Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves might have found a soulmate for his long-pursued quest to ensure the teaching of only positive American history.
During a recent interview by the hosts on Fox News’ morning show, President Donald Trump was explaining his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and instead send federal education funds directly to the states.
The former president was interrupted by one of the hosts, Brian Kilmeade, who expressed concern that sending money directly to the states could allow liberal cities and states to “just decide we are going to get rid of that history. We have a new history. This is America built off the backs of slaves on stolen land, and that curriculum comes in.”
“Then we don’t send them money,” Trump boldly proclaimed.
This sentiment might sound familiar to some in Mississippi. Nearly every year since taking the office of governor in 2020, Reeves has proposed as part of his budget spending $5 million to create the Patriotic Education Fund.
“No American child should be taught that the United States is an inherently evil nation that solely acts in its own self-interest,” Reeves wrote in his latest budget proposal. “Unfortunately, that worldview is being taught by radical activists in too many schools across our country, and that’s why Mississippi must take proactive steps to ensure this warped ideology does not infiltrate our state’s schools.”
The Legislature has for years now rejected funding the governor’s Patriotic Education Fund, but Reeves keeps swinging for it.
It is insulting to think Americans cannot learn about the nation’s brutal past treatment of Black Americans, Native Americans and many other groups and still love America. After all, what makes America special is its ideas, its continuing efforts to strive for equality and fairness and, yes, its educational transparency that allows for the true history of our nation to be taught. For many, the heart of America is that we always strive to be better, and part of doing that is understanding what we have done wrong and trying not to repeat those wrongs.
As Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the House minority leader, said recently in a television interview, “That history is history. You don’t have to White-wash it. You don’t have to Black-wash it. You just tell the truth.”
But Mississippi has a long history of whitewashing history.
For decades, Mississippi students learned a sanitized version of slavery and later a rose-colored version of the state’s violent segregationist past.
Mississippi historian Charles Eagles wrote in his book “Civil Rights, Culture Wars,” as cited in an Associated Press article, “At the behest of the white elite, the history books (taught in Mississippi schools) 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.”
In 1962, then-Gov. Ross Barnett, who had been given the authority by the Legislature to select the state’s textbooks, tabbed John K. Bettersworth’s “Your Mississippi” as a Mississippi history textbook.
“All of us ought to be against anything in our textbooks that would teach subversion or integration,” Barnett said. “Our children must be properly informed about the Southern and true American way of life.”
In the 1970s, Tougaloo College sociologist James Loewen and Millsaps College historian Charles Sallis edited a new textbook called “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” which provided a more accurate telling of Mississippi history.
Still, the then-established Textbook Commission rejected “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” opting to select the whitewashed Bettersworth book as the state’s ninth grade Mississippi history textbook. A court challenge and the ruling of a federal judge was required to change that decision. The judge ruled that the landmark “Mississippi: Conflict and Change” should be placed on an approved list of textbooks for the state.
That opened the floodgates to more truthful textbooks for Mississippi students. Many of these students, despite learning a more accurate depiction of the state’s and nation’s faults and shortcomings, still grew up to love America and, yes, Mississippi.
The story of Sallis and Loewen and their textbook is important in today’s climate because, after all, there is that old saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Tate Reeves and Donald Trump sure do not seem to be heeding those words.
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