History through Red Eyes: A Conversation with James Loewen

Abstract

JAMES Loewen is an author, historian, and professor. Through Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has helped to reconstruct the way history is viewed and taught in public schools all across America. During a recent conversation, he shared his views on how American Indian topics and events are traditionally taught and offered his insights into what we can do to accommodate multiple perspectives in our examination of history. Below, I present his comments and insights as he told them to me. My first teaching assignment was at Tougaloo College, a historically black institution in Tougaloo, Mississippi. In my first year, I taught a course developed by the history department that was titled Freshman Social Science Seminar. In it we introduced students to sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and psychology in the context of African American history. This made sense because 99% of our students were African American. The second semester of the course began with events immediately following the Civil War. I had a new group of students in the second semester, and I didn't want to do all the talking on the first day of class, so I asked them, We're starting with Reconstruction. is that period? followed was an Aha! experience for me. Or it might be better called an Oh no! experience. Sixteen out of 17 students said, was that 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, and white folks had to take control again. Now, there are at least three complete misstatements--lies I would call them--in that sentence, and I was just floored by it. Blacks never took over the government of the Southern states; the Reconstruction governments did not, on the whole, screw up; and didn't resume control at the end of Reconstruction. However, a certain group of whites did take control, using terrorist tactics. It was, in fact, the original Ku Klux Klan. So I thought, What must your teachers have done to you to make you believe that the one time your group was center stage in American history, they screwed up, and had to take control back again? If it were true, that would be fine. But it is not true. these students had learned we might call BS--that would be Bad Sociology--in the black public schools. they had learned was being taught by black teachers in all-black schools. But it was white supremacist history because their teachers were just blindly teaching what was in the textbooks. Seeing the outcome made me aware that history can be a weapon and that it can be used against you, just as it had been against my black students. When I put together a team of students and faculty members at Tougaloo and Millsaps College (a nearby all-white college), we confronted the lies and myths in Mississippi history by writing a new history textbook for the Mississippi history course that was required in public schools. But our book just wasn't racist enough, so the state refused to adopt it. Because Mississippi is a textbook-adoption state, we actually had to sue to get it adopted. The case was Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. After eight years in Mississippi, I moved to the University of Vermont, where I continued to teach first-year students in huge introductory sociology classes. There I learned that distorted history was not a phenomenon peculiar to Mississippi. Although in the early 1970s Mississippi exhibited it in a more exaggerated form--as Mississippi exhibited many national maladies in a more exaggerated form back then--this was a national problem. As I had done in Mississippi, I went to nearby high schools to learn where my students were getting the bizarre ideas they brought to college. Many of these ideas had to do with savage Indians. Lies My Teacher Told Me is based on my intensive reading of 12 high school American history textbooks. …