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Brown-ing the American Textbook: History, Psychology, and the Origins of Modern Multiculturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jonathan Zimmerman
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In June 1944, a delegation of African-American leaders met with New York City school officials to discuss a central focus of black concern: history textbooks. That delegation reflected a broad spectrum of metropolitan Black opinion: Chaired by the radical city councilman Benjamin J. Davis, it included the publisher of the Amsterdam News—New York's major Black newspaper—as well as the bishop of the African Orthodox Church. In a joint statement, the delegates praised public schools' recent efforts to promote “intercultural education”—and to reduce “prejudice”—via drama, music, and art. Yet if history texts continued to spread lies about the past, Blacks insisted, all of these other programs would come to naught. One book described slaves as “happy”; another applauded the Ku Klux Klan for keeping “foolish Negroes” out of government. “Such passages… could well have come from the mouths of the fascist enemies of our nation,” the Black delegation warned. Even as America fought “Nazi doctrine” overseas, African Americans maintained, the country needed to purge this philosophy from history books at home.

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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 46 - 69
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Copyright © 2004 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 “Statement of Principle” (ms, 15 June 1944), frames 265–66; press release by Davis, Benjamin J. Jr., 15 June 1944, frame 264, both in reel 22, Part 16B, Papers of the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994).Google Scholar

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8 Recently, historians have emphasized the critical role of World War II in galvanizing the black quest for civil rights. Indeed, the entire lens of civil-rights scholarship has shifted backwards 20 years, from the better-known “1960s generation” to their forebears in the 1940s. See, e.g., Lawson, Steven F. Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 1–28; Takaki, Double Victory, 22–57; Fairclough, Adam Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2001 (New York: Viking, 2001), 181–226.Google Scholar

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10 To be sure, a concern for racial identity marked textbook campaigns by Carter G. Woodson—the so-called “Father of Negro History”—in the 1920s and 1930s. Woodson focused his interwar efforts mainly upon segregated black schools in the South, where he promoted special history texts (including his own monographs) for “Negro History” elective courses. After World War II and the defeat of fascism, however, Woodson declared a new purpose for Negro History: to teach “brotherhood” across every race, not simply pride within his own. If whites learned of the black contribution to national and world civilization, Woodson wrote hopefully, they would turn a deaf ear to bigots—“American Nazis,” in Woodson's rich phrase—who still despised African-Americans. From the acquisition of his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1912 to his death in 1950, meanwhile, Woodson also insisted that historical scholarship and instruction should seek shared, objective accounts of the past. After Brown, by contrast, textbook critics often privileged the psychological effect of history over its accuracy and objectivity. Many contemporary multiculturalists reject the entire notion of an “objective” history, presuming that “all knowledge reflects the power and social relationships within society,” as James A. Banks has written. Zimmerman, Jonathan Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 42–47; Woodson, Carter G. “‘Negro History Week’ Stresses Race's Part in Civilization,” New South 1 (Jan. 1946): 4; Banks, James A. “The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education,” in Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action, ed. Banks, James A. (New York-Teachers College Press, 1996), 16.Google Scholar

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19 New York Teachers Union, Bias and Prejudice in Textbooks, 18; Boas, Franz to Campbell, Harold G. 25 May 1942, “Campbell, Harold G” folder, Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Cora M. Patton to Marian Anderson, 6 Aug. 1952, folder 2, box 3, Rich Papers.Google Scholar

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21 “Little Black Sambo,” Washington Post, 30 Sept. 1947, folder 871, box 78–44, NAACP-DC Papers. For other white satires of the Sambo controversy—accusing blacks of “censorship” as well as “hypersensitivity”—see Moore, Everett T. “Censorship in the Name of Better Relations,” American Library Association Bulletin, July-August 1961, fiche 004.909–3, SCF; McGinley, Phyllis “Tiger, Tiger,” New Yorker 21 (26 Jan. 1946): 22.Google Scholar

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27 State Board of Education minutes, 12 Sept. 1955, p. 11, folder 5, box 33, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

28 “Our Changing Social Order” (ms, n.d. [1955]), enclosed with Dean, George C. to Talmadge, May 22 April 1955, folder 8, box 8, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

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30 Bloch, Charles J. to Peters, James S. 4 March 1959; Talmadge, May to Bloch, 5 March 1959, both in folder 12, box 30, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

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32 “Negro History in the Curriculum,” Negro History Bulletin (December 1955), fiche 003–565–2, SCF. The unidentified speaker delivered his address to the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, America's oldest and most influential black history organization. Founded in 1915 by Carter G. Woodson, the ASNLH would change its name in 1972 to the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 14, 301.Google Scholar

33 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483; Kluger, Simple Justice, 318–19, 353–56; Scott, Contempt and Pity, 229n; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 183–84.Google Scholar

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38 The term “identity” was most closely associated with psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who used it to describe the necessary process whereby individuals linked themselves to human communities—in the past as well as in the present. A close student of Black literature and history, Erikson warned that African-Americans faced an especially difficult task in this regard: Blacks “are made to feel so inexorably ‘different,’” he wrote, “that legal desegregation can only be the beginning of a long and painful inner re-identification.” Erikson understood that Blacks across the political spectrum—not just in the “Black Power” movement—needed to construct a black identity, and that each individual would do so in his or her own way. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 292; Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams, 127; Friedman, Lawrence J. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999), 261.Google Scholar

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43 Slotkin, Aaron N. “The Treatment of Minorities in Textbooks: The Issues and The Outlook,” Strengthening Democracy 41 (May 1964): 2, folder 22, box 39, Philadelphia Fellowship Commission Papers, Urban Archives, Temple University; Black, American Schoolbook, 119; National Urban League, Textbooks, Civil Rights, and the Education of the American Negro, p. 2.Google Scholar

44 National Urban League, Textbooks, Civil Rights, and the Education, p. 2; Larry Cuban, “Not ‘Whether?’ But ‘Why? and How?,’” Journal of Negro Education 36 (Fall 1967): 435. See also Thompson, “Textbooks and Racial Pressure Groups,” p. 5.Google Scholar

45 Gonzalez, Eugene to Chunn, Ellsworth 3 April 1967, folder 843, CDER; “Textbook Crisis in California,” Interracial Books for Children 4 (Winter 1972–73), pp. 1–2, 8–9, box 11 (no folder), Racism and Bias Task Force File, NCTE; Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised (New York: Vintage, 1979), 96.Google Scholar

46 “Criticism of Land of the Free,” 130, 142, 119; “New U.S. History Textbooks Putting Stress on Minorities’ Contribution to Building Nation,” New York Times, 28 April 1974, fiche 004.909–4, SCF.Google Scholar

47 King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 41. For other examples of Blacks’ continued emphasis upon textbooks as a cause—and a potential remedy—for white racism, see “On the Use of Biased Textbooks,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 3 Nov. 1962, fiche 004–909–3, SCF; “Principal Urges Teaching Negro History to All Pupils,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 29 Feb. 1968, “Schools—Philadelphia—African-American-Studies” folder, box 204, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin News Clipping Collection, Urban Archives, Temple University; Gimlin, Hoyt “American History: Reappraisal and Revision,” Editorial Research Reports 2 (5 Nov. 1969), fiche 003–560–8, SCF.Google Scholar

48 Fitzgerald, America Revised, 101. On history textbooks’ ongoing neglect of racism, see Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 137–70.Google Scholar

49 Lukas, J. Anthony “Educators Turn to a Balanced Teaching of Negroes’ Role in American History,” New York Times, 8 July 1968, fiche 003.560–6, SCF.Google Scholar

50 Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, 5th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 524–27; Janis, Juel “Textbook Revisions in the Sixties,” Teachers College Record 72 (Dec. 1970): 300, 293; Bragdon, Henry Wilkinson “Dilemmas of a Textbook Writer,” Social Education 33 (March 1969): 297; Prugh, Peter H. “The Black Past: Civil Rights Movement Spurs Interest in Role of Negroes in History,” Wall Street Journal, 17 May 1967, fiche 003.560–5, SCF.Google Scholar

51 Zimmerman, Whose America?, 126–27; Orfield, Gary “The Growth of Segregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield, Gary and Eaton, Susan (New York: New Press, 1996), 58; letter from Andrew Blunt, Times-Dispatch [Richmond, VA.], 26 Feb. 1970, accession 7690–ac, Virginius Dabney Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.Google Scholar

52 According to historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, for example, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a “shift from civil rights universalism to the Black identity movement.” In workplaces as well as schools, she argues, “The [Black] therapeutic movement, with this ethos of empowerment, has trumped the civil rights movement, with its vision of the just society.” Likewise, Todd Gitlin chronicles “the swerve from civil rights, emphasizing a universal condition and universalizable rights, to cultural separatism, emphasizing difference and distinct needs.” Both authors date this development to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, which opened the way for a profusion of identity-based challenges to the civil rights ideal. As the textbook debate shows, however, “identity politics” lay firmly inside the mainstream of 1960s liberalism—not just on its radical fringes. Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, xii, 159; Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams, 153, 128–34.Google Scholar

53 This formulation closely follows the analysis in Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberals, Christians, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 343.Google Scholar

54 Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 312.Google Scholar

55 For further explanation and evidence of this point, see Zimmerman, Whose America?, esp. 6–7, 214, 221–22.Google Scholar

56 “Ghetto Education,” Center Magazine 1 (November 1968): 51.Google Scholar