Lies My Teacher Told Me (34 page)

“Our country . . . may she always be in the right,” toasted Stephen Decatur in 1816, “but
our country, right or wrong!” Educators and textbook authors seem to want to inculcate the
next generation into blind allegiance to our country. Going a step beyond Decatur,
textbook analyses fail to assess our actions abroad according to either a standard of
right and wrong or realpolitik. Instead, textbooks merely assume that the government tried to do the right
thing. Citizens who embrace the textbook view would presumably support any intervention, armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective of our legitimate national interests or not, because they would be
persuaded that all our policies and interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims. They
could never credit our enemies with equal humanity.

This “international good guy” approach is educationally dysfunctional if we seek citizens
who are able to think rationally about American foreign policy,42 To the citizen raised on textbook platitudes, George Kenrian's realpolitik may be painful
to contemplate. Under the thrall of the America-the-good archetype, we expect more from
our country. But Kennan describes how nations actually behave. We would not risk the
decline ofdemocracy and the end ofWestern civilization if we simply let students see a
realistic description and analysis of our foreign policies. Doing so would also help close
the embarrassing gap between what high school textbooks say about American foreign policy
and how their big brothers, college textbooks in political science courses, treat the
subject.

When high school history textbooks turn to the internal affairs of the U.S. government,
the books again part company with political scientists. A large chunk of introductory political science coursework is devoted to analyzing the various
forces that influence our government's domestic policies. High school American history
textbooks simply credit the government for most of what gets done. This is not surprising,
for when authors idealize the federal government, perforce they also distort the real
dynamic between the governed and the government. It is particularly upsetting to watch
this happen in the field of civil rights, where the courageous acts of thousands of
citizens in the 1960s entreated and even forced the government to act.

Between 1960 and 1968 the civil rights movement repeatedly appealed to the federal
government for protection and for implementation of federal law, including the Fourteenth
Amendment and other laws passed during Reconstruction. Especially during the Kennedy
administration, governmental response was woefully inadequate. In Mississippi, movement
offices displayed this bitter rejoinder:

THERE' S A STREET IN ITTA BENA CALLED FREEDOM. THERE' S A TOWN IN MISSISSIPPI CALLED
LIBERTY. T H E R E ' S A D E P A R T ME N T I N W A S H I N G T O N C A L L E D J U S T I
C E .

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's response to the movement's call was especially
important, since the FBI is the premier national law enforcement agency. The bureau had a
long and unfortunate history of antagonism toward African Americans. J. Edgar Hoover and
the agency that became the FBI got their start investigating alleged communists during the
Woodrow Wilson administration. Although the last four years of that administration saw
more antiblack race riots than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus on
gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating
blacks' civil rights. Hoover explained the antiblack race riot of 1919 in Washington,
D.C., as due to “the numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women.” In that
year the agency institutionalized its surveillance of black organizations, not white
organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the bureau's early years there were a few black
agents, but by the 1930s Hoover had weeded out all but two. By the early 1960s the FBI had
not a single black officer, although Hoover tried to claim it did by counting his
chauffeurs.43 FBI agents in the South were mostly white Southerners who cared what their white Southern
neighbors thought of them and were themselves white supremacists. And although this next
complaint is reminiscent of the diner who protested that the soup was terrible and there
wasn't enough of it, the bureau had far too few agents in the South. In Mississippi it had no office at all and relied for its initial
reports on local sheriffs and police chiefs, often precisely the people from whom the
civil rights movement sought protection.

Even in the 1960s Hoover remained an avowed white supremacist who thought the 1954 Supreme
Court decision outlawing racial segregation in Brmvn v. Board ofEducation was a terrible error. He helped Kentucky prosecute a Caucasian civil rights leader, Carl
Braden, for selling a house in a white neighborhood to a black family. In August 1963
Hoover initiated a campaign to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. With the
approval of Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, he tapped the telephones of King's associ
ates, bugged King's hotel rooms, and made tape recordings of King's conversations with
and about women. The FBI then passed on [he lurid details, including photographs,
transcripts, and tapes, to Sen. Strom Thurmond and other white supremacists, reporters,
labor leaders, foundation administrators, and, of course, the president. In 1964 a high
FBI administrator sent a tape recording of King having sex, along with an anonymous note
suggesting that King kill himself, to the office of King's organization, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The FBI must have known that the incident might
not actually persuade King to commit suicide; the bureau's intention was apparently to get
Coretta Scott King to divorce her husband or to blackmail King into abandoning the civil
rights movement.44 The FBI tried to sabotage receptions in King's honor when he traveled to Europe to claim
the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country” and
tried to prove that the SCLC was infested with communists. King wasn't the only target:
Hoover also passed on disinformation about the Mississippi Summer Project; other civil
rights organizations such as CORE and SNCC; and other civil rights leaders, including
Jesse Jackson.

At the same time the FBI refused to pass on to King information about death threats to him.J6 The FBI knew these threats were serious, for civil rights workers were indeed being
killed. In Mississippi alone, civil rights workers endured more than a thousand arrests 3t
the hands of local officials, thirty-five shooting incidents, and six murders. The FBI
repeatedly claimed, however, that protecting civil rights workers from violence was not
its job.47 In 1962 SNCC sued Robert F Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover to force them to protect civil
rights demonstrators. Desperate to get the federal government to enforce the law in the
Deep South, Mississippi civil rights workers Amzie Moore and Robert Moses hit upon the
1964 “Freedom Summer” idea: bring 1,000 northern college students, most of them white,
to Mississippi to work among blacks for civil rights. Even this helped little; white
supremacists bombed thirty homes and burned thirty-seven black churches in the summer of 1964 alone.48 After the national outcry prompted by the murders ofJames Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, however, the FBI finally opened an office
in Jackson. Later that summer, at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic
City, the FBI tapped the phones of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party and Martin
Luther King, Jr.; in so doing, the bureau was complying with a request from Pres. Lyndon
Johnson.

Because I lived and did research in Mississippi, I have concentrated on acts of the
federal government and the civil rights movement in that state, but the FBI's attack on
black and interracial organizations was national in scope. For example, after Congress
passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, refused
to obey the law. Students from the nearby black state college demonstrated against the
facility. State troopers fired on the demonstrators, killing three and wounding
twenty-eight, many of them shot in the balls of their feet as they ran away and threw
themselves on the ground to avoid the gunfire. The FBI responded not by helping to
identify which officers fired in what became known as “the Orangeburg Massacre,” but by
falsifying information about the students to help the troopers with their defense.50 In California, Chicago, and elsewhere in the North, the bureau tried to eliminate the
breakfast programs of the Black Panther organization, spread false rumors about venereal
disease and encounters with prostitutes to break up Panther marriages, helped escalate
conflict between other black groups and the Panthers, and helped Chicago police raid the
apartment of Panther leader Fred Hampton and kill him in his bed in 1969.51 The FBI warned black leader Stokely Carmichael's mother of a fictitious Black Panther plot
to murder her son, prompting Carmichael to flee the United States.52 It is even possible that the FBI or the CIA was involved in the murder of Martin Luther
King, Jr. “Raoul” in Montreal, who supplied King's convicted kiiler, James Ear! Ray, with
the alias “Eric Gault,” was apparently a CIA agent. Certainly Ray, a country boy with no
income, could never have traveled to Montreal, arranged a false identity, and flown to
London without help. Despite or because of these incongruities, the FBI has never shown
any interest in uncovering the conspiracy that killed King. Instead, shortly after King's
death in 1968, the FBI twice broke into SNCC offices. Years later the bureau tried to
prevent King's birthday from becoming a national holiday.

The FBI investigated black faculty members at colleges and universities from Virginia to
Montana to California. In 1970 Hoover approved the automatic investigation of “all black
student unions and similar organizations organized to project the demands of black students,“ The institution at which I taught,
Tougaloo College, was a special target: at one point agents in Jackson even proposed to
”neutralize“ the entire college, in part because its students had sponsored ”out-of-state
militant Negro speakers, voter-registration drives, and African cultural seminars and
lectures . . , [and] condemned various publicized injustices ro the civil rights of Negroes in Mississippi.” Obviously high crimes and misdemeanors.'4 The FBI's conduct and the federal leadership that tolerated it and sometimes requested it are part of the legacy of the 1960s, alongside such positive
achievements as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As Kenneth
O'Reilly put it, “when the FBI stood against black people, so did the government.”5 How do American history textbooks treat this legacy? They simply leave out everything bad
the government ever did. They omit not only the FBI's campaign against the civil rights
movement, but also its break-ins and undercover investigations of church groups,
organizations promoting changes in U.S. policy in Latin America, and the U.S. Supreme
Court.5 Textbooks don't even want to say anything bad about state governments: all ten narrative textbooks in my sample include part of Martin Luther
King's “I Have a Dream” speech, but nine of them censor out his negative comments about the govern
ments of Alabama and Mississippi.

Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the
civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for
the advances made during the period. In so doing, textbooks follow what we might call
the Hollywood approach to civil rights. To date Hollywood's main feature film on the
movement is Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. In that movie, the three civil rights workers get killed in the first five minutes; for
the rest of its two hours the movie portrays not a single civil rights worker or black
Mississippian over the age of twelve with whom the viewer could possibly identify Instead,
Parker concocts two fictional white FBI agents who play out the hoary “good cop/bad cop”
formula and in the process doublehandedly solve the murders. In realitythat is, in the
real story on which the movie is basedsupporters of the civil rights movement, including
Michael Schwerner's widow, Rita, and every white northern friend the movement could
muster, pressured Congress and the executive branch of the federal government to tbrce the
FBI to open a Mississippi office and make bringing the murderers to justice a priority.
Meanwhile, Hoover tapped Schwerner's father's telephone to see if he might be a communist!
Everyone in eastern Mississippi knew for weeks who had committed the murder and that the
Neshoba County deputy sheriff was involved. No innovative police work was required; the FBI finally apprehended
the conspirators after bribing one of them with $30,000 to testify against the others.

American history textbooks offer a Parkerlike analysis of the entire civil rights
movement. Like the arrests of the Mississippi Klansmen, advances in civil rights are
simply the result of good government. Federal initiative in itself “explains” such
milestones as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John F.
Kennedy proposed them, Lyndon Baines Johnson passed them through Congress, and thus we
have them today. Or, in the immortal passive voice of American History, “Another civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act, was passed.” Several textbooks even
reverse the time order, putting the bills first, the civil rights movement later.58 Only American Adventures and Discovering American History show the basic dynamics of the civil rights movement: African Americans, often with white
allies, challenged an unjust law or practice in a nonviolent way, which then incited
whites to respond barbarically to defend “civilization,” in turn appalling the nation
and convincing some people to change the law or practice. Only the same two books
celebrate the courage of the civil rights volunteers. And only Discovering American History tells how the movement directly challenged the mores of segregation, with the result that
some civil rights workers were killed or beaten by white racists simply for holding hands
as an interracial couple or eating together in a restaurant. No book educates students
about the dynamics that in a democracy should characterize the interrelationship between
the people and their government.59 Thus no book tells how citizens can and in fact have forced the government to respond to
them.