Mississippi Textbook Revised After It Was Rejected In 1974 For Not Whitewashing Black History. Sound Familiar?

For those of us who are observant and aware, there is no doubt that under the administration of President Donald Trump — and at a time when white conservatives have weaponized “wokeness” and the very concept of diversity to fuel their propaganda-reliant culture war — the darker parts of America’s history are repeating themselves. There are tons of examples of this, but an interesting one comes out of Mississippi, where a textbook that was banned from the classroom more than 50 years ago has been revised and made available again, although it’s still up in the air whether it will ever return to the classroom.

According to Mississippi Today, the University Press of Mississippi is releasing an updated version of a 1974 ninth-grade history textbook titled Mississippi: Conflict and Change: A New Edition. The textbook was rejected by the State Textbook Commission in 1974 for the same reason Trump and anti-critical race theory crusaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would reject it today: because it didn’t soft-serve the history of slavery to white people and make Jim Crow sound like a really nice guy who was just misunderstood.

From Mississippi Today:

Historian Charles W. Eagles detailed that fight in his 2017 book, Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook. The book “grew out of the civil rights movement,” he wrote, “and foreshadowed the emerging culture wars.”

Unlike its predecessors, “‘Conflict and Change’ did not flinch in its discussions of lynching, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation in the late nineteenth century,” he wrote. “For the first time black and white ninth graders could read about the civil rights movement in their state.”

Stephanie Rolph, author of “Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council”, 1954-1989, said the 1974 book “struck at the very foundations of the Redemption narrative that had prevailed in Mississippi classrooms for decades. By providing more honest and historically accurate descriptions of the Civil War and the institution of slavery, it supported a shared history for all Mississippians, and an opportunity to grapple with the economic, political and social impacts of the past.”

From the early 1900s until the 1970s, Mississippi textbooks often depicted the Civil War as a noble cause, the Ku Klux Klan as a band of heroes who saved the South and slavery as a good thing, even for the slaves, said historian Rebecca Miller Davis, who has studied the state’s textbooks throughout the 20th century and is writing a book on the Mississippi press during the civil rights era.

White schoolchildren read about enslaved people being “happy and content,” “corrupt Negro-controlled” Reconstruction governments, and “troublemaking” civil rights activists, while never reading about the brutality of slavery, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, or the thousands of lynchings of Black Americans, she said.

So, yeah — before we get into the revised version of this textbook and whether students will ever be able to learn from it again, we really need to get into how not much has changed in red state America over the last half-century.

In January 2023, DeSantis and the state of Florida rejected an Advanced Placement course covering African American Studies because it “significantly lacks educational value,” because he and the Florida Board of Education were too cowardly to admit they were nixing it because it didn’t align with the right kind of ideological indoctrination. The curriculum included lessons on Black Lives Matter, the debate around reparations, and, among other LGBTQ-related things, the fact that trans people exist instead of a curriculum that is transparently politically motivated, like one that includes courses on the ills of communism. (To be fair, that course, at the very least, might teach a few MAGA morons what communism actually is.) The rejected curriculum also failed to offer any “opposing viewpoints” or “other perspectives” of slavery.

In June 2023, DeSantis and the state of Florida approved new standards requiring teachers to teach that enslaved people benefited from their enslavement because it taught them skills. Even after key information peddled by the new standards was thoroughly debunked, and Florida was compelled to update the new standards in May 2024, the board opted to keep the slavery lie included in the curriculum.

Florida officials also selected PragerU —an unaccredited conservative non-profit organization founded by a loud and proud racist—to provide classroom materials to schools. As we previously reported, PragerU once produced animated videos for children that taught, among other things, that iconic abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass would have agreed with America’s choice to prioritize white supremacy over ending slavery.

DeSantis is far from the only GOP leader who is making 1974 Mississippi energy great again. Another glaring example can be observed in Trump’s ongoing agenda to rid the Smithsonian of any Black history his administration dubs “improper ideology,” and implement his low on facts, heavy on white nationalism “1776 Commission” to replace unfiltered Black history.

Anyway, Byron D’Andra Orey, a Black professor of political science at Jackson State University, is the man who was commissioned to revise “Conflict and Change.” Orey said when he first began revising the textbook four years ago, he aimed to republish the book with minimal changes to preserve its original essence.

More from Today:

But a “reviewer’s misinterpretation” of his revised draft led him to “refresh, rather than rewrite.” 

“It was the kick in the butt I needed to go in the right direction and to that anonymous reviewer I have to give them credit,” Orey said. “It made it a much better book in a comprehensive way.” 

The version updates the textbook’s original language, capitalizing “Black” and referring to people as “enslaved,” rather than calling them “slaves.”

At the time of the textbook’s original publication, milestone events such as the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, which propelled the civil rights movement, were only decades old.

Orey said extensive research and decades of scholarship shed more light on these moments, allowing a new generation of students to engage with the state’s complex and rich history. 

And that’s exactly why, in Trump’s America, this textbook will face an uphill battle to ever see a Mississippi classroom.

What’s that they say about “the more things change”?

SEE ALSO:

Judge Temporarily Halts Mississippi’s DEI Ban In Schools, Colleges

Black Cyclist In Mississippi Arrested After Shooting White Man Who Attacked Him: What About ‘Stand Your Ground’?

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