Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday defended his state’s new Black history standards to NBC News, arguing that the controversial curriculum was “not political at all.” On this week’s episode of Now & Then, “Telling Tales of History: The Florida Problem,” Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman examined the distortions of the Florida standards and put them in context with the turn-of-the-century “Lost Cause” textbook advocacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who endeavored to paint a nostalgic vision of human enslavement. Another struggle over how to teach the brutal Southern past came in 1970, when Alabama parents rebelled against a staggeringly racist textbook called Know Alabama.
On June 16th, 1970, activist Winifred Green testified before the Senate Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, chaired by Minnesota Democratic Senator Walter Mondale.
Green was a 32-year-old white woman. A fifth-generation Mississippian, she was a veteran of the Freedom Summer voter registration drives and directed the Southeastern Education Project of the American Friends Service Committee, which sought to improve public school conditions for Black children across the South.
The Committee was meeting in response to a statement three months earlier by President Nixon, promising $1.5 billion to support stagnating efforts to desegregate Southern public schools.
During her testimony, Green openly questioned the Nixon administration’s commitment to fixing the myriad ills in the Southern public education system and offered several recommendations for how best to apportion the new funds.
One section of the appropriations were earmarked for providing new teaching techniques and materials for “racially isolated” children.
Green argued for using these funds to create multiracial committees focused on rewriting racist textbooks. “The best use of funds under this section would be the purchasing, or in some cases the rewriting, of textbooks to make them reflect the contribution of Black people to our society,” she testified.
The activist then zeroed in on one particular textbook: Know Alabama. The book was the only recommended textbook in elementary history for fourth graders in Alabama’s state public school system. Green testified that Know Alabama was “one of the worst examples of the way textbooks are used to perpetuate false stereotypes held by the white community and cause black children to doubt their worth in society.”
Know Alabama, first published in the early 1950s, was written by three Alabama historians, including the famed Vanderbilt professor Frank Owsley. A noted defender of the Confederate cause, Owsley had written a much-cited 1948 book, Plain Folk of the Old South, which had stressed the righteousness of the Southern middle-class yeomanry in rebelling against the North. He had also contributed to a 1930 racist manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in which he had, in an extremely dehumanizing framing of Black Americans, argued that the South after the Civil War was “turned over to the three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.”
Owsley had brought much of the same perspective on enslavement to Know Alabama. He and his co-authors started their chapter on Antebellum plantation life thusly: “Now we come to one of the happiest ways of life in Alabama before the war between the states. This is life as it was lived on the big plantations.”
Owsley asked each fourth grade reader to imagine themself as a “little boy and girl who lived in one of the plantation homes many years ago.”
He then described, in second person, a visit that the “little boy or girl” had with slaves during a ride to the cotton fields with their father: “You like the friendly way they speak and smile. They show bright rows of white teeth.”
And he illustrated a visit to the slave quarters with the imagined child’s mother. “Many nights you have gone with your mothers to the ‘quarters’ where she cared for some sick person.” He further claimed that the mother “is the best friend the Negroes have, and they know it.”
Owsley’s textbook had an equally rosy view on the Ku Klux Klan. “The klan did not ride often, only when it had to,” he claimed, following up that the organization was only targeting people “doing bad, lawless things.”
“When law and order was restored, there was no more need for the Ku Klux Klan,” Owsley further declared.
Owsley also had a very particular view of the views of former slaves during Reconstruction: “Many of the Negroes remained loyal to the white Southerners. Even though they had lately been freed from slavery, even though they had no education, they knew who their friends were. They knew the Southern white men who had been good to them in the time of their slavery were still their friend.”
In her testimony, Green read choice quotes from Know Alabama to Mondale, who asked, “Is that the textbook being used in Alabama today?”
“Yes, sir; it is,” Green responded. “It is being used.” She also alluded to an ongoing protest in the state against the continued use of the book.
The protest Green referenced began several months earlier, shortly before Nixon’s desegregation speech. In February 1970, a multiracial group of five mothers of Birmingham fourth graders protested the textbook in a presentation before the State Board of Education. Immediately after the mothers spoke, the Board unanimously voted to continue using the text.
The Board may have been experiencing some political pressure. By the late 1960s, Know Alabama was published by Bob Ewing and Bill Jones, two former press secretaries to the arch-segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had left office in 1967 but still wielded immense influence in the state.
The rebuffed parents then spoke with the press. Mrs. W.L. Williams, a mother and a 27-year-old biology instructor at the University of Alabama, told the Los Angeles Times in March 1970, highlighting her issues with Know Alabama. “Mainly, our objection to the book is that we feel it promotes white supremacy,” she succinctly stated. “We also felt that if it was going to be a history book, it should tell both sides of the story and this book does not do that. It only gives the white man’s viewpoint on things.”
In response to the parental protest, the Reverend K.L. Buford, the Alabama field director of the NAACP, wrote to Alabama Governor Albert Brewer, State Superintendent Ernest Stone, and other leading state officials to protest the continued use of Know Alabama.
Buford had been, alongside another candidate in the same race, the first Black Alabamian to win an election against a white opponent since Reconstruction when he became a Tuskegee City Councilman in 1964. He did not mince words in his letter.
He said that assigning Know Alabama, “especially in a grade where young, tender minds are influenced is tantamount to instilling racist viewpoints regarding Negroes and making heroes of known subversive organizations.”
Brewer did not reply to Buford’s letter, but State Superintendent Stone, a vaunted educator who later served as President of Jacksonville State University, pointedly disagreed with Buford’s characterization of the text. “I don’t feel the things the book said about the Negro race are derogatory,” Stone wrote in his response. “Slavery and Reconstruction are part of the history of Alabama.”
As news spread of the standoff, Black newspapers across the country expressed outrage. The Baltimore Afro-American, for example, issued a scathing editorial. Of the “bad things” the Klan ostensibly stopped, the Afro-American commented, “The book does not impress on the young pupils that some of the ‘bad’ things were such as trying to register and vote, refusing to eat watermelon and dance for the pleasure of whites, and for seeking to learn reading and writing.”
The paper also psychoanalyzed white parents who supported the textbooks. “In their desperation to hang on to an obsolete way of life, some bigoted Alabama parents seem willing to rear their children in a way certain to destine them to miserable lives as frustrated misfits in the decades ahead,” the editorial conjectured.
Shortly before Green offered her testimony to Mondale in Washington, Alabama’s Assistant Education Superintendent, Dr. Fred Phillips, appointed a committee of four Black and four white teachers to explore the possibility of editing the textbook.
In February 1971, an edited version of the textbook emerged with slight changes. The text, for example, no longer called plantation life “one of the happiest ways of life in Alabama.”
The new edition also added in a caveat about the perspective of enslaved Black Alabamians: “Most black people probably did not like being in a system of slavery. Most wanted their freedom.
In the very next line, however, the new edition backpedaled: “However, all but the most intelligent made the best of the situation and seemed to be fairly content.”
NAACP leader Buford was mostly nonplussed by the changes, calling the new version “a slight improvement,” but declaring that the text was still “far from being a true picture of the situation as it has existed or still exists in Alabama.”
Publisher Bill Jones, unsurprisingly, argued that the new version could be read “with interest and with pride by any child in any school in Alabama regardless of race.”
Know Alabama slowly moved out of the Alabama public school curriculum during the 1970s. The impassioned protests against textbooks by activists like Green, Buford, and Williams, as well as the defensive posture of Jones, echo amid the current Florida standoff – and offer a reminder of the corrosive and ongoing effort to downplay the brutality of American enslavement.
There have been several powerful articles on Know Alabama in Alabama newspapers in recent years, including the 2020 Birmingham Watch article “Textbook ‘Know Alabama’ Justified Slavery, Praised Confederacy to Schoolchildren,” by Scott Morris, and the 2020 Montgomery Advertiser article “When the textbooks lied, Black Alabamians turned to each other for history,” by Brian Lyman.
And head to the Twitter account of Now & Then Editorial Producer David Kurlander for supplemental archival threads on each Time Machine piece: @DavidKurlander.
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