The Varner-Hogg plantation near Houston was a sugar plantation that was worked by sixty-six enslaved African Americans in the early 19th Century. It is a state administered Texas historic site. After a visit there recently by amateur historian Michelle Haas, she was so outraged by the books on sale in the gift shop that she wrote to a Texas Historical Commission board member demanding that the books be removed. These were all books dealing with race and slavery. Now mind you, the vast majority of people employed 175 years ago at the site had been Black and were enslaved. Haas also complained that the video at the house portrayed Black people as well as the white plantation owners.
Haas has been very critical of how history depicts slavery. She wrote a book 200 Years a Fraud, an attack on Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave. While this sort of complaining might have been dismissed by the Texas Historical Commission which runs the Varner-Hogg plantation as emanating from some non-Reconstructed Lost Cause partisan, in fact the Commission started removing books at the house and another nearby plantation under its charge as well. Out of 87 titles available at the two plantations on June 12, 2023, only 39 titles were still for sale by November.
According to the Texas Monthly Magazine:
Haas took credit for the removal of the books in an email to supporters of the Texas History Trust. “Hey….remember those politically charged books being sold to the public at state-run history sites?” Haas wrote. “Those are gone now. We worked hard to make that happen.” In an interview with Texas Monthly, however, she couldn’t name the exact titles that had been removed from the sites.
Ms. Haas says she is campaigning to take “woke ideology” and “neo-Marxist” theory out of the telling of Texas history at public institutions.
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Texas has its own “minitrue”, like Florida…