Politics Dictating What Teachers Can Say About Racism is Dangerous

The reactionary nostalgia evoked by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has taken on a new dimension: a push to censor what gets taught in America’s history classrooms. New laws in red states — and even some purple states — aim to ban the teaching of critical race theory, and one district in Tennessee has even banned a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.

These moves are a throwback to the right wing’s idea of an educational golden age — the period before the civil rights movement transformed American education. That period reminds us that such political actions can have a chilling effect on teachers’ willingness to teach about race and racism. And a lack of education on these topics can have devastating consequences, something that was on display at the University of Georgia in 1961.

What did education look like on the White side of the color line in the Jim Crow South?

As one student wrote 30 years after finishing his segregated education in Georgia, from elementary school through high school, “there was not a single instance — not one — in which any of the teachers initiated, even allowed a discussion about racism.” Instead, teachers and textbooks presented U.S. history as the triumph of democracy. Any serious engagement with slavery, Jim Crow or even the Black experience got excluded from what historian Nathan Huggins has termed America’s “master narrative.”

But without these discussions, White students never bothered to ask themselves why their towns had separate Black and White water fountains, waiting rooms, bus stations and more. Instead, they saw bigotry, in the words of one of those students decades later, as “just the way things were, and would always be.”

This lack of knowledge about Jim Crow policies, racism and the South’s past left children and young adults with skewed perceptions. Nowhere was this clearer than in 35 essays written by White undergraduates at UGA less than a week after a segregationist riot erupted Jan. 11, 1961, outside the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students to desegregate the university and the first to live on campus. These essays came from a surprising place: A calculus professor, who was one of the faculty members who belatedly stood up to the campus’s belligerent segregationists after witnessing their racist violence, asked his students to reflect on the riot and UGA’s desegregation crisis.