Remember the revisionist history that members of the Texas State Board of Education were pushing in the debate over new social studies curriculum standards? This was especially evident in efforts by some board members to whitewash American history when it came to race and civil rights issues. At one point board member Don McLeroy even suggested that women and minorities should thank men and white people for securing their civil and equal rights — as if the decades of struggle to win those rights were just a footnote in history.
Now Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is trying to revise the racist history of White Citizens Councils in the South during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Here’s Barbour talking about his hometown of Yazoo City, Miss.:
“You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
Hmmm… Well, here’s what Prof. Robert Mickey of the University of Michigan says about that ridiculous bit of historical revisionism:
“This was an organization that spread very quickly across the South, directly in response to Brown v. Board of Education. Usually they were against violence because of its harm to economic development; firms wouldn’t want to relocate to places that had a lot of violence. So their tools of slowing down the South’s democratization was to use economic intimidation. … They intimidated black parents from signing petitions demanding that school districts be desegregated, sometimes by printing the signatories in local newspapers, which oftentimes led to the signatures being recanted because the parents understood and feared the consequences of being publicly outed like that. So Barbour’s right — on one hand, they often helped out on the Klan, and a lot of times they were interested in deterring white mob violence. But Northerners are right that it’s like the Klan.”
In the same article, Joseph Crespino, an associate professor of history at Emory University, also weighs in on Barbour’s argument:
“One of the things the Citizen Council would do is carry out economic harassment — sometimes physical intimidation — against local blacks. There was this well-known incident in Yazoo City in the 1950s where a handful of black parents tried to file a lawsuit against a local public school. They lost their jobs because they filed a lawsuit and they participated in the local civil rights movement. So it’s well-documented that the kind of harassment that blacks faced when they tried to desegregate the schools there in Yazoo City.”
Talking Points Memo has more about the racists Barbour is praising. TPM provides images of a Council newspaper from 1956 in Jackson, Miss., about 40 miles from Yazoo City:
The paper includes such headlines as: “Christian Love And Segregation”; “Council Movement Spreads As Nation Reacts to Danger”; “Negroes Taking Over”; “Baptists Rap Mixing” (note: In 1950’s American English, “rap” in this context meant to harshly criticize, similar to “blast” in a headline now); “Rape In Germany,” warning of alleged rapes of German women by African-American soldiers; “Lady Veteran Raps Hospital Mixology”; and “Enemy Made Large Gains In 1955.”
The Texas Freedom Network fought hard to stop this kind of historical revision by the State Board of Education during the social studies curriculum debate. And we’ll continue fighting that battle for as long as it takes. Students should learn the facts, not whitewashed nonsense backed up by little more than the historical revisionism of politicians with an agenda to promote.