Texas Panel to Tell the State’s History Leaves Out Most of the Reconstruction Era (And a Lot About Slavery)

Texas Monthly reports on the whitewashing of Texas history by the states new 1836 Project. Last year the Texas legislature  passed a bill establishing the “1836 Project,” the year the Republic of Texas declared its independence from Mexico. The project is designed to “promote patriotic education and increase awareness of the Texas values,” according to the new law. The panel appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to help set up the “1836 Project” is chaired by Kevin Roberts, who was on Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission whose report was condemned by the American Historical Association because it relied on “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements” in its recasting of American history. Two former students of Grady McWhiney, the founder of the racist League of the South, are also on the nine member panel of “experts.”

Texas Monthly describes the draft of the panel’s history “pamphlet” that will be distributed to all Texas when they receive their driver’s licenses:

the group’s pamphlet removes most of the blemishes of Texas history and ignores the stories of those who have often been left out of the record. Of the document’s 4,517 words, 108 are spent on the 13,000-plus years of Indigenous history before the arrival of Spanish conquerors. The Texas Revolution receives 601 words. Only 133 words cover segregation, and 50 are spared for the African American mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement.

Comparative word counts provide a crude measure of the advisory committee’s biases. A better measure can be found in what’s left unsaid. The pamphlet says of slavery, “Texas soon had a reputation. ‘Texas is heaven for men and dogs,’ the saying went, ‘but hell for women and oxen.’ This was doubly true for the enslaved.” No details are included about the lives of Texans held in bondage. Later, slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom….

The pamphlet also doesn’t mention how Reconstruction-era white terrorist violence erased the civil liberties African Americans gained through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. According to the late Barry Crouch, a historian of the Reconstruction era in Texas, whites in the state murdered about one of every one hundred African American men between the ages of 15 and 49 from 1865 to 1868. The Ku Klux Klan murdered newly enfranchised voters, and there’s a story of one enraged white man with a sword chopping an African American woman in Huntsville in half when she dared celebrate her emancipation. The pamphlet grants only 42 words to the bloody tragedy of the era: “With the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when given an opportunity to overhaul its state constitution, pro-Southern white Texans responded by creating a weakened government while defending the concept of states’ rights as expressed in the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

The pamphlet’s description of Reconstruction is a total of three sentences long in a document whose draft fills up fifteen pages! This is everything it says about Reconstruction:

In many ways, the American Civil War, and the decades after, helped craft modern
Texas. Reconstruction introduced Texans to a constitution in which the government in Austin
was dominated by a pro-Union governor and his cabinet, a constitution opposed by many of the
ex-Confederates. It also gave rights to a newly freed African American population who, with the
help of the northern Freedmen’s Bureau, took advantage of their chance at education and selfgovernment.

The first line of the next paragraph begins; “With the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when given an opportunity to overhaul its state constitution, pro-Southern white Texans responded by creating a weakened government while defending the concept of states’ rights as expressed in the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” No mention of the violent efforts by Confederate veterans to murder Blacks to prevent them from voting, or creating a state government strong enough to enforce Black subordination. Instead, Texans will hear that the color-blind Reconstruction constitution was jettisoned because white Texans were “defending…the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution”!!!

As Texas Monthly makes clear, the 1836 Project is part of a long tradition of the rewriting of Texas history in line with the needs of the dominant white race:

In some ways, the 1836 Project, and the restrictions on teaching about race in schools, aren’t anything new in Texas. There’s a long history in the state of attempts to bend the past to conform to political agendas. In 1918, Annie Webb Blanton, who called herself loyal to the “old South,” became the first woman elected to a statewide office as the superintendent of public instruction. She belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which lobbied to ban textbooks it believed were too critical of the South. One chief historian of the United Daughters, Laura Martin Rose, authored a book praising the Ku Klux Klan, and in 1913 the UDC campaigned for its use in public schools. Blanton leveraged her power to ensure the “Lost Cause” orthodoxy was taught in Texas classrooms… In the 1950s, an elementary school textbook, Texas, taught children that under slavery, breakfast was brought to the enslaved in the fields, while nights were filled with family time and dancing. By the 1970s, activists around the country began to discover the power that Texas, the second-biggest buyer of school textbooks in the nation after California, wields over how history is taught in the entire United States and sought to dictate what its lessons would be.

Words important for non-Texans to remember.

As Texas distorts its history once again, expect school textbooks nationwide to follow suit.

Note: Feature graphic by Michael Hogue

 

 

 

 

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