James Loewen: A Civilrights.org Book Club Interview
When Civilrights.org started the book club one year ago we did not know that so many writers would submit their books for consideration. A number of authors have made our jobs easier – and readers choices more plentiful – by sending us books we might never have known about otherwise. James Loewen, author, scholar, and professor, was one of the first authors to request inclusion in the book club. However, we had already selected his book. Because he was so gracious and enthusiastic, Mr. Loewen was the obvious choice for our inaugural interview of the series. His book, "Sundown Towns," deals with one of our most pernicious civil rights violations – housing discrimination and residential segregation. It’s a provocative book that reveals a piece of our nation’s history too long obscured.
Civilrights.org: So how did you find out that you were selected for the Civilrights.org book club? What were your thoughts when you found out?
James Loewen: I have no idea how I found out....My reaction was, "I’m delighted." Because the civil rights community, if you will, is one of the most important audiences for "Sundown Towns." And the reason for this is, first of all, the civil rights community might do something about it, and second of all, to my surprise the civil rights community on the whole doesn’t know about sundown towns. I have asked at least eight civil rights lawyers, for instance, if they knew that at least one town in the south – and perhaps as many as four or five or six whole counties – threw out their black population in response to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. And they had utterly no idea that that had happened. Now, that’s a response to Brown that’s a whole lot more hostile than Prince Edward County, Virginia, which merely closed all its schools. You know they got rid of the whole black population. Is that actionable? I would think so. I would think it’s still actionable.
Another reason I want to reach the civil rights community is that I think the court, particularly the Supreme Court, did not know about – put it this way, did not take judicial notice of – the sundown suburbs of Detroit when it decided Bradley v. Milliken. And if it had known about them it could not have claimed, as the key justice, I think Potter Stewart it was, in his deciding opinion claimed that the suburbs were all-white for "unknown and perhaps unknowable reasons." Well, the suburbs were all white for sundown policies, and this is clear after you read my book. So maybe there is some way to go after that decision and get it re-adjudicated. Certainly, that decision has left Detroit and the Detroit metropolitan area screwed to this day. And Detroit is the most segregated metropolitan area, it has the most downtown abandonment, and it had until the last five years the most sundown towns. Many of them have just recently broken and black folks can now live safely in at least three of the five Grosse Points, for instance, and in Dearborn, and in some of the others. But the damage has been done over the last several decades.
CR.org: Looking at your books, "Lies Across America," "Lies My Teacher Told Me," and "The Truth about Columbus" it is safe to say that you have a very sharp focus on telling the truth about American history. What drives you to write these kinds of books?
JL: My interest in history particularly grew from my first fulltime teaching job, which was at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, next to Jackson, Mississippi. 1968-1969 was my first year teaching there full-time. I was assigned to teach the courses I expected to be teaching in sociology, but I also was assigned to teach a section of the freshman social science seminar. This was a class invented by the history department and required of all first-year students. And it introduced them to – you know the drill – sociology, anthro, poly sci, econ, psych, in the context of African American history. Made sense; 99 percent of our students being African American.
Now that’s the same chronology as American history, so second semester begins right after the civil war with, of course, Reconstruction. Second semester began. I had a new seminar, a new group of students. I didn’t want to do all the talking that first day of class, so I asked them, “Okay, what is Reconstruction, what happened then?”
And I will always remember this event. It was an “ah-ha” experience, or perhaps better an “oh no” experience. Sixteen out of seventeen of them said “that was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the southern states but they were too soon out of slavery, so they screwed up, so white folks had to take control again.”
I sat there stunned. There are of course at least three direct misstatements of fact – I would call them lies – in that sentence. Blacks never took over the governments of the southern states. All of the southern states had white governors throughout the period; all but one had white legislative majorities. Second, the Reconstruction governments did not screw up. Mississippi, in particular, had probably the best government during Reconstruction than it had at any later point in the 19th century. Throughout the south, the Reconstruction governments wrote better state constitutions than any constitution the southern states have ever had, including those that they labor under today, and so on.
And so therefore, white folks didn’t take control to end it. Instead a certain group of whites took control at the end of Reconstruction: white racist Democrats using KKK tactics. In fact, it was of course the original Ku Klux Klan.
So I thought, "What must it do to you to believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history they screwed up?" Can’t be good for you. How could you come to believe this? I mean, if it’s true that’s another matter, you have to deal with it; you have to come to terms with it, figure out why this happened. But it did not happen. This is what we in sociology call BS or “bad sociology.”
And so I proceeded to try to get historians in central Mississippi to write a better textbook, because I visited black schools, with black teachers, and all black students – this was just before massive school desegregation in the Deep South – and I watched them teaching white supremacist history, because they were just teaching the book, particularly in, of course, Mississippi history, which was required in 5th grade and again in 9th grade.
I couldn’t get anybody else to write it. So finally after a year and a half I got a grant. I got together some students and faculty at Tugaloo, and some students and faculty at Millsaps College, the nearby white college, and together we wrote a new history of Missisippi. We had to sue the state to get it adopted. The lawsuit is called Loewen et al v. Turnipseed et al. But we did win.
But that whole escapade proved to me that history can be a weapon; that it can be used against you and that it had been used against my students.
By the way, the civil rights community might be interested to know, that our initial civil rights attorney associated with us from the beginning was Mel Leventhal, who was then the husband of Alice Walker and famous in his own right as the attorney who won Alexander v. Holmes, the case that desegregated the Deep South. And then after he moved to New York, our new attorney was Frank Parker, who became very famous as probably the number one voting rights lawyer in the United States before his death....
Read entire article at http://www.civilrights.org
Civilrights.org: So how did you find out that you were selected for the Civilrights.org book club? What were your thoughts when you found out?
James Loewen: I have no idea how I found out....My reaction was, "I’m delighted." Because the civil rights community, if you will, is one of the most important audiences for "Sundown Towns." And the reason for this is, first of all, the civil rights community might do something about it, and second of all, to my surprise the civil rights community on the whole doesn’t know about sundown towns. I have asked at least eight civil rights lawyers, for instance, if they knew that at least one town in the south – and perhaps as many as four or five or six whole counties – threw out their black population in response to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. And they had utterly no idea that that had happened. Now, that’s a response to Brown that’s a whole lot more hostile than Prince Edward County, Virginia, which merely closed all its schools. You know they got rid of the whole black population. Is that actionable? I would think so. I would think it’s still actionable.
Another reason I want to reach the civil rights community is that I think the court, particularly the Supreme Court, did not know about – put it this way, did not take judicial notice of – the sundown suburbs of Detroit when it decided Bradley v. Milliken. And if it had known about them it could not have claimed, as the key justice, I think Potter Stewart it was, in his deciding opinion claimed that the suburbs were all-white for "unknown and perhaps unknowable reasons." Well, the suburbs were all white for sundown policies, and this is clear after you read my book. So maybe there is some way to go after that decision and get it re-adjudicated. Certainly, that decision has left Detroit and the Detroit metropolitan area screwed to this day. And Detroit is the most segregated metropolitan area, it has the most downtown abandonment, and it had until the last five years the most sundown towns. Many of them have just recently broken and black folks can now live safely in at least three of the five Grosse Points, for instance, and in Dearborn, and in some of the others. But the damage has been done over the last several decades.
CR.org: Looking at your books, "Lies Across America," "Lies My Teacher Told Me," and "The Truth about Columbus" it is safe to say that you have a very sharp focus on telling the truth about American history. What drives you to write these kinds of books?
JL: My interest in history particularly grew from my first fulltime teaching job, which was at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, next to Jackson, Mississippi. 1968-1969 was my first year teaching there full-time. I was assigned to teach the courses I expected to be teaching in sociology, but I also was assigned to teach a section of the freshman social science seminar. This was a class invented by the history department and required of all first-year students. And it introduced them to – you know the drill – sociology, anthro, poly sci, econ, psych, in the context of African American history. Made sense; 99 percent of our students being African American.
Now that’s the same chronology as American history, so second semester begins right after the civil war with, of course, Reconstruction. Second semester began. I had a new seminar, a new group of students. I didn’t want to do all the talking that first day of class, so I asked them, “Okay, what is Reconstruction, what happened then?”
And I will always remember this event. It was an “ah-ha” experience, or perhaps better an “oh no” experience. Sixteen out of seventeen of them said “that was the period right after the Civil War when blacks took over the government of the southern states but they were too soon out of slavery, so they screwed up, so white folks had to take control again.”
I sat there stunned. There are of course at least three direct misstatements of fact – I would call them lies – in that sentence. Blacks never took over the governments of the southern states. All of the southern states had white governors throughout the period; all but one had white legislative majorities. Second, the Reconstruction governments did not screw up. Mississippi, in particular, had probably the best government during Reconstruction than it had at any later point in the 19th century. Throughout the south, the Reconstruction governments wrote better state constitutions than any constitution the southern states have ever had, including those that they labor under today, and so on.
And so therefore, white folks didn’t take control to end it. Instead a certain group of whites took control at the end of Reconstruction: white racist Democrats using KKK tactics. In fact, it was of course the original Ku Klux Klan.
So I thought, "What must it do to you to believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history they screwed up?" Can’t be good for you. How could you come to believe this? I mean, if it’s true that’s another matter, you have to deal with it; you have to come to terms with it, figure out why this happened. But it did not happen. This is what we in sociology call BS or “bad sociology.”
And so I proceeded to try to get historians in central Mississippi to write a better textbook, because I visited black schools, with black teachers, and all black students – this was just before massive school desegregation in the Deep South – and I watched them teaching white supremacist history, because they were just teaching the book, particularly in, of course, Mississippi history, which was required in 5th grade and again in 9th grade.
I couldn’t get anybody else to write it. So finally after a year and a half I got a grant. I got together some students and faculty at Tugaloo, and some students and faculty at Millsaps College, the nearby white college, and together we wrote a new history of Missisippi. We had to sue the state to get it adopted. The lawsuit is called Loewen et al v. Turnipseed et al. But we did win.
But that whole escapade proved to me that history can be a weapon; that it can be used against you and that it had been used against my students.
By the way, the civil rights community might be interested to know, that our initial civil rights attorney associated with us from the beginning was Mel Leventhal, who was then the husband of Alice Walker and famous in his own right as the attorney who won Alexander v. Holmes, the case that desegregated the Deep South. And then after he moved to New York, our new attorney was Frank Parker, who became very famous as probably the number one voting rights lawyer in the United States before his death....