Amid the recent furor over the expulsion of two Black Democrats from the state House, Tennessee lawmakers made another shameful move: affirming acclaim for the Confederacy while disregarding the work of historians who have demonstrated that the CSA was founded to protect slavery and white supremacy.
This month's events in the state capitol, culminating in the expulsion of two House members after a raucous gun control protest, recalls Nashville's role as a center in the Black Freedom movement.
The disproportionate response of the Tennessee House's majority—the expulsion of two Black members for the violation of decorum rules during a gun control protest—echoes the efforts of the so-called "Redeemers" of the Reconstruction era to reassert white supremacy through expulsions.
"When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or our own Gov. Bill Lee and Tennessee’s legislature enact laws to prevent teaching Black history, they are defending white supremacy."
The leaders of a student movement to resist Tennessee's restrictions on course content charges that their university's faculty senate has failed to give their petition a hearing.
Incoming AHA President Thavolia Glymph discussed how the actions of Black refugees who moved behind Union lines at Fort Negley and other locations changed the meaning of the war and ensured that it would ultimately abolish slavery.
"Our students, and our society, desperately need to hear and learn the real history of this country – a history of this country that has no better telling than that history as seen through the eyes and experience of Black people."
Although the aftermath of the Tennessee "Maus" controversy involved a flood of donated copies sent to the local community and the book's return to the bestseller charts, the revival of book-banning sentiments bodes ill for the course of the nation.
The graphic memoirist says that the Tennessee controversy probably doesn't reflect any antisemitic bigotry, but a desire to find a catharsis that fixes the horror of the Holocaust instead of recognizing it as ongoing.
The stated objections to Maus – profanity, nudity, filial disrespect, violence – are impossible to separate from the fact that the book is a graphic history of the Holocaust.
"In a time of mistrust along racial lines, the initiative in Chattanooga is a model for other communities. It demonstrates that agreed-upon facts can be a precursor to recovery."
"I don’t ask the students to subscribe to any ideas. I don’t ask them to base their opinions on materials that we read. I just ask that they critically evaluate it and understand it. We evaluate claims. That’s all that we do."
Despite charges of a "politically correct" curriculum, Tennessee history professors report that students enter their classes with almost no exposure to Black (or Native American) history from their high school studies.
Some conservative legislators are upset with the state Historical Commission's recent decision to remove a memorial to slave trader and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee capitol.
