Text Book Wars in Texas – Coming to Your Schools

In the School Textbook industry, the State of Texas has out sized influence because books are standardized throughout the state by an appointed Commission. The textbook manufacturers don’t make separate textbooks for every state, they instead make a few standard versions, one based on Texas, which they sell to the nation’s school systems more cheaply than the school systems cost to develop a new book.

Conservative majorities on the Texas Textbook commission the last decade or so have resulted in textbooks following the conservative, and often racist beliefs of the far right.

You get not only the Southern Myth (slaves were well treated and happy), but the introduction of their own perverted “christian” beliefs…And now Mexicans are lazy drunks, and Hispanics are inferior to whites.

For the complete list in he “textbook” go here.

Texas teachers are rebelling against a new racist textbook that portrays Mexicans as lazy drunks

 

Texas college and high school teachers say a textbook that has been proposed for Mexican-American Studies high school class is chock-full of errors and omissions. If that isn’t enough, it’s also racist.

According to Fusion, Texas State Board of Education member Ruben Cortez Jr. demanded that the board reject the textbook on the basis of the racism but also on the 68 factual errors, 42 interpretive errors and 31 omission errors.

“It is an utter shame we must deal with racially offensive academic work,” said Cortez Jr. at a press conference.

The Texas Tribune cites one passage in the commission report that states, “Stereotypically, Mexicans were viewed as lazy compared to European or American workers … Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day’s work so vigorously … It was also traditional to skip work on Mondays, and drinking on the job could be a problem.”

South Texas College history professor Trinidad Gonzales called the book nothing but “a web of racist assertions.”

“It was very difficult to get through it because of the significant errors that kept popping up,” he said. He said that one passage was “anti-Catholic” because it claims that Catholics’ only loyalty is to the Pope.

But Republican board member David Bradley saw racism in the fact that the teachers were bringing up racism to begin with.

“Are we not being a little discriminatory in singling out one group?” he said. “I am French-Irish, and you don’t see the French or the Irish pounding the table wanting special treatment, do you?”

He believes that the course isn’t a required class and schools should be more focused on preparing students for college. Because the course isn’t required, school districts also have an option to choose whatever textbook they want for the class. Still, the members of the commission are hoping to ban the book from being used.

The full report goes line by line through the textbook with examples of attacks on Native people in North, Central and South America being far less “civilized” than Europeans. It claims that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans with “Indian heritage remain skeptical of modern society.”

The book’s racist stereotypes shouldn’t be surprising because the book was crafted by a textbook company run by former school board member Cynthia Dunbar. She is infamous for admitting that during her time on the board she worked to correct a “biblically illiterate society.” Dunbar now works at the right-wing Christian college Liberty University and worked on Ted Cruz’s campaign in Virginia.

She claimed that she tried to work with the commission but was turned away and to this day has only been told of one error in the book. The commission report, however, details all 141 errors and racist citations. She swears that she wants to create objective textbooks.

 

 

The Southern Myth – How Slavery Became Pleasant

I remember this from my segregated primary school 3rd Grade textbook, which is the one mentioned in the article below. When I first attended an integrated school in 7th Grade, the textbook in the previously all white school quoted almost verbatim the Southern Myth about slavery. My refusal to be tested and graded on anything which was gross historical lie, or to sit in class while it was being taught caused a bit of an uproar. I actually remember one white girl saying in class how well the slaves were treated, and how happy they were…That lasted up until I mentioned Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner (We didn’t know about Gabriel Prosser yet as much of what would become Black History had been erased from the textbooks and had to be rediscovered). and The teacher challenged me to provide material which contravened the information in the “official” Virginia History Book. My Dad, a historian had just completed a book on black history, replete with all the research and documentation from places like the Library of Congress…

I provided said information.

The Daughters of the Confederacy weren’t the last to attempt to rewrite History…Right wingers in Texas have even tried to erase figures like Cesar Chavez and the existence of black contributions to America. So the battle is ongoing.

Welcome to America. I now own your ass.

How Dixie’s History Got Whitewashed

The United Daughters of the Confederacy were once a powerful force in public education across the South, right down to rewriting history: slaves were happy, y’all.

Earlier this week Vanderbilt University announced that it would remove the word “Confederate” from the stone pediment at the entrance to a campus dormitory known as Memorial Hall. The decision brings to a close a long-standing dispute between the university and the Tennessee division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which provided the funds for the construction of the building and claimed naming rights in 1933. As part of the agreement, the school will pay the UDC $1.2 million or the present value of their initial $50,000 donation. This decision is the latest in a string of high-profile moves to remove Confederate iconography from public and private places as well as a reflection of the UDC’s long decline.

The women who founded the UDC in 1894 were committed to preserving and defending the memory of  Confederate soldiers and their cause. By World War I, membership in the UDC had reached roughly 100,000. While chapters were eventually established throughout the country, they remained most influential in the South, where they organized Decoration Day ceremonies, monument dedications, and raised money to support veterans in their old age. Their most important function, however, was the overseeing of how history was taught to the next generation on the high school and college levels. Students were expected to assume the responsibility of defending their ancestors once the generation that lived through the war had died. They did this primarily by authorizing textbooks for classroom use and rejecting those they deemed to be a threat to the memory of the Confederate soldier.

The UDC promoted histories that celebrated the Confederate cause by praising leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and ignoring or re-interpreting the central cause of the war, namely slavery. Consider Susan Pendleton Lee’s 1895 textbook, A School History of the United States, in which she declared that although abolitionists had declared slavery to be a “moral wrong,” most Southerners believed that “the evils connected with it were less than those of any other system of labor.” “Hundreds of thousands of African savages,” according to the author, “had been Christianized under its influence—the kindest relations existed between the slaves and their owners.” It should come as no surprise that in her account of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was necessary “for protection against . . . outrages committed by misguided negroes.”

By the first decade of the 20^th century and with the encouragement of the UDC, most Southern states established textbook commissions to oversee and recommend books for all public schools that provided a “fair and impartial” interpretation. These committees worked diligently to challenge publishers who stood to threaten the South’s preferred story of the war: “Southern schools and Southern teachers have prepared books which Southern children may read without insult or traduction of their fathers. Printing presses all over the Southland—and all over the Northland—are sending forth by thousands ones which tell the true character of the heroic struggle. The influence . . . of the South forbid[s] longer the perversion of truth and falsification of history.”…

…The effort made by the UDC to control history textbooks paid off immeasurably and continued to shape how Americans remembered the Civil War well into the 20^th century. As late as the ’70s, the state of Virginia still used the popular textbook Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis B. Simkins, Spotswood H. Jones, and Sidman P. Poole, first published in 1957. Its chapter on slavery—“How the Negroes Lived under Slavery”—featured a well-dressed African-American family on board a ship shaking hands with a white man, who is presumed to be the family’s new owner. Here is how it describes slavery:

A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes . . . The house servants became almost as much a part of the planter’s family circle as its white members . . . The Negroes were always present at family weddings. They were allowed to look on at dances and other entertainments . . . A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other …  The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous.  Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked . . . But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.

Read the Rest Here…

 

My Dad always argued that black folks were the first non-Asian people to reach the Americas from Africa. He had visited Mexico and seen the statues of the Olmecs who ruled parts of what is now Mexico and Central America in 1700 BC. It is only about 1,000 miles by sea at the closest point between Africa and South America aided by the “Westerlies”. He believed that the great trading period starting about 7th Century was actually the second or third rise of trade and exploration in West Africa. Indeed it is now known as a result of that second/third trade period that the first known African migrated to live in England in the 13th Century, and there may have been trade between North Africa and Europe as early as the Vikings.

 

Black Chumph “Historian”

Its hard out there for even black, well educated folks to get work. The fall of the white middle class, folks who presumably are the core of Chumph’s ever shrinking “legions”, was bad for white folks…But devastating for the black middle class.

I mean – if there is any group in America who should be angry and start blowing isht up…It ain’t the inbred white cretins who slavishly follow the Chumph.

The Washington, DC area has been a mecca for black folks for generations. The area supports what is probably the largest black middle class in the country.

For some reason the region also seems to attack that sub-fractional subset of morally repugnant, mentally deficient, Lawn ornament, black conservatives. Uncle Wally “confederate” Williams, Crystal “Wrong” Wright, Snidely Whiplash AKA  Peter N. Kirsanow who sits on the scurrilous US Civil Rights Commission, the infamous neurosurgeon who filled the Herman Cain seat for racism denial on the Presidential Primary platform…And this chump – Derek Boyd Hankerson.

Mythical Black Confederates have been a hot topic for slavery denial types and neo-confederate racists for a while.

Mythical…Because there quite simply weren’t any.

Prior to the Civil War, there were three areas of the country with large free black populations. Those would have been Virginia, the area around New Orleans, and North Carolina – where 80% of the free black folks lived.

So…Since Slavers (AKA confederates) weren’t real keen on giving guns to slaves (geez…I wonder why) – If there were to be any Black confederates, they would have had to come from the “free” population. Problem with that is, starting about 1840 all of the slave states started passing laws, called the Black Codes – in an attempt to drive free blacks out. The area I live in currently, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia had one of, if not the largest free black landowning populations in the country in 1840…By 1860, they were all gone. Part of the Black Codes prohibited free black folks from owning guns.

Some of these Laws –

1840 –  “Black Codes” are established in South Carolina. Under these codes, enslaved African-Americans are unable to gather in groups, earn money, grow crops independently, learn to read and own high-quality clothing.

1841 – Residents of Texas are given the responsibility of catching runaway slaves and then, alerting local law enforcement.

1842 – Georgia lawmakers declare that they will not consider freed African-Americans as citizens.

1844 – North Carolina pass a law declaring it will not recognize freed African-Americans as citizens.

Almost every slave state made it illegal for a free black to move into the state, and all of the slave states with ocean ports passed laws requiring the incarceration of any free black sailor who entered the state while serving on a ship. South Carolina set the standard for such laws in 1822 by requiring that ship captains bring their black sailors to the local jail, where they would be held for a fee until the ship was ready to set sail. If the fees were not paid, the black sailor would be auctioned off for temporary service and then expelled from the state. Similar rules applied to emancipated slaves. By 1860 most of the eleven states that formed the Confederacy prohibited the emancipation of slaves within their jurisdiction. Thus, if a master wanted to free his slaves he had to remove them from the state, either before emancipating them or immediately afterwards.

Southern states also prohibited free blacks from engaging in professions that might enable them to foster or aid slave revolts. Thus free blacks could not be pharmacists, gunsmiths, printers or publishers, or operate taverns or places of entertainment. Mississippi made it a crime for blacks to even work for printing offices. Georgia prohibited free blacks from being masons or mechanics, or from contracting to build or repair houses. Most of the slave states prohibited free blacks from learning to read or write. They could also be severely punished for owning antislavery literature. Under a Mississippi law of 1830, whites who circulated “seditious pamphlets,” which would have included antislavery pamphlets, could be jailed, but free blacks were to be executed for the same offense. In 1842, Virginia made it a felony for free blacks to receive abolitionist material in the mail….

The point being – unarmed, prohibited from crossing state borders, locked out of numerous professions, and liable to be re-enslaved at any moment…

Yeah – those free black folks were highly motivated to fight to perpetuate a cause, and a bunch of folks who didn’t even recognize them as citizens.

Now I am a published amateur historian, who focuses on the Virginia North Carolina area. After years of research, uncovering a lot of interesting stuff about life in the Antebellum South, myself, and my far more established and educated compatriots have only ever been able to find one (1) so called Black confederate in the State of Virginia. And we aren’t even terribly sure he was actually…

Black. He shared a surname with a large black family in central Virginia, which led to the assumption by some early researchers (Uncle Wallie Williams) that he was black. However, further research, including DNA shows no relationship, and the family whose surname was besmirched does not, and never has claimed him as kin. Indeed, when the super-racist Walter Plecker conducted a campaign of racial terrorism in the 1930s to positively identify who was actually black, white, or Native American in Virginia – said “black confederate’s” family came up as white.

Ooops!

With that in mind..On to the Chumph’s Lawn Jockey (And Lawn Ornament of the Month) – Know your enemy.

Meet the historian and civil war ‘truther’ responsible for helping Trump win the Florida primary

Derek Boyd Hankerson is an African American university lecturer, filmmaker, author, and political operative. He’s also a Donald Trump supporter. Pledging his support for Trump last year, Hankerson served as Trump’s Northeast Florida Field Director. He helped Trump win “sixty-six of sixty-seven counties in Florida,” he told HNN.

Just who is this African American who backs Donald Trump?  The media have identifiedhim as a historian in their accounts, though he lacks a degree in history.  He received his undergraduate degree in Political Science in 1991 from the University of Maryland College Park. In 2007 he earned his Masters in Business Administration from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri.

But he has co-authored a history book, Belonging: The Civil War’s South We Never Knew.  The book makes the astonishing claim that blacks in large numbers fought for the South during the Civil War, a myth advanced by white racist groups that long ago was debunked by historians. Hankerson is the descendant of slaves.  His coauthor, Judith Shearer, is the scion of a family that owned slaves.

So who is Derek Boyd Hankerson?

Raised in Prince Georges County, Maryland, Hankerson developed a strong passion for history at the early age of ten years old. When he was young, he frequently took trips to the South with his family, where he visited historical sites and learned history about his West African Gullah Geechee ancestry and the Underground Railroad.

One trip to Saint Augustine forever changed his outlook on history, making him question the accuracy of conventional learning he received from textbooks. He had been taught that St. Augustine was founded in 1513, but a historical sign he saw on his visit listed the city’s founding year as 1565. In the history books he had read neither St. Augustine nor Florida had been mentioned in connection with the founding of European settlements. He was taught the first settlements were in Jamestown and Plymouth.

Is this Chumph’s boy?

He began to wonder – “What else are people hiding?”

In his twenties he was a political operative in the Reagan administration. His political resume includes working in the White House under both President George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush.  In one stint he served in the White House Office of Public Liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  He also worked on campaigns for governors and senators.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump.  For all the officials he’s worked for, Hankerson says no one has had quite the same appeal for him as Trump. What drew him to Trump is the candidate’s background as a businessman and his stance as an outsider. A Washington insider himself, Hankerson said he is tired of self-seeking politicians. Ideologically, he strongly identifies with Trump’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Common Core and the outsourcing of jobs.

Hankerson is currently in Wisconsin working on the campaign of a businessman who’schallenging House Speaker Paul Ryan in the GOP primary. In the political off-season Hankerson devotes himself to teaching, filmmaking, and writing.

His book, Belonging: The Civil War’s South We Never Knew, is on sale on Amazon, but has received no reviews.  There are also no blurbs.  In an interview with HNN over email he insisted that blacks fought for the South:

“I’ve personally had 30 members of my family who are native to the south and fought to protect their homes and farms. I also have family members who fought for the north to include the family’s 54th Mass. These relatives in the south were part of Calvary units, sharp shooters, officers (mulatto), infantry and reserves. It’s a misnomer or incorrect history in believing blacks didn’t fight for the south when the majority or 80 percent of black people are originally from the south and most arrived pre-1800 or pre-mass immigration. To classify them as coward is false.”

Those who believe blacks fought in the Confederacy (at least voluntarily) are in a small minority. Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and an expert in African American history, dismisses claims like Hankerson’s, which rest on the belief that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War:

This is a picture of the 1st Louisiana Guard.They were actually founded as a confederate militia by free blacks to protect the City of New Orleans…Until the confederate General refused to recognize them as legitimate troops. They promptly changed sides and became the the foundation of the 1st US Colored Troops fighting for the Union in the West.

“Slavery, as Southern Vice President Alexander Stephens put it, was ‘the cornerstone’ of the Confederacy. This does not mean that it was the only issue contributing to the coming of the Civil War. Nor does it suggest that the hundreds of thousands of men who fought under the Confederate banner, most of them non-slaveholders, were motivated exclusively by the desire to keep blacks in bondage. Yet to claim that Confederate soldiers went to war to protect their ‘way of life’ conveniently forgets that this way of life was founded on slavery.”

“Slaves fully understood this,” says Foner. “A few light-skinned blacks may have passed for white and joined the Southern Army. But the regiments of black Confederate troops one hears about of late exist only in myth or in the willful confusion of the Army’s black servants and laborers–slaves impressed into service by their masters–with combat soldiers. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of slaves eagerly sought their freedom by fleeing to Union lines and enlisting in the Union Army.”

Scholars have conceded that up to 50,000 slaves labored for the Confederacy and that some blacks actually fought for the Confederacy.  Harvard’s John Stauffer says the number of black soldiers was somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000. But he points out that that would have been less than 1 percent of the black men living in the South of military age.  Even this modest admission, he says, has gotten him into hot water with other scholars….Read the rest here…

Lawn Jockey black Republican of the Month Award – Derek Boyd Hankerson

 

 

On This Memorial Day – Remembering Those Who Fought to End Slavery

There are a lot of Southern Myths about the Civil War and Antebellum South, and what life was like in the period leading up to the War. The root of the war was economic. By 1860, over 60% of the GDP, and near 80% of the trade was generated by the South. And just about every penny of that money was built and fully enabled by slavery. It is no mystery why the Articles of Secession by every Southern State lists the cause of their actions as to maintain slavery.

The South was by no means monolithic as the Southern Myth would have you believe. And it was a dangerous place, with rebellion seething just under the surface. One of the few things which kept the slave master’s cruelty in check was the distinct possibility that ol’ Massa might “fall off his horse and break his neck”. There were hundreds, if not thousands of slave rebellions, and the risk was so great that during the Revolutionary War the Southern States supplied few troops to fight the British…Because they were needed at home to keep the slave rebellions in check. The sight of Haitian Troops marching to Savannah to attack British forces holding the city must have sent chills down the spines of Southern slave owners.

Further the South wasn’t monolithic. Large regions, especially the Appalachians, had no real economic ties to slavery, making the western Southern States a battleground between pro and anti-slavery forces. If you examine the maps of the Shenandoah campaign between Union General Phil Sheridan and confederate General Stonewall Jackson, you will find that there are areas conspicuously avoided by the rebs, You will find the same in certain areas of North Carolina. Those areas weren’t “confederate friendly”.

This Memorial Day we should celebrate those who fought to put down the rebellion, and ultimately end slavery. Over 100,000 of whom were white Southerners, and 260,000 of whom were black, often escaped slaves.

100,000 From Dixie Fought for the North in the Civil War

In all the recent debate about erasing Confederate history, no one talks about the history the South itself has erased, such as the many Southerners who fought for the Union.

Earlier this past week a judge ruled that the city of Louisville, Kentucky can proceed with the removal of a Confederate monument near the campus of the University of Louisville. Arguments against removing Confederate monuments over the past year have often claimed that in doing so communities run the risk of erasing history. What has been universally overlooked, however, is that the push to establish monuments to the Confederacy during the postwar years helped to erase the history of those white and black southerners who remained loyal and were willing to give their lives to save the Union.

Southern Unionism took many forms during the Civil War. Some disagreed with the right of a state to secede from the Union at the war’s outset while others grew weary of the Confederacy in response to a number of factors, including a Conscription Act in 1862 that exempted large slaveowners, the impressment of horses or mules for the army, and a “tax-in-kind” law that allowed the government to confiscate a certain percentage of farm produce for military purposes. Others in places like Appalachia and other highland regions that included few slaves saw little value in supporting a government whose purpose was the creation of an independent slaveholding republic.

Resistance to the Confederacy also took many forms throughout the war. The release of the movie, The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey next month, will introduce audiences to Newton Knight, who led an armed rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi. Some joined clandestine political organizations such as the Heroes of America, which may have contained upwards of 10,000 members. Networks of communication kept resistors in touch with one another and their activities throughout the region. Unionists risked arrest by Confederate officials, ostracism from within the family, and violent reprisals from the community.

It is impossible to know just how many white southerners remained loyal to the Union during the war given disagreements over its very definition, but we do know that somewhere around 100,000 southern white men from Confederate states, except for South Carolina, served in the U.S. military. East Tennessee supplied somewhere around 42,000 men, but other Confederate states yielded significant numbers, including 22,000 from Virginia (and West Virginia) and 25,000 from North Carolina. The First Alabama Cavalry, which was considered one of the toughest units in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army, took part in his “march” through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864-65.

The decision to express one’s loyalty to the Union by joining the army was often a painful one to make from the lowliest private to some of the highest-ranking officers. While the story of Robert E. Lee’s decision to resign his commission in the U.S. army, rather than betray his home of Virginia, is often told and re-told in tragic prose, others grappled with the same decisions and yet chose to remain loyal. The man who offered Lee command of the U.S. army in 1861 was another Virginian by the name of Winfield Scott. Scott, whose military career stretched back to the War of 1812—including a failed presidential bid in 1852—was the highest-ranking general at the beginning of the war. Scott’s decision was no less difficult than Lee’s and yet he remained loyal and although too old to take command in the field, he helped formulate military policy that ultimately proved successful in subduing the rebellion.

General George Henry Thomas, also from Virginia, became one of the most successful generals in the war and saved the Union army from being completely routed on September 19, 1863, earning him the nickname the “Rock of Chickamauga.” His loyalty to the nation cost him his family, who refused to speak with him ever again and even turned his picture against the wall. Very few monuments to the service of these men and others like them, who defied family, friends, and community for the sake of the nation, can be found in the former Confederate states. And yet the removal of some Confederate monuments has caused some to worry about erasing history.

The other significant Southern bloc that voiced their loyalty to the Union and commitment to crushing the rebellion was the region’s slave population. From the beginning of the war, and in the shadow of a Supreme Court that as recently as 1857 ruled that free and enslaved blacks could not be citizens of the United States, African Americans offered their services to the military. Beginning in 1862 along the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, former slaves rushed into the first all black regiments. By the end of the war roughly 150,000 former slaves fought and died to save this nation. They did so under the most harrowing conditions. Black soldiers were massacred on battlefields and even sent back into slavery at places like Fort Pillow in Tennessee and at the Crater in Petersburg, Virginia by Confederates, who refused to treat them as legitimate soldiers. As if that wasn’t enough, their own government refused to pay them what white soldiers earned. Only sustained protests that lasted more than a year and continued demonstrations of bravery on the battlefield led Congress to correct this injustice in the summer of 1864.

Southern Unionists, both black and white, may have celebrated Confederate defeat, but they continued to be persecuted owing to their wartime beliefs and actions by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Life was especially difficult for former slaves, who fought for the Union and now hoped to exercise the right to vote, own land, or run for public office. Their sacrifice for the Union ended in the rise of Jim Crow state governments by the turn of the 20^th century.

After the war, as white Southerners erected monuments to their Confederate dead they also erected monuments to their former slaves, only they recalled not brave men who fought to preserve the Union, but their loving former “servants” who remained loyal to master and their Lost Cause. The very act of monument erection helped to erase this history for much of the 20^th century.

The removal of Confederate monuments need not result in the erasure of history. In fact, it may for the first time create the intellectual and physical space to commemorate and remember a new narrative of the past, one that corresponds more closely to the long and rich history of service and sacrifice to this nation that is recalled each year on Memorial Day.

 

Black History Month

 

Racist conservatives and their Lawn Ornaments have a new argument – that Black History Month is no longer relevant because it has been absorbed into mainstream American History. That is yet another racist myth.

Proof?

The Texas School Board which is run by right wing racists…

Texas Makes Changes to History Textbooks: No Mention of KKK or Jim Crow, and the Civil War Was Fought Over States’ Rights, Not Slavery

A change is coming to public school education in Texas, a change that was voted for in 2010 and will take effect when students go back to school come fall.

It’s happening in history class—in the new social studies textbooks that students will be using to learn U.S. history. New state academic guidelines changed some of the black American history content that students typically learn. For instance, the new textbooks will “barely address racial segregation,” the Washington Post explains; nor will they make mention of the Ku Klux Klan or the Jim Crow laws put in place to continue what began with slavery.

Oh, and with regard to what got the Civil War going: Texas’ new academic standards mandate that students learn that the war was about a debate regarding states’ rights. Slavery will reportedly play second fiddle on the list of explanations used to teach why some states seceded from the Union. …

 Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

Why does it matter what some right wing racist redneck types do to their schools in Texas? Texas buys 48 million textbooks every year. No other state, except California, wields that sort of market clout. As such, the Texas KKK version of American History gets printed, and distributed to other states. Meaning, the Texas board gets to erase people like Caesar Chavez, and the existence of Jim Crow from not only their textbooks – but those bought by other states.

So…There is an active movement in America…Still…To erase Black History. The argument against Black History Month is based on CHarles Woodson – who believed black history would be absorbed into the context  of Amrican History – ergo American Historians, textbook publishers, and Schools –  “would willingly recognize the contributions of black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.”

Obviously…That isn’t happening.

Black History Month in Schools—Retire or Reboot?

Now in its 40th year, questions remain about the value of commemorating it in classrooms.

The seed of what is now known as Black History Month was planted in the doctoral thesis of Carter G. Woodson, a noted scholar, author, and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The son of former slaves, Woodson received a Ph.D. in 1912 from Harvard University, where he studied under renowned historians who minimized the importance and vitality of black history. But Woodson would not be deterred. He believed the heritage and contributions of black Americans was excluded from history, and he saw this knowledge as essential to social change.

Woodson’s dedication to the research and promotion of black history has been memorialized by his actions—in 1926 he declared the second week of February Negro History Week—and his words:

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

Today Woodson’s brainchild is the entire month of February. First celebrated in 1976, Black History Month was the result of a growing racial pride and consciousness of black Americans and Woodson’s association pushing to expand the weekly celebration. Now a well-entrenched, nationally recognized observance, Black History Month is a commemoration that might be short in days but is increasingly long on controversy. In the last month—in examples that cross racial boundaries—the black actress and conservative commentator Stacey Dashcalled to eliminate Black History Month, labeling it a vestige of segregation, while Republicans in the Kansas legislature questioned if an entire month dedicated to honoring black history was “too long.”

In one corner, advocates of Black History Month argue that a special month is needed to celebrate and recognize the achievements of black Americans in a country where European history dominates historical discourse. In the other corner, critics cast doubt that Black History Month is still relevant with the gains made in race relations—a black U.S. president the most visible sign—anddetractors charge it is detrimental in the long term to pigeonhole black history into a month-long observance. Somewhere caught in the middle are educators and schools.

A driving force behind Woodson setting aside time to study and reflect on black culture was his frustration that children—black and nonblack students—were deprived of learning in America’s schools about black achievements. Yetaccording to the NAACP, even the creator hoped the time would come when a black history week was unnecessary. Woodson was optimistic that America “would willingly recognize the contributions of black Americans as a legitimate and integral part of the history of this country.” But research shows this goal is far from complete.

Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2014 graded all 50 states and the District of Columbia on how well their public schools taught the civil-rights era to students. Twenty states received a failing grade, and in five states—Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, and Wyoming—civil-rights education was totally absent from state standards. Overall, the study found less teaching of the civil-rights movement in states outside the South and those with fewer black residents. The report paints an unfavorable picture of schools where a crucial event in black history is largely ignored…Read the Rest Here…

 

On that Reverse Racism Myth

During the Bushit Administration the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was gutted, with replacement lawyers largely from Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school). The new conservative management decided to ignore the more than 11,000 discrimination cases submitted to the Office of Civil Rights a year to pursue cases of reverse discrimination against whites. Like WMDs in Iraq, after 8 years of searching for mythic reverse discrimination case – the Department found exactly 1 (one) prosecutable case.

Yet the myth, like the Southern Myth still lives through racists projecting their own morality on black folks…It’s called projection, the old conservative “I’m not racist, you are, for pointing out my bigotry”.

The New Jim Crow, just like the Old Jim Crow…Just without the sheets.

Racism Vs. Whites? You’re Kidding Me

Majorities of whites think anti-white discrimination is as bad as the anti-black kind. Honestly, are they out of their minds?

Last week, New York Times columnist Tom Edsall, in a piece about Donald Trump’s appeal amongst conservative voters, cited an alarming survey on white people’s racial attitudes that made me wonder if large segments of white America are completely misinterpreting what racism is and how prevalent it remains in our society.

Edsall pointed to a study conducted last fall by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 52 percent of white respondents agreed with the following statement: “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

Among subsets of respondents, 76 percent of those affiliated with the Tea Partyagreed with the statement. Another 61 percent of Republicans, and 53 percent of independents. A majority of whites over age 50 also agreed with the statement, and 58 percent of working-class whites agreed. Evangelical Protestants (63 percent) and Catholics (56 percent) also agreed.

62 percent of white Democrats disagreed, and 61 percent of those with a college education. White Americans under 50 also disagreed, even though it was close. Only 48 percent of whites between the ages of 18-29 agreed, and 49 percent of them disagreed. Of whites 30-49, 46 percent agreed and 52 percent disagreed.

Upon seeing these figures I immediately wondered about what exactly white Americans perceive racism to be, and how the supposed racism they receive has become equal to that of African Americans and other minority groups.

Did a leading American presidential candidate refer to large swaths of the white American population as “rapists” and “murderers”?

Have countless white Americans taken to the streets to express their frustrations with a criminal justice system that disproportionately harms and negatively impacts the lives of white Americans?

Are white Americans campaigning against profound levels of income inequality that negatively impact the white community far worse than other racial and ethnic groups in America?

When I look around America I do not see white voices making these complaints. Instead I see large amounts of white Americans expressing their frustration that some traditional white American values are being questioned, or are “under attack” as some might say.

The controversy over the Confederate Flag has ruffled the feathers of many conservative white Americans because it questions the value and legacy of certain Southern traditions and their heroes. But should it be right for a nation’s or even a state’s decision to refrain from celebrating the lives and ideals of known traitors who were hell bent on destroying America (who also happened to be white) to be viewed as a racist attack against the white race?

Additionally, the growth of Black Lives Matter has led many white Americans to proclaim that they are “under attack” along racial divisions, but the closest incidents of an “attack” have been occasional protests that have turned violent and resulted in the destruction of property. There has never been a concerted effort to destroy white-owned establishments in the movement, and the random destruction of property is defined as criminality and not racism.

Apart from the recent and unfounded accusation that Black Lives Matter has morphed or been hijacked into a rabid, uncontrollable movement that emphasizes the killing of white law enforcement officials, the greatest cause for concern has been the name of the movement. To some Americans, the name Black Lives Matter implies that other lives do not matter, despite the fact that this notion is actually the inverse of the intent of the name. Black Lives Matter’s intent is to highlight how historically and even to this day, but with lesser severity, black lives have been dehumanized, devalued, neglected, and abused within American society, and that collectively we need to put a stop to this damning status quo.

At no point has the existence of Black Lives Matter been about the dehumanizing or abusing of other races. It has not been about pitting the races against one another and saying that one race is superior to the other. It has been about highlighting the centuries of abuse inflicted upon black Americans, acknowledging the existing abuses, and aspiring to increase the empathy and humanity of the American public to combat these systemic problems.

Proclaiming that the movement should change its name to “All Lives Matter” or creating spin-off, competing slogans such as “Blue Lives Matter” only displays a lack of understanding of the intent of Black Lives Matter. And while the motivations of such reactionary suggestions might be honest and pure, I struggle to see how the misunderstanding of certain segments of white America regarding a national civil rights movement led by black Americans should be interpreted as a racial attack against white Americans.

Black Americans expressing their frustrations against the oppressive institutions that govern them that have been erected primarily by white Americans should not be viewed as a racial attack against white Americans.

In another PRRI survey, support among whites for public protests to combat an unfair government dropped dramatically – from 67 percent in favor to 48 percent — when the protestors were identified as black.…More…

Examples of Projection and “white victimization”?

From Here, an article written by a racist conservative promoting the black-on-black crime meme, and responses by white racist conservatives (but I repeat myself!). If I choose to go over to one of the racist cesspools of the right, like the National Review, which shares articles from the white supremacist site VDARE, it gets even more blatant especially with authors like Heather McDonald and Michelle Malkin.

Jarka • an hour ago

Racial healing? That is easy. All you have to do is to put proven black racists into positions of power, in control of government, and results will come. Just like they came to Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, Department of Justice, Obama’s government, and the list goes on. Democratic party at action. You deserve it, for you vote for it.

Harry Taft • 2 hours ago

BLM is a tool of the Obama Administration that seeks to divide in every way possible and pit groups against one another. It sounds evil because it is. The instigators in the movement are opportunists who see something attractive in black population areas that are lightly or not policed at all. What could it be? But if the average black doesn’t wake up and push back against this lawlessness, who pays? They do.

Joyful LaRue • 5 hours ago

Sorry, Barone . . . the ‘movie’ of rampant crime will NOT end differently.

Thanks to the likes of Jessa Jackson, Sharpton, the black caucus, the Black Panthers and all the other race-baiters who have plied their hate-trade for fun ‘n profit over past 40 years.

These purveyors are proud members of the left and have worked hand-in-hand with the dem politicians to get & keep as many as possible dependent on gov’ment, thus keeping the jack boot of liberalism exactly where it does them the most ‘good’….

 

The Civil War…It Was About Slavery, Period

The Southern Myth has an entire alternate universe explanation about the causes of “The War Between the States”… COvering up the real reasons.

This is Col Ty Seidule, Head of the History Department at West Point

 

The Black Confederate Myth

One of the more interesting divergences of the Southern Myth – is the Myth of the Black Confederate Soldier. This one has popped up reliably since in was invented back around 1900, when southern writers tried to whitewash the brutality and savagery of the slave states, and deny that the war was really about slavery.At that time many of the soldiers who had fought in th Civil War were still alive,. The SCV campaigned for pensions for a few black men, All told, perhaps a half dozen black me were awarded pensions for serving in the Confederate Army, bolstering the claim at little expense. No record exists that any of these men ever carried a rifle.

Like anything to do with white supremacy, advocates have been able to dredge the sewers of black life and come up with black advocates – mot notably in this case Uncle Walter Williams.A few others discussed below wave the flag, and even dres up in confederate uniforms, espousing conservative causes.

The Myth of the Black Confederate Soldier

Lost Cause fanatics—including a handful of African Americans—insist that thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy. Nothing in the historical record supports that claim.

On Sunday July 19, 2015 Anthony Hervey was killed while driving home on Mississippi’s Highway 6 after attending a rally in Birmingham, Alabama to protest the city council’s decision to remove a Confederate monument in Linn Park.

A fellow passenger who survived the crash claimed that she and Hervey were being pursued by another vehicle containing four or five black men. The accident is under investigation, but given recent decisions at the state and local level to remove Confederate flags and monuments and the resulting conflicts witnessed recently, the reported cause of the crash may not come as a surprise. What may surprise readers is that Anthony Hervey was African-American.

Hervey was one of a very small but vocal group of African-American men and women who identify closely with a narrative of the Civil War that celebrates the Confederacy. These so-called “Black Confederates” have been embraced by heritage organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). In the wake of the South Carolina shootings, they have been front and center in a campaign that dates back to the late ’70s to convince the general public that thousands of free and enslaved blacks fought as soldiers in the Confederate army.

A resident of Oxford, Mississippi, Hervey was no stranger to the often contentious debates surrounding the display of the Confederate flag and other iconography. In 2000 he led protests to keep the Confederate flag flying atop the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina and closer to home, challenged the University of Mississippi’s attempt to replace its mascot, “Colonel Reb” and ban the singing of “Dixie” during football games.

Hervey was often seen wearing a Confederate uniform and carrying a large flag in front of Oxford’s soldier statue. Among his many signs could be read: “White Guilt=Black Genocide,” “The Welfare State Has Destroyed My People,” and “Please! Do Not Hire Me Because I Am Black.” According to Hervey, it is the policies of the federal government that have fueled suspicion and deepened the racial divide in the South. In his final speech in Birmingham, just before his fatal accident, Hervey said, “I don’t like black people. I don’t like white people… but I love the hell out of me some Southerners.”

It should be no surprise that Hervey’s outspokenness in support of the Confederacy and his conservative politics endeared him to crowds at pro-Confederate heritage rallies.

H. K. Edgerton of NorthCarolina

Others like honorary SCV member H.K. Edgerton of North Carolina—arguably the most visible pro-Confederate African-American—also appeared at rallies throughout the South following the shootings. A one-time president of Asheville’s chapter of the NAACP, in 2002-03 Edgerton walked 1,600 miles with the flag and in full Confederate uniform from North Carolina to Texas in opposition to government policies that divide the races and in support of Confederate heritage.

At the time of his walk Edgerton asserted, “If we Southerners don’t stand together we will lose our culture, heritage, religion and region to outsiders who sadly have no appreciation of the unique culture of being Southern.”

In Virginia, Karen Cooper has maintained a close relationship with the Virginia Flaggers, which organized in 2011 to protest the removal of the Confederate flag at the “Old Soldiers’ Home” in Richmond on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Originally from New York and a former member of the Nation of Islam, Cooper identifies closely with her new home and with Confederate heritage. She was introduced to the Virginia Flaggers through her involvement in the tea party and quickly found a home for her views on limited government and her strong stand against a welfare state that she believes has seriously harmed the black community.

As for the history of slavery in the South, Cooper brushes it aside as having existed throughout human history and, curiously, that for every individual it was “a choice.”

All three believe that racial unrest in the modern South and the recent divide over Confederate flags and monuments is the result of failed government policies and a false view of the history of the Confederacy. In their view, it was the Confederacy’s embrace of states rights and its own steps toward the recruitment of thousands of black Confederate soldiers that offered the promise of racial unity and equality. The willingness of all three to don Confederate uniforms and/or wave the flag offers a powerful visual reminder for those who continue to embrace a Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War—a narrative that rejects the preservation of slavery as the central goal of the Confederate experiment in independence in favor of a scenario wherein loyal black soldiers stood by their masters on the battlefield.

The Lousiana Native Guard, a group of local free black and Native American Men who Organized a Brigade to defend their home, New Orleans from invasion by the North. The confederate Generals denied them the opportunity to defend their city, resulting in the entire Brigade, consisting of two regiments defecting to the NOrth to become the US Colored Troops. The distinguished themselves fighting in the west, and would form the core of what would become The Buffalo Soldiers.

In their initial statement following the violent murder of nine black Charlestonians while attending Bible study at Emmanuel AME Church and the publication of photographs of Dylann Roof holding the Confederate flag, the South Carolina Division, SCV offered the following reminder:

“Historical fact shows there were Black Confederate soldiers. These brave men fought in the trenches beside their White brothers, all under the Confederate Battle Flag. This same Flag stands as a memorial to these soldiers on the grounds of the SC Statehouse today. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a historical honor society, does not delineate which Confederate soldier we will remember or honor. We cherish and revere the memory of all Confederate veterans. None of them, Black or White, shall be forgotten.”…Read the rest here

 

A bit more about Hervey here.

 

 

Are Southern Black People Complicit in Racism?

Interesting article which discusses the differences between black folks living in the South and those from other places. I am not sure the author’s reasoning is correct but it is worth evaluating and discussing…

I’m a Black Southerner Who’s Seen Racism All My Life. Why Do I Stay Silent?

Blacks in the South, Carlton told me, are submissive. He was a young African-American man from Kansas City. We were sitting in a classroom in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A teacher friend of mine had asked me to mentor him and another of her high school students.

Blacks in the South are submissive.

It rolled off his tongue, not as indictment, but as description.

His family sent him “down South” for that very reason, to get him away from, Carlton said, the kind of black people who stand up for themselves and firmly against injustice—personal and otherwise—the kind of black people he had been getting in trouble with as they fought back … against whatever it was they were fighting, something he couldn’t quite explain.

Being among submissive blacks, there would be none of the fighting and mischief that had his mother worried about how long he would live, because Southern blacks don’t fight, don’t question authority, unthinkingly fall in line—the kind of environment he needed.

The proof was all around us.

Never mind the rich history of the Civil Rights movement, born in the South and carried out by men and women so fearless they were willing to be lynched. What caught Carlton’s attention were Confederate flags in store windows, hanging from front poles in people’s yards, on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and gated communities developers named after pretend plantations, hoping to invoke the image of Southern elegance portrayed in Gone with the Wind.

No way that kind of thing would be allowed where he was from, Carlton reasoned. There would be rioting in the streets. (Notice how black South Carolinians have been praised for not rioting after a white North Charleston cop shot a fleeing black man in the back or when nine black people were targeted for death in a church.) The Southern blacks he saw—people like me—seemed too content, too happy, too accepting of the unacceptable.

Listening to him, I felt like Hattie McDaniel, which was fitting, given that I have driven by a restaurant named Mammy’s so frequently it had become part of the landscape, no longer a point of reflection. The sight of it, or riding down roads named for Confederate heroes, no longer left me wondering how much my state’s reverence for a war it started to keep people like me in chains a century and a half ago helped perpetuate 21st-century racial disparities.

That conversation with Carlton was a little more than a decade ago. The memory of that day came flashing back as I watched commentators throughout the country wax poetic with righteous anger about the Confederate flag flying on State House grounds in the capitol of my native state and their clear, unapologetic calls to “bring it down.”

I was ashamed, began wondering if Carlton was right because I knew that in some ways black people and white people in South Carolina had for years done what President Barack Obama warned against during his eulogy for the “Charleston Nine” killed at Emanuel AME—slipped “into comfortable silence.”

Despite the headlines and rhetoric dripping from the lips of Southern politicians so white-hot they make national news and late-night comedians drool, a comfortable silence has been a more accurate description of everyday black life in my part of the South than constant, overt racial unrest.

And that’s why it took the massacre of nine black people in a church once burned down by slavery supporters to make the Confederate flag an issue politicians have to grapple with today.

I was raised about 45 miles from where Dylann Roof allegedly sat in a Bible study for an hour before shooting the people he reportedly hesitated to kill because they had been so nice to him. My childhood included many trips to Charleston, including to Emanuel AME during the summer of 1990 on the day the Ku Klux Klan held a rally a five-minute walk from the church.

I grew up in an under-funded, rural high school that remained segregated for four decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and was taught by a white high school teacher who forbade us from writing about Malcolm X for Black History Month.

I rushed to the TV like many people I grew up with to watch “The Dukes of Hazzard.” I cheered for Daisy and Uncle Jesse against Jefferson “Boss Hog” Davis, and with Bo and Luke Duke in an orange Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag on the roof and named after the most revered Confederate soldier of them all, Gen. Robert E. Lee.

By the time that show ended its six-year run in 1985, the Confederate flag had been flying above the South Carolina State House dome for almost a quarter of a century, placed there in 1962 in defiance of the burgeoning civil rights movement. As it was flying at our capitol to celebrate men who fought to implement a permanent form of black enslavement, we were celebrating it in our homes in the form of the good-natured Duke boys.

By night, for at least an hour every week, we were immersed in the kind of sanitized version of the ugliest period of our past that was codified by Gone with the Wind. By day, we were taught in public schools from a history book written by the daughter of a Confederate soldier that included descriptions of happy slaves and a sympathetic Klan.

We had (and have) friends who revere the flag and told us they were protecting their heritage and honoring the sacrifice their ancestors made to protect the state from an invading army.

They never stopped reminding us of the horrors inflicted upon the South during General Sherman’s infamous march during the Civil War.

Their lines are so well-rehearsed, I can’t tell if they are sincere or a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of the South.

“There were slave owners who fought for the North, too.”

“Did you know there were black slave owners?”

“Most white Confederate soldiers were too poor to own slaves.”

“That war had nothing to do with slavery; they invaded our homeland and we had to protect it. That’s why Lincoln will never represent me.”

“Thousands of black people fought for the South.”

“How I wish the South would have freed all the slaves, then fought the war.” (…More…)

Interesting viewpoint. Raises a question as to how much this “Southern mentality” may have affected MLK’s strategy of non-violence, if at all. It also raises some question of how the “New South”, particularly those regions into which have gained black population from the North in the Reverse Great Migration of the last two decades as manufacturing has crumbled in the North will fit into this “polite society”. Texas and Georgia are probably the next two states in the once “solid South” to go blue, changing the political dynamic.

Issac Bailey (the author of this article) is a columnist at the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He’s the author of Proud. Black. Southern. (But I Still Don’t Eat Watermelon in front of White People). He was a 2014 Neiman Fellow.

 

 

The New Southern Myth

The new version of the Southern Myth goes something like this –

Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History

The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all of the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican Party were suburban, prosperous “New South” types. The more Republican the South has become the less racist…

Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)…

Amusing. But, if you control for region on voting for the Civil Rights Act, you get

281 out of 313 Representatives from Union States voted yes (90%)

8 of 102 from former confederate states voted yes (8%)

72 of 78 Senators from Union States voted yes (92%)

1 of 22 Senators from former confederate states voted yea (5%)

http://www.theguardian.com/com…

Which is the Party of the South now?

Here is a hint…

 

How Slavery Built America

Saw this one on my Amazon Reading List, downloaded it – and have been reading through it the last week or so on my way to work on the subway.  Historian Edward Baptist’s treatise on how slavery made America has been greeted with both strong objection from the usual suspects as well as hailed for it’s detailed treatment of a complex historical subject, the ramifications of which still impact American Society today. What Baptist documents is what us students of American History have suspected for a very long time, but until this book – no one really documented it and brought it out front.

What Baptist succinctly points our and documents is the “capitalism” which grew this country from it’s founding in the early 1600’s to an industrial powerhouse owes it roots, and its foundation to slavery. Far from the oft repeated “land of economic opportunity”, slavery generated over half of this country’s economic might, and the worth  of slaves alone constituted over 1/6th of the total wealth of the nation prior to 1860. This one smacks the”Southern Myth” regurgitated by conservative right wingers dead between the eyes.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

 

Part of a book review by the NY Times. Follow the link for the whole article.

A Brutal Process

‘The Half Has Never Been Told,’ by Edward E. Baptist

For residents of the world’s pre-­eminent capitalist nation, American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States. This situation was exacerbated in the 1970s, when economic history began to migrate from history to economics departments, where it too often became an exercise in scouring the past for numerical data to plug into computerized models of the economy. Recently, however, the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.

Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary). Recently, historians like Sven Beckert, Robin Blackburn and Walter Johnson have emphasized that cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.

Edward E. Baptist situates “The Half Has Never Been Told” squarely within this context. Baptist, who teaches at Cornell University, is the author of a well-­regarded study of slavery in Florida. Now he expands his purview to the entire cotton kingdom, the heartland of 19th-­century American slavery. (Unfortunately, slavery in the Upper South, where cotton was not an economic staple, is barely discussed, even though as late as 1860 more slaves lived in Virginia than any other state.) In keeping with the approach of the new historians of capitalism, the book covers a great deal of ground — not only economic enterprise but religion, ideas of masculinity and gender, and national and Southern politics. Baptist’s work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development.

Where Baptist breaks new ground is in his emphasis on the centrality of the interstate trade in slaves to the regional and national economies and his treatment of the role of extreme violence in the workings of the slave system. After the legal importation of slaves from outside the country ended in 1808, the spread of slavery into the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico would not have been possible without the enormous uprooting of people from Maryland and Virginia. Almost one million slaves, Baptist estimates, were transported to the cotton fields from the Upper South in the decades before the Civil War.

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph. For African-Americans, its results were devastating. Since buyers preferred young workers “with no attachments,” the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children was intrinsic to its operation, not, as many historians have claimed, a regrettable side effect. Baptist shows how slaves struggled to recreate a sense of community in the face of this disaster.

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits. They not only emphasized the labor abilities of those for sale (reinforced by humiliating public inspections of their bodies), but appealed to buyers’ salacious fantasies. In the 1830s, the term “fancy girl” began to appear in slave-trade notices to describe young women who fetched high prices because of their physical attractiveness. “Slavery’s frontier,” Baptist writes, “was a white man’s sexual playground.”

The cotton kingdom that arose in the Deep South was incredibly brutal. Violence against Native Americans who originally owned the land, competing imperial powers like Spain and Britain and slave rebels solidified American control of the Gulf states. Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation.

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.” When Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans in his Second Inaugural Address of the 250 years of “blood drawn with the lash” that preceded the Civil War, he was making a similar point: Violence did not begin in the United States with the firing on Fort Sumter.

 

Tea Party Southern Myth vs 12 Years a Slave

Like the Holocaust Deniers scattered around the world in anti-Semitic clusters, America has its own peculiar breed of Denier of the unconscionable – The advocates of the Southern Myth.

Recognizing what they were doing as slavers was morally unconscionable from a Judeo Christian basis, the slavers sought absolution through first, perverting their religion to justify slavery, and second by attaching themselves to Chivalrous traditions creating a “Genteel” societal veneer. Indeed, in my State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson’s University, UVa – adopted the Cavalier as the school symbol. That wasn’t just because most slaveholders were Crown Loyalists during the Revolutionary War. Attaching themselves to the English Cavaliers was an attempt to gloss over, and add class to an evil society. No different than the Drug Lords of recent vintage using their ill gotten gains to project an image of respectability.

Post Civil War, this shifted into manufacturing a society’s existence under slavery which never existed. The brutality visited upon the slaves to force them to obey, which included torture, systematic rape of women and children, and murder became the “Good Old Days” of a slightly decadent but otherwise genteel society. The Civil War became the “War of the States” supporting the fiction that each and every Southern State’s Secession Articles didn’t list slavery as the “States Right” they were fighting for. These same stawarts brought America Segregation and Jim Crow.

The modern incarnation of this “Southern psychosis” is the Tea Party, the grandchild of the Second Klan of the 20’s, American Nazi Party of the 40’s, and Dixiecrats  of the 50’s and 60’s. Absorbing the Republican matra of blaming the victim. Like their poor, landless ancestors who marched off to be maimed and killed to [protect the rights of wealthy slave owners, today’s conservative confederate malcontents support the rights of the elite right who have eviscerated the American Dream, sold their jobs overseas,  and near destroyed the American Middle Class since Raygun. All under the banner of maintaining their fictitious racial superiority. It is OK with the modern Tea Bagger to take Food Stamps away from the poor, using much the same justification of the rapist that the “bitch deserved it”. It is OK to harass the poor, even though the economic condition of many Tea Parties would place them among the “white trash” – because in a country which has legislatively discriminated, at the Tea Bagger’s ancestors demand,  against minorities for generation – a higher percentage of minorities are poor. Despite class mythology, the only reason many of these white Tea Baggers aren’t scions of society has nothing to do with discrimination – and everything to do with their own personal, generational failures. no one has held them back, except their own ignorance and racism.

In front of the White House after disgracing th WII Memorial

Tea Party and ’12 Years a Slave’

“Twelve Years a Slave,” a movie based on the 1853 autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841, is a powerful antidote to the Tea Party’s poisonous nostalgia for the era of “states’ rights” and “nullificationism,” which became code words for protecting the “liberty” of Southern whites to own African-Americans.

The movie, directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup, reveals how lofty phrases about “freedom” often meant their opposite as Southern politicians developed an Orwellian skill for weaving noble-sounding “principles” into a cloak for covering up the unjustifiable.

And, for too many generations, it worked. Americans have romanticized the antebellum South, seeing it through the rosy haze of “Gone with the Wind” or learning from school history books that most slave-owners were kindly and paternalistic masters. Even today many Americans tell themselves that slavery wasn’t all that bad. To burnish their pride in the never-to-be-criticized USA, they whitewash one of the nation’s greatest crimes, the enslavement of millions of people based on the color of their skin.

 

The Southern Myth and “Confederate History Month”

In this interview by Olbermann, Julian Bond gets into the background and structure of the Southern Myth which Southern Apologists have advanced for over a century.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Indeed, here is a variation of that “Southern Myth” by a Sons of Confederate Veterans PR Chair –

He claims that the Northern states all had slavery by the time of the “War Between the States”.

That’s not true. These states abolished slavery prior to the Civil War  –

• Vermont in 1777
• Pennsylvania in 1780
• Massachusetts in 1781
• New Hampshire in 1783
• Connecticut in 1784
• New York in 1799
• New Jersey in 1804

These new states never allowed slavery within their borders:

• Maine
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Ohio
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Oregon
• California
• Illinois

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