information

would presumably foment what was then commonly called “racial agita- tion.” In Georgia, Zimmerman points out, the mere mention of black poverty in Magruder’s American Government textbook provoked threats of white ret- ribution. Magruder “should be shot as a traitor to our Country,” one citizen proclaimed in 1950. “This type of stuff might be expected in the Harlem dis- trict of New York, but that it should be taught in the Public Schools of Geor- gia is unthinkable” (quoted passages in Zimmerman 2002, 88).

When in 1952 Alabamians discovered that one of their textbooks included a chapter on the Fair Employment Practices Committee and other efforts to fight racial injustice, they demanded that the publisher delete the entire chap- ter. To “protect” Alabama school children against further “subversion,” the state legislature passed a law requiring all subsequent textbooks to carry a statement confirming that neither the author nor the people quoted had been members of a communist or “Communist-front” organization. This very broad and ambiguous designation was used whenever it suited right-wing fanatics. In this instance, Zimmerman tells us, the law was directed at the NAACP, considered by white southerners a “Red” organization. Given the NAACP’s bitter and expensive fight with the Communist Party USA over the legal defense of the “Scottsboro Nine”—young black men falsely con- victed of raping white women in 1930s Alabama—one wonders how any southerner could entertain such nonsense (see Pinar 2001, chapter 12).

Right-wing assaults on school textbooks were most intense south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The regional difference became apparent, Zimmerman suggests, in the controversy surrounding the 1948 publication of Brain-

washing in the High Schools by E. Merrill Root, a former English professor

and right-wing activist. Root alleged that studying subversive textbooks in high school had led to American prisoners’ vulnerability to communist in- doctrination during the Korean War. The allegation was greeted with wide- spread ridicule in the North, where critics quickly pointed out that 18 of the 21 “traitors” had not even completed high school, making their study of the textbooks in question unlikely (Zimmerman 2002).

In the South, however, Root’s fantasy was treated as fact. Southern law- makers hired Root to analyze supposedly subversive texts in their high schools. No segregationist, Root was of little help to southerners. Despite his acknowledgment, in a report to Mississippi legislators, of his own support for voluntary racial integration, Root’s rabid anti-communism proved useful to southerners in their segregationist cause. Zimmerman points out that Root’s list of “Reds” who were cited—or worse, celebrated—in “collectivist” school- books included William O. Douglas, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other advocates for racial justice. After Root (1948) condemned 12 Mississippi textbooks for the “pink political fog,” lawmakers immediately demanded that schools re- move them (see Zimmerman 2002, 104). The color of his visual image is not incidental; right-wing fanatics often linked political betrayal with gender be-

trayal. In the decade to follow, “Pinko-Commie-Fag” was hurled at more than one long-haired Vietnam War protester.

Perhaps compensating for the treason of their Confederate ancestors, many southerners embraced the anti-intellectual attacks on school textbooks by patriotic societies. Apparently inspired by Root’s Brainwashing in the

High Schools, Zimmerman tells us, the Daughters of the American Revolu-

tion issued a list of 170 objectionable texts in 1959. Unlike Root, whose dia- tribes were limited to history textbooks, the DAR went after literature, biol- ogy, music, and even arithmetic textbooks. Like Root’s book, Zimmerman reports, the DAR list was taken seriously only south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In Mississippi, segregationist governor Ross Barnett criticized southerners for failing to take seriously enough the communist threat in school textbooks. Taking control of the state’s text-selection system, Barnett promised all text- books adopted by Mississippi would defend “the Southern and true Ameri- can way of life” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 106). Originating in the North as a campaign to defend America’s “free enterprise system” from “creeping collectivism,” Zimmerman points out, the assault on textbooks became a southern assault on the prospect of racial integration.

Civil rights movement activists were not silent in the face of (white) south- ern intransigence. In 1961 a NAACP resolution demanded that school text- books “properly present the contribution of the Negro to American culture”; in 1963 Urban League officials called for a “nationwide struggle” against “all-white” textbooks; and in 1965 the Congress for Racial Equality con- demned “stereotypes and distortions of the roles of Negroes” in school text- books (quoted passages in Zimmerman 2002, 112). That same year, Zim- merman (2002, 112) tells us, the Urban League convened a “tense” meeting between black leaders and representatives of the publishing industry. While claiming allegiance to responsible racial representation, most of the publish- ers present cautioned against “moving too fast,” fearing that white school boards would refuse to adopt “integrated” textbooks. Publishers should pro- duce “what people ought to know, not just what will sell,” Urban League Whitney Young pointed out. “Don’t approach integration like castor oil,” Young told the publishers. “For once, look at something not as a problem but as an opportunity. . . . Your job as human beings is do what is right. Take a position” (quoted passages in Zimmerman 2002, 112).

Civil rights activists knew they could not rely on publishers to place ethics over profits. Like other civil rights struggles in the sphere of public education, the textbook battle would be won or lost “on the local level,” school district by district, school by school. In addition to identifying racist schoolbooks, then, the NAACP also asked local affiliates to organize against them. Across the country, thousands of African Americans responded, demanding racial justice in the school curriculum (Zimmerman 2002).

Activists used two basic arguments, both connected to the era’s civil rights movement. First, activists pointed out that accurate history textbooks might help persuade stubborn (especially southern) whites to revise their racist views. Second, activists pointed out that if the school curriculum texts contin- ued to misrepresent African Americans and their experience in America, black children would suffer “feelings of separateness and inferiority,” as sev- eral Philadelphia activists wrote in 1965 (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 114). On this point they were in agreement with the theories of Kenneth B. Clark and other “damage” theorists, whose ideas were influential in Brown v. Board

of Education. If physical segregation was harmful to African Americans,

“segregated” textbooks were damaging as well (Zimmerman 2002). Martin Luther King Jr. employed both arguments; he pointed out that biased school curricula supported both “white supremacy” and “the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 114).

White liberals brought federal power to bear on the matter. On occasion, they used the “bully pulpit,” as when Vice President Hubert Humphrey con- demned the “Negro history gap” in American schools (quoted in Zimmer- man 2002, 115). On other occasion, liberals used legislation. Under the Ele- mentary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, $400 million was allocated to schools and libraries for the purchase of “multi-racial” and “multi-ethnic” books (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 115). Such actions on behalf of an “inte- grated” school curriculum were—like actions on behalf of integrated school buildings—were often contested, especially by southern whites (Zimmerman 2002).

While white resistance and recrimination were hardly limited to the South, it was especially widespread and intense there. Southern whites insisted that racial integration was unacceptable, whether in classrooms or in textbook il- lustrations. As late as 1969, in Birmingham, Alabama, whites blocked the adoption of a textbook that alluded to the church bombing that killed four black girls in the city in May 1963. In truth, Zimmerman (2002, 116) points out, the authors of the textbook “bent over backward to appease local sensi- bilities,” attributing the crime to lower-class “white extremists,” thereby ab- solving Birmingham’s political and economic elites. Even through the early 1970s, Zimmerman (2002, 116) notes, “any reference to racial violence, hos- tility, or prejudice often spelled the removal of a textbook.”

Even the most modest mention of distinguished African Americans in the textbooks of time was met by white protest in the South. In Florida a teacher who used a text showing black Union soldiers during the Civil War found the tires of her car slashed and warnings scrawled across the windows. Other crit- ics objected to the mention of even Frederick Douglass simply because such mention implied criticism of racist whites. “For God’s sake,” demanded one white Virginian in 1970, “give us some history to be proud of” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 116). By resisting the inclusion of important African

Americans in school textbooks, these same European Americans were insur- ing that America would have no future of which to be proud.

Racists in the North and West tended to be less direct than those in the South. There they tended to make their objections to integrated textbooks in class rather than in explicitly racial terms. Rarely, Zimmerman (2002) points out, did northern white resistance to integrated textbooks—or, for that mat- ter, to integrated classrooms—employ long-discredited arguments concern- ing inherent differences between blacks and whites. Rather, racists in the North complained that liberal elites were smearing hardworking, patriotic Americans (Zimmerman 2002). “Of course, we do have much of which we are not proud,” acknowledged one Californian, “but why play up our mistakes, downgrade our heroes, and please our enemies?” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 117–118)

That Californian, and millions of other European Americans, might have profited by studying James Baldwin’s March 1968 testimony before Congress on behalf of a proposed National Commission on Negro History and Cul- ture. While endorsing the Commission’s interest in promoting greater study and awareness of black history, Baldwin pointed out that this study must oc- cur as part of American history. After all, he pointed out, “my history and culture has got to be taught. It is yours” (quoted in Zimmerman 2002, 129).

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