Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

By Luca Falciola

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469631165

Luca Falciola

Luca Falciola is lecturer in history at Columbia University.

Book preview

Civil Rights, Culture Wars

CHARLES W. EAGLES

Civil Rights, Culture Wars

The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Fred W. Morrison Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eagles, Charles W., author.

Title: Civil rights, culture wars : the fight over a Mississippi textbook / Charles W. Eagles.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021187 | ISBN 9781469631158 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469631165 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: History—Study and teaching (Secondary)—Mississippi. | Mississippi—History—Textbooks. | Civil rights—Mississippi—History.

Classification: LCC E175.8 .E24 2017 | DDC 976.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021187

Jacket illustration: Open book © 123RF.com/stillfx; vieux papier background © istockphoto.com/AndreyBeka.

To George Brown Tindall

and W. F. Minor

There is nothing more important than molding the hearts and minds of children in the right direction.

—Governor Ross Barnett, 1963

Here all they learn is they’re niggers, and they haven’t got a chance in the world, except to serve the white man, be under him, do what he wants .… They don’t get much out of school. Our people aren’t supposed to take their education too seriously. We’re supposed to do all the dirty work, and the white man is supposed to do the learning. I’ve seen the books they give our children in school .… they tell all about the white man, and they tell nothing about us, except that we’re here, and we’re no longer slaves. Well isn’t that nice! So long as our children don’t learn the truth about themselves in school, then they might as well be slaves!

—Thirty-one-year-old black mother in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1964

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

Civil Rights, Culture Wars

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 contained an annotated bibliography to encourage further reading, and the text itself occasionally explained the clashing interpretations of events. The textbook introduced new features not for novelty but to help ninth graders interact with history by thinking critically about new questions and by becoming active learners instead of passive memorizers of the traditional historical facts.

As their primary objective, however, Loewen and Sallis wanted to eliminate bias in Mississippi history books. Fairness had many facets. It, of course, meant giving blacks full and accurate treatment, but it also involved a more comprehensive discussion of whites, Native Americans, and women. Older history textbooks downplayed any conflict associated with the farmers’ movements in the late nineteenth century, and they paid little attention to lynching and racial violence. In the view of Loewen and Sallis, dissenting whites who did not approve of white supremacy deserved inclusion, and white racists required a more forthright description.

Discriminatory treatment of blacks especially attracted Loewen and Sallis’s attention. For the state with a black majority for a century after 1840, their textbook elevated and expanded the presence of blacks in the state’s history. Conflict and Change did not flinch in its discussions of lynching, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation in the late nineteenth century. Its simplest but most dramatic innovation expanded coverage of recent Mississippi history and directed unprecedented attention to the civil rights movement in The Struggle for Civil Rights, the book’s longest chapter. For the first time black and white ninth graders could read about the civil rights movement in their state.

As Loewen and Sallis worked on their book, they began to worry about the reception (chapter 6) Conflict and Change would receive. Initial concerns focused on editors and publishers. They had produced their book without any professional editorial advice, whereas most textbook ideas originate with editors and publishers who direct their development to ensure eventual profitability; textbook writers, therefore, usually had a publisher even before they began writing. As a result of their unusual, naive approach, Loewen and Sallis later had to scramble to interest a publisher. A radical secondary school textbook with a market limited to one small state had little appeal because it promised negligible profits. Loewen and Sallis had the good fortune that Pantheon and Andre Schiffrin, its director, accepted their Mississippi textbook. In addition to finding a publisher, the authors had to worry about the reaction of students and teachers who tried a manuscript version in their classes and about the response of scholars and others who offered expert commentaries on the manuscript. After publication in 1974, the authors waited for the book’s critical reception in the popular and professional press, mostly from outside the state. The most important response would come, of course, from the educational establishment within the state.

Controversy (chapter 7) quickly engulfed the new ninth-grade history book. The battle over the Loewen and Sallis text involved whether the state’s public schools could adopt it. A local school district’s purchase of textbooks depended on state funds because individual districts could not afford to buy books with their own resources. State monies could only buy books approved by the State Textbook Purchasing Board, and it relied on advice from a Rating Committee for Mississippi history textbooks. The approval process presented the question of whether professional educators, laypeople, or scholarly experts should evaluate textbooks and determine the knowledge that students should learn. State law posed the judgment of political appointees, who included teachers and educators, against the textbook’s authors who had professional scholarly expertise. The two state groups determined, for example, if a textbook employed appropriate levels of vocabulary and analysis for its readers. Judging a history text’s suitability also included deciding if its historical interpretation would become, in effect, the state’s official view of its history. State-authorized books set the standard for what students would learn about many controversial subjects. Usually objections to schoolbooks came from conservatives who discerned a liberal or radical bias.

In the 1970s, decisions about Mississippi history textbooks emphasized their treatment of the Civil War, Reconstruction, race and sometimes, as in other states, communism, American presidents, the nation’s capitalist economic system, religion and evolution, and patriotism. Concerns over black history and race relations dominated; the Rating Committee, basing their evaluations largely on their own opinions and experiences, accepted or rejected a textbook based on its members’ approach to racial issues. When Loewen and Sallis routinely sought acceptance of their textbook for assignment in the state’s schools, traditionalists opposed it. As a result, the teachers on the Rating Committee for Mississippi history books rejected the Loewen and Sallis book, and the members of the State Textbook Purchasing Board affirmed the decision. The state authorities refused to approve the revisionist Conflict and Change that brought blacks fully into the state’s history. After the official rejection, Loewen and Sallis challenged the decision in court.

Along with a dozen other plaintiffs who included supportive public school district officials, representatives of Catholic schools, and parents of affected students, lawyers for Loewen and Sallis initiated in the U.S. District Court in Greenville a case (chapter 8) against the state authorities. Their federal lawsuit, entitled Loewen v. Turnipseed (the latter after John Turnipseed, a member of the Rating Committee), sought to force the State Textbook Purchasing Board to approve Conflict and Change. Melvyn Leventhal of the Jackson office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund (LDF) filed the suit, and, after Leventhal moved from Mississippi, Frank Parker of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Jackson office continued the lawsuit to trial. The lawyers for Loewen and Sallis pursued a protracted effort to gain the book’s acceptance. For four years the two sides filed motions, replied to written interrogatories, took oral depositions, received sworn testimony, and engaged in pretrial conferences and negotiations. The plaintiffs encountered myriad delays.

Loewen v. Turnipseed finally came to trial (chapter 9) near Labor Day in 1979. After four days of testimony and arguments, Judge Orma R. Smith took the case under advisement. Seven months later, on April 2, 1980, he ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state officials to put Conflict and Change on their list of approved textbooks.

The victory in federal court marked significant progress (chapter 10) for Mississippi education and for the civil rights movement. School districts would have access to a textbook that included African Americans fully in the state’s history. By also telling the history of other neglected groups such as women and workers, Loewen and Sallis presented a far broader conception of their own state’s history than the state had ever known; they offered a view that dramatically diverged from what the state’s students, black and white, had always learned. Coming after the civil rights movement had overturned the Mississippi way of life, Conflict and Change sought to instill in a school textbook the social changes brought by the freedom struggle.

In the early 1970s when Loewen and Sallis undertook their work on a Mississippi history textbook, they benefitted from a combination of their own backgrounds and timing. Each author had devoted his doctoral research to studying the state’s race relations, and each in his nonacademic life worked for equal rights. More important, in addition to the cycles in textbook adoption, Conflict and Change grew out of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Advances attained in the 1960s made their integrated effort possible and created, they hoped, a more hospitable environment for their pathbreaking book.

While Conflict and Change came partly as a result of the black freedom struggle, it also sparked a conflict that anticipated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In effect, the controversy over the ninth-grade history book bridged two major upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century: it grew out of the civil rights movement and foreshadowed the emerging culture wars. Cultural conflicts over textbooks had particular intensity not just because of the money involved in the growing textbook market but also because the issues involved what values the nation’s schools and textbooks would pass on to the children of the next generation. The sides fought over how the American culture would perpetuate itself. Defending America’s identity as a democratic, capitalist, Christian country gained power in a time of national uncertainty and fear. In the Depression challenges to Harold Rugg’s social studies textbooks had, for example, focused on his textbooks’ treatment of the New Deal and capitalism. Later during the Cold War textbook fights commonly involved discussions of communism. Intractable clashes over religion and evolution had also perennially affected textbooks. Beginning in the 1960s, Texans Mel and Norma Gabler attacked textbooks that undermined conservative Christian values by promoting moral relativism and secular humanism. A battle contemporaneous with Conflict and Change erupted in Kanawha County, West Virginia, over diversity but even more in defense of Christian values.¹²

For history books in the twentieth century the debates repeatedly centered on the increasing inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities and what diversity meant for national identity and patriotism. Critics of new textbooks argued that an emphasis on America’s historical pluralism would necessarily focus attention on racism and prejudice and, as a result, lessen students’ respect for and devotion to their country. Conservatives feared diversity would cause patriotism and loyalty to decline. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the solution for American history texts involved compromises that included in the books mere token representatives of minorities but without disrupting or threatening the celebratory, patriotic view of the nation’s history.

After the culturally disruptive sixties challenged Americans’ basic values and the fall of communism raised questions of national purpose, the culture wars, according to one historian, were fights over how the nation’s history was narrated … and over whether the purpose of America history was to make Americans proud of the nation’s glorious past or to encourage citizens to reflect on its moral failures. In 1994 a major controversy over National History Standards focused attention on American history textbooks and teaching. In the uproar, according to another scholar, the wars increasingly connoted battles about race, ethnicity, and patriotism.¹³

Years before the fight over National History Standards, the civil rights movement had challenged white Mississippians’ vaunted southern way of life that rested on white supremacy and white control. Just as uncertainty about national identity led to the national controversies in the 1990s, unexpected changes in Mississippi during the civil rights movement meant state history textbooks suffered from similar, more parochial perils if they deviated from the established positive story of progress and if they did not support the entrenched interests’ sense of their own unique collective character. Conflict and Change continued the movement’s assault on the supposedly fixed identity of white Mississippians who had always dominated the state and its official culture. In the wake of the civil rights movement, the authors presented challenging ideas about who was a Mississippian, what it meant to be a Mississippian, and who and what should be in Mississippi history. By revealing the lack of consensus in the state’s past, Conflict and Change prompted students to consider the state’s past errors, and it questioned the standard all-white narrative. Threatened whites, who had by 1974 already lost much of their cultural and political authority, wanted to protect and preserve their place in the state’s history books. Fighting a ninth-grade textbook constituted one way to resist change.

CHAPTER TWO

Textbooks

Their History, Role, and Importance

With an attack in 1960 on some schoolbooks as subversive, un-American, [and] advocating integration of the races through communist propaganda, the Mississippi chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution ignited a controversy. The Mississippi Education Association’s response defended the books and criticized investigations of our textbooks made by irresponsible parties. The teachers’ organization also lauded the state’s methods for selecting textbooks as one of the nation’s best.¹ As the heated debate during the Cold War and the civil rights movement demonstrated, citizens attached great importance to the books school children studied. Periodically disagreements over textbooks roiled public life and divided white Mississippians. Controversy had erupted at the turn of the century over who would choose the books and what method they would use, and in the 1920s Governor Theodore G. Bilbo had stirred outrage over his proposal for the state to publish its own schoolbooks. The Great Depression had caused great concern over the costs of books and disagreement over the state’s provision of free textbooks. Later, as the 1960 episode proved, the Cold War and the civil rights movement provoked fears of subversive textbook contents. Such controversies could only occur, of course, after the state provided for public education.

Mississippi’s Reconstruction Constitution of 1869 created the state’s first public education system. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had lacked any statewide public school system because a small, dispersed population made public schools impractical and the wealthy slaveholding elite had little interest in paying taxes to finance public schools for poor whites. Political rivalries and general indifference also presented obstacles to antebellum education. When the Reconstruction schools began operation in 1871, the legislature authorized each local school board to prescribe a uniform series of text books. Concerned about dishonesty and chicanery, the legislature required that no member of the board could act as agent for any author, publisher or bookseller nor could a director accept any gift, emolument or reward for influencing the selection of books. The state mandated that schools provide books to students at cost. After the removal of the Reconstruction government and the restoration of local white rule, the legislature reestablished a free statewide public school system. Although control over school textbooks went in 1873 to each county superintendent, two years later under a new law teachers assumed the responsibility for selecting books to be used for five years. To combat malfeasance in choosing schoolbooks, the prohibition against a superintendent’s acting on behalf of any book persisted and extended also to teachers.²

The creation of the state’s public schools reflected broader national changes. In the nineteenth century, a dramatic growth in public education produced a corresponding increase in textbook demand, and more publishers entered the business. Before the Civil War small, scattered schools lacked the enrollments to support a national textbook industry, and a competitive national market in schoolbooks did not develop. Along with various primers, students in the antebellum era frequently used Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and the McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers; by the end of the nineteenth century, Webster and McGuffey each had sold a million copies. After the Civil War, with westward expansion and immigration from Europe, the nation grew, and public school enrollments soared. The increasing demand for schoolbooks spurred the growth of textbook publishing, and many companies began to engage in cutthroat competition in the individual state markets. Publishers and their representatives, for example, commonly bribed local and state school officials to influence their book purchases, and they offered discounts to appeal to the buyers. They also exchanged free copies of their books for their competitors’ books because they hoped for later purchases.³

To curb uncontrolled corruption and protect profitability, publishers in the early 1870s created the Publishers’ Board of Trade. When their reform efforts failed, the board dissolved in 1876. Keen, unscrupulous competition resumed, for example, nearly eighty publishers bid to sell schoolbooks to Kansas. Recalling the tactics, one publisher admitted, Nothing short of manslaughter was excluded. To guarantee profits eighteen leading publishers in 1884 formed the School Book Publishers’ Association, but it too failed to cleanse and rationalize the business. As a last resort in 1890, several major publishers formed a book trust, the American Book Company (ABC). It soon sought to ensure its dominance by buying a dozen smaller firms and becoming the world’s largest producer of textbooks. Unethical business practices continued. To win book contracts, publishers’ field agents continually cultivated friends in public schools, bribed school officials, secured teaching positions for supporters, installed friends on school boards, and engaged in other improper behavior. As a result, an Oregon committee of forty-one school officials formed to choose schoolbooks just happened to select 98 percent of the new books from the ABC list. In another state most county superintendents of education also worked as book salesmen for the ABC. Though payments often amounted only to one hundred dollars, a school superintendent could receive a paid vacation courtesy of a publisher. The trust even used its power to unload obsolete old books on unsophisticated frontier districts. One commentator claimed the ABC grasp[ed] the lion’s share by means fair and foul. Occasional exposures of bribes and illegal deals discredited the ABC and allowed smaller publishers to stay temporarily in business.⁴

Many observers recognized the evils of the textbook business. In 1896, according to the Atlantic Monthly, one school superintendent observed, As now conducted, the school-book business is a portentous evil. The next year George A. Gates, the president of Iowa College (later Grinnell) told the Iowa Teachers’ Association that the book trust’s evils included bribery, threats to employment, electoral support for candidates, and undue influence of local newspapers. It had, said Gates, used all the wiles of the devil. With muckraking journalist Henry Demerest Lloyd, he published his charges in a Christian socialist newspaper, and the ABC responded with a lawsuit. Though it never went to trial, the intimidating response demonstrated the trust’s confidence in its position. With the trust controlling about 90 percent of the textbook business, one educator declared, Even the notorious Standard Oil Company has no such monopoly as this. The book trust’s extensive power meant that it effectively determined what schools taught and what students learned. A four-hundred-page ABC sociology book, for example, mentioned monopolies, combinations, and trusts three times, and in each case excused or defended them. While ABC sold many fine textbooks, it also, according to Gates, peddled some of the most disgraceful trash.⁵

In Mississippi the Constitution of 1890 continued the uniform system of free public schools and required racial segregation, but it also responded to the industry’s cutthroat tactics and to attempts to restrict competition by one dominant company. Anticipating the American Book Company’s control of the nation’s textbook market, Mississippi reformed its method for choosing schoolbooks. It still called for uniform textbooks in a district, but, in a move toward centralization, a committee, not all made up exclusively of teachers, would make the decisions. The local school board would name five teachers of recognized ability, and the superintendent would appoint two more. The committee could select only one book per subject in each grade.⁶

In response to mounting concerns about graft, Mississippi lawmakers in 1904 enacted a drastic reform. A comprehensive law curtailed the number of people involved in deciding which books students would use. Instead of hundreds of individuals on scores of local committees, the new plan called for one commission for the entire state. The governor appointed eight educators of known character and ability, with no more than one coming from each congressional district; the state superintendent of education served as an ex officio member. Repeatedly and explicitly, the legislators revealed their fears of malfeasance and their intent to purify the process. One of the law’s lengthy sections directed that each commissioner swear to have no interest, direct or indirect, in any contract that may be made hereunder; that he will receive no personal benefit of profit there from; that he is not in any manner interested in any books or publishing concern publishing any books of the kind contemplated for use in the public schools of this state or any state. In providing for punishment of a fine up to $1,000 and two years in prison, the law restated and extended the prohibited conflicts of interest: It shall be clearly unlawful for any member of the school books commission during the term of his appointment to office to accept or receive from any school book company, firm, corporation, or agent, any employment, retainer, compensation, reward, emolument, gift, or donation, directly or indirectly. The reform also required a commissioner to abstain from voting if "any person related within the third degree by blood or marriage to any member of the school book commission, or is associated in any business or partnership with any member of said commission, shall be employed in good faith by any school book company, firm, corporation or agent in connection with the adoption of school books in this state."⁷

The 1904 reform also specified how the commission operated. To avoid inside deals, the commission advertised for sealed bids, required a deposit from every bidder, and opened the bids in an executive session. By law the commission notified the chosen publishers by registered mail. The recipient of a contract had to post a $10,000 bond, and it had to maintain in a state warehouse sufficient copies of the book. Except for foreign language course books, the legislation required that every book had to be in English and mandated that no book could contain anything of a partisan or sectarian character. Though the law expected the commissioners to use their discretion and judgment, it specifically directed them to consider the book’s physical characteristics such as binding and durability, the appropriateness of the content, and the price that had to equal the lowest price offered to any other state. The commission had the authority to reject all bids and reopen the search. To prevent fraud after letting a contract, the law stipulated that