When America fails to teach society about its history, you
get the Republican Party and its attitudes
toward the Civil War. This country is awfully
ignorant when it comes to American history
because that history is not taught correctly,
truthfully or with any context or sensitivity.
And this is how Republican presidential
candidates can exploit a public lack of
knowledge and just say whatever they want and
proclaim things that never happened.
Donald
Trump — the former president who aspires
to retake the White House and stay there
forever — recently said the Civil War could
have been negotiated and President Abraham
Lincoln should have done more to stop it.
“So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I
think could have been negotiated, to be honest
with you,” Trump said at an Iowa campaign
stop. “I think you could have negotiated that.
All the people died. So many people died.”
Trump, regarded by absolutely no one as a
student of history, signed legislation in 2017
honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick
Douglass, the formerly enslaved statesman and
abolitionist. “Frederick Douglass is an
example of somebody who’s done an amazing job
and is getting recognized more and more, I
notice,” Trump said.
And in a recent town hall rally in New
Hampshire, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki
Haley failed to mention slavery as the cause
of the Civil War. “Yeah, I mean, I think the
cause of the Civil War was basically how
government was going to run – the freedoms and
what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley
said.
And back in 2010, Haley told the Sons
of Confederate Veterans that the Civil War was “tradition
versus change,” and said states have a constitutional
right to secede — which is not true.
A knowledge of history is important. The Civil War was
fought over slavery, which the Southern states
wanted to maintain and therefore seceded from
the Union. Some would have you believe the war
between the states was all about states’
rights and economics, which only makes sense
if you believe states had a right to kidnap,
brutalize, rape and own Black people and
profit from their free forced labor.
South Carolina was the first state to
secede from the Union and started the Civil
War. In its Declaration
of Secession, the Palmetto State gave as its reason
for leaving “an increasing hostility on the
part of the non-slaveholding States to the
institution of slavery.” The declaration also
said the Northern states “have denounced as
sinful the institution of slavery…. They have
encouraged and assisted thousands of our
slaves to leave their homes; and those who
remain, have been incited by emissaries, books
and pictures to servile insurrection.”
A potent symbol of slavery, the
confederacy and white supremacy is the
confederate flag. The confederate flag first
flew at the South Carolina Capitol in 1962 to
commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the
start of the Civil War, and in opposition to
civil rights. Black folks had demanded the
removal of the flag for years.
As governor of South Carolina, Haley
removed the confederate flag from the state
capitol in Columbia in 2015, but only after
the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof
murdered eight Black people at Mother
Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Black activist Bree
Newsome Bass took matters into her own hands,
climbing the flagpole and tearing down the
flag, in any case.
One of the founders of Mother Emanuel was
Denmark
Vesey, who had led a thwarted slave revolt in
Charleston in 1822 and was executed. The
church was burned
to the ground because of its affiliation with
Vesey.
According to Haley, the confederate flag
stood for “service, sacrifice and
heritage” until Roof “hijacked” it. Haley is
also a woman of Indian descent whose father
taught at Voorhees College, an HBCU, and who attended a white “segregation academy” — a private school formed in the
1960s to resist integration and keep out Black
children.
Haley is not a white
woman, the confederate flag never stood for
anything good, and the Civil War was all about
whether white Southerners could continue to
chain Black people up in their backyards. Some
people may think it doesn’t matter. But don’t
let them fool you, because history matters.
They say that history is told from the
standpoint of the victors, and those who don’t
remember history are doomed to repeat it.
As the Gullah-Geechee people say, If oonuh ent kno weh
oonuh dah gwine, oonuh should kno weh oonuh
come f’um. Translation: “If you don’t know
where you’re going, you should know where you
come from. And as the Akan (Ghana) proverb says, Se wo were fi na
wosankofa a yenkyi, which means “it is not taboo to go
back and fetch what you forgot.” History tells
the narrative, giving us an understanding of
what happened in the past to help us make
sense of the present and solve the many
problems we face.
If you think history is not important,
look no further than the culture war taking
place in America, the book bans and memory
laws that criminalize the teaching or reading
of Black history in schools. Right-wing
textbooks describe slavery as “Black immigration.” In Florida, they are teaching
students that
Black people benefited from slavery. White supremacist groups such as Moms
for Liberty are leading the charge to plunge
our children into ignorance of history, but
this is nothing new.
Over a century ago, the pro-confederate
groups who were responsible for building
confederate statues across the South reshaped
textbooks, emphasizing the Lost
Cause and glorifying a white supremacist
view of slavery and Reconstruction. United
Daughters of the Confederacy made pro-confederate and pro-KKK
propaganda a part of the textbooks. In the
last century, textbooks across the South
followed a white-friendly narrative that
sidelined Black people, depicted them as happy
with their second-class status, downplayed
slavery, and presented enslaved Black people
as indentured servants. “It should be noted
that slavery was the earliest form of social
security in the United States,” read a 1961 Alabama
history textbook.
The impact of this indoctrination and
miseducation is clear. A Southern
Poverty Law Center study found that schools are not
teaching students about slavery, and students
have no clue about the impact of the
institution on America and race relations.
Only 8% of high school seniors knew slavery
was the main cause of the Civil War. Fewer
than half knew that slavery was legal in all
the colonies before the American Revolution,
and most did not know that a constitutional
amendment ended slavery.
And the current attacks on Black history will only make
students more ignorant of their history. There
is much at stake. Hiding the crimes of history
by whitewashing the textbooks is an attempt to
silence calls for reparations and restorative
justice. If slavery did not exist — if the
books tell us nothing wrong was done — then
they will have you believe there is nothing or
no one to pay. And the Civil War was about
Southern heritage or taxes or something like
that.
This commentary is also posted on TheGrio.com