Civil Rights, Culture Wars

The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

Charles W. Eagles

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state's past. In 1974, when Random House's Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit ( Loewen v. Turnipseed ) challenging the book ban. Charles W. Eagles explores the story of the controversial ninth-grade history textbook and the court case that allowed its adoption with state funds. Mississippi: Conflict and Change and the struggle for its acceptance deepen our understanding both of civil rights activism in the movement's last days and of an early controversy in the culture wars that persist today.

CHAPTER ONE

Conflict

Combating Ignorance

In the early 1970s two young college professors in Jackson, Mississippi, led a team that wrote a boldly revisionist textbook that upset the staid field of Mississippi history and caused a major public controversy. James Loewen, a sociologist at Tougaloo College, and Charles Sallis, a historian at Millsaps College, worked with several of their students and colleagues to produce in 1974 a ninth-grade textbook, Mississippi: Conflict and Change.1 The title told their story. On many levels Loewen and Sallis argued that conflict produces change, and they embraced controversial subjects related to race and class, examined unpleasant subjects such as economic depressions and violence, and included subjects neglected by other books—blacks, women, workers, and the arts. By paying attention to dissent, the revisionist writers revealed past conflicts and highlighted lost possibilities for change. Loewen and Sallis believed that writing and teaching about the potential conflicts in Mississippi’s history would stimulate intellectual growth among ninth graders but also foster change in the state and among historians.

Loewen and Sallis presented a perspective that differed dramatically from previous textbooks. As Loewen would later demonstrate for American history in his best-selling Lies My Teacher Told Me, they wanted to correct the “lies”—the omissions, false impressions, distortions, errors—in Mississippi history textbooks.2 Marginalized women, workers, and blacks and other minorities learned little about their own histories from their Mississippi history textbooks. More important, they gained no knowledge about challenges to the established elite and about struggles against its control, whether by slaves or farmers in the nineteenth century or more recent civil rights demonstrators. The textbooks thereby denied many Mississippians access to their own traditions of resistance and protest, their own achievements and progress, and kept them ignorant of everything but the homogenized, continuous success story of the dominant class. At the behest of the white elite, the history books preserved ignorance of past inspirational heroes and, more generally, of lost possibilities and forgotten historical opportunities. The state-sanctioned amnesia played a vital role in the perpetuation of white supremacy and racial discrimination.

Ignorance has many causes and takes many forms. Though education seeks to overcome the innocent ignorance of birth, ignorance can also result from a failure to study certain subjects, from a loss of memory, and from a suppression of information. In school textbooks, educational authorities deliberately decide what to include and what to exclude. The powerful can make decisions that actually “strive for a goal of stupidity,” rather than for genuine education. Under the guise of protecting children, imposing an engineered ignorance protects the privileged by preserving the status quo and by releasing leaders from responsibility. It also reinforces orthodox values and preserves useful stereotypes. One method of constructing ignorance involves a fearful elite’s actively and strategically instilling ignorance by leaving out specific information and analyses and by limiting access to dangerous knowledge. Too much knowledge could lead to troubling questions and a loss of control of the classroom, and the elite feared the unknown results. Such a constricted education preserves power arrangements. As one scholar concluded about the impact of ignorance, “We rule you, if we can fool you.”3

Privileged whites have used historical ignorance to maintain their superiority over blacks but also over other minorities, women, and less influential whites. Through an “airbrushed white narrative,” the elite denied the excluded groups’ knowledge of their own past victimization by the powerful. For example, to keep blacks subservient, a purging or “management of memory” has deliberately suppressed or forgotten inspiring historical information. The manipulated official history justifies white privilege as well as black inferiority, and it also denies any need for reform. Not only do blacks lose their past, but many whites do too; nonelite whites feel their comparable powerlessness when history omits accounts of class struggles. Ignorance of historical facts can also lead to “moral ignorance”: a lack of accurate information that can yield “incorrect judgments about right and wrong.” Moral ignorance causes erroneous historical interpretations. As a consequence, the “mystification of the past underwrites a mystification of the present” that produces a “feel-good history for whites.” It particularly makes ruling whites comfortable and confident in their status and authority while it denies the historical, and by implication the contemporary, significance of everyone else.4 As teachers and authors Loewen and Sallis wanted their textbook to combat ignorance in textbooks.

Viewing the school as an intellectual marketplace, the authors of Conflict and Change sought to extend a type of conflict into the classroom where competing ideas would prompt students to consider both the state’s past and its future. Unlike previous writers of Mississippi history textbooks, Loewen and Sallis did not seek to reinforce the status quo but urged students to question it and eventually, if necessary, to change it. By presenting clashing historical interpretations, Conflict and Change also undermined the conventional view of history as a fixed set of facts and made the study of history itself an intellectual contest full of questions rather than answers. The authors wanted to transform Mississippi history textbooks and the study of the state’s past, but the introduction of Conflict and Change caused a controversy because of the importance of textbooks not just in Mississippi schools but in all of American education.

Before the electronic classroom, textbooks constituted the “big gun in the educational arsenal” and were often the only weapon available to teachers. Long dominating American primary and secondary education, textbooks occupied as much as three-quarters of classroom time and 90 percent of homework. By the end of a typical twelve-year educational career a student had encountered more than thirty thousand textbook pages, and often no other significant books. A textbook exerted an especially powerful educational influence because the average student “accept[ed] everything in the text as gospel.” As a result of textbooks’ virtual monopoly power, they not only determined what students learned, but they also played a major role in shaping students’ attitudes, values, and interests. Textbooks often determined the content of what teachers taught. Diane Ravitch concluded that in history classes textbooks “are the curriculum” because history teachers usually have not studied history but have an education degree in social studies. In the upper grades where each teacher had many more students than in the lower grades, teachers may have especially depended on textbooks. Combined with teacher’s manuals, texts also often determined how teachers presented subjects and how they tested their students.5

Students, the ultimate textbook consumers, played no role in selecting the books they studied. According to one industry saying, “kids don’t buy books,” so publishers cavalierly ignored student preferences and interests. Like students, teachers individually and collectively usually had little impact on textbook selection even though textbooks shaped their curriculum and classroom activities. Instead textbook selection involved a more centralized, politicized procedure under the authority of individual school districts or, more often, the state.6

By the 1970s American schools spent more than twice as much for books as for other teaching materials. With yearly sales of more than $600 million in 1975, textbooks constituted a big business, but smaller than the dog food industry. Sales of commercial fiction and nonfiction books exceeded that of textbooks and dominated the domestic book industry, but publishers depended on textbooks because their steady sales promised larger profits with smaller risks. Although one-fourth of textbooks did not make a profit, the chairman of Houghton Mifflin acknowledged, 80 percent of his company’s profits came from textbooks. In the lucrative national market, publishers fought for textbook sales.7

After this introductory chapter, the story of Conflict and Change must begin with an appreciation for both the history of textbooks (chapter 2) in Mississippi and American education and the methods used to produce, market, and select them. Textbooks’ long dominant role in education meant that they had frequently sparked controversies. For more than a century the public repeatedly debated the selection, production, and, especially, content of textbooks. The fight for textbook contracts created a competition rife with shady and even illegal sales methods, and widespread abuse led to efforts to restrict unfair practices. Publishers tried to form a monopoly to restore order by eliminating costly competition and controlling prices. On the other hand, through progressive legislation, state governments created agencies to achieve lower book prices by stopping corruption and professionalizing textbook selection; a few states tried printing their own books. Despite attempts to cleanse the textbook market, controversies frequently erupted, often at the state and local levels.

In writing Conflict and Change, Loewen and Sallis dissented from the predominant view of Mississippi histories (chapter 3) that celebrated a harmonious story from the perspective of dominant white males. According to the established interpretation, white men did everything important: they settled the state, operated the plantations, controlled the slaves, ran the government, developed the economy, and, in general, made the state’s history. Conventional Mississippi history textbooks portrayed a past without disruptive events and contentious issues; the books lacked oppressed people and dramatic clashes. The white ruling class had tried to avoid the conflicts that could have produced change by coercing conformity and stifling dissent over slavery, white supremacy, violence, secession, poverty, disfranchisement, black oppression, and other divisive issues. The minimized disagreements of the past had yielded little historical change. Endorsing the view of the white elite, contemporary Mississippi history textbooks’ presentation of a peaceful past compounded the problem by denying even the potential for conflicts.

The contrasts between Conflict and Change and older traditional Mississippi histories echoed larger debates over the contours of American history. Two interpretative traditions have prevailed in American history. One, called progressive history, originated during the progressive era and saw instability and divisions in the nation’s past, just as in early twentieth-century society. It stressed conflicts and struggles between classes but also between different groups who divided along ethnic, racial, political, ideological, sectional, or religious lines. In the fights each side sought the power to control, or at least influence the direction of, change. As supporters of reform, progressive historians identified with the past forces working for a more democratic society; they supported the people against the entrenched conservative interests. Their positive portrayals of political and economic reformers in the past offered historical confirmation for their advocacy of contemporary reforms. During the first third of the twentieth century, progressive historians had great influence, and a generation later in the 1960s another group of historians called the New Left revived a revised version of the progressive interpretation. The New Leftists also saw divisions and conflict in the American past, and they too sided with the people against the interests. Unlike the progressives, however, the sixties radical historians had little optimism that reform of the political and economic system could achieve meaningful results, so they advocated more extreme change.8 Without any declaration of allegiance, Conflict and Change fit in the tradition of the progressives and the radical critics of the 1960s.

Appearing between the progressive and New Left historians, a second view of American history minimized differences among Americans and emphasized the nation’s persisting consensus around shared fundamental values and ideas. Though the new consensus history resembled the nationalistic celebrations by nineteenth-century histories, it developed most fully in the affluent post–World War II years marked by stability, prosperity, and conformity. Instead of stressing divisive classes, they focused on unifying American culture. Upon their closer examination, apparent conflicts in the past appeared to consensus historians as only minor disagreements occurring within a wider harmony. Without periodic clashes between various groups, the consensus interpretation of history generally told a story characterized by continuity among a homogeneous population with uniform values. Consensus history, according to historian John Higham, resulted from a “massive grading operation that smoothed and flattened” the past and eliminated serious contention and controversy. Historical change occurred when society agreed on needed modifications and the consensus gradually shifted, not as a result of any disruptive disagreement. Conservative historians approved the consensus; more liberal ones bemoaned it. Conservative forces wanted schools to teach the true facts about the past, while liberals thought schools should teach students to ask critical questions about their history.9

Mississippi history textbooks shared the consensus school’s positive perspective, and they resembled the triumphal nineteenth-century American histories. The state histories, however, arrived at their similar interpretations for different, more parochial reasons. Like most schoolbooks, especially in the social sciences and particularly state histories, the books presented the views of the state’s civic elite who ran the political system and public education. The orthodox interpretations justified the leadership’s status and power, and Mississippi’s elite based its authority on white supremacy and racial segregation. Working constantly to block anything that seemed to subvert the southern way of life, the white leaders’ continued dominance required the unremitting suppression of African Americans. In the words of University of Mississippi historian James W. Silver, the state became a “closed society” that barred new ideas and information that could threaten the culture’s values and stability.10 By justifying white dominance, Mississippi history books played a key role in maintaining the closed society. Whites as well as blacks suffered from the suppression of subversive ideas. The traditional official consistent confirmation of the white male leaders’ importance meant that when James Loewen and Charles Sallis sought to overturn the “feel-good” historical narrative they caused a controversy.11

To write a different version of Mississippi history, the two professors assembled a team of writers (chapter 4) for the Mississippi History Project. Not the experienced educators who usually wrote textbooks, the group included fledgling faculty and even undergraduate students. Coming from Tougaloo College and Millsaps College in Jackson, the assorted writers included professors and students, men and women, blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, historians and non-historians. The eight writers brought a variety of perspectives, strengths, and interests to the creation of Conflict and Change. Loewen and Sallis maintained overall control, coordinated the writers, and played the role of editor as they directed their unusual collection of contributors. In the entire process Jim Loewen played the driving role.

The Mississippi History Project (chapter 5) sought to expand in an unbiased way the state’s story to include all Mississippians, even the silent, the unnamed, and the dispossessed. The radical approach began with their inspiration to write a textbook and the unique group gathered to work on the Project. The textbook’s design and format also had many original features. It employed numerous maps, tables, bar graphs, pie charts, photographs, drawings, and other illustrations, and it presented extracts from primary sources along with vignettes and personal profiles. The margins also highlighted key points, posed questions, and defined terms. Loewen and Sallis also often urged the reader to compare information to material found in other places in the text; to prompt ninth graders to see relationships, for example, they suggested comparing a map showing the 1850 distribution of slaves to an earlier map of soil types. Each chapter also cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Chapter One: Conflict/Combating Ignorance
• Chapter Two: Textbooks/Their History, Role, and Importance
• Chapter Three: Histories/Earlier Mississippi History Textbooks
• Chapter Four: Writers/Jim Loewen, Charles Sallis, and Their Team
• Chapter Five: Project/Development and Writing of Conflict and Change
• Chapter Six: Reception/Reviews and Reactions
• Chapter Seven: Controversy/Rejection by the Textbook Purchasing Board
• Chapter Eight: Case/Preparing the Legal Challenge
• Chapter Nine: Trial/Loewen v. Turnipseed in Federal Court
• Chapter Ten: Change/The Book’s Effects and the Culture Wars
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Essay on Sources
• Notes
• Index