The Birmingham New has an outstanding article on the Daughter of the Confederacy who helped rewrite the State of Alabama’s Civil War and Reconstruction history. According to the article by reporter Kyle Whitmire that woman, Marie Bankhead Owen, was “an Alabama fixture, a force from a century ago whose influence persists. Her name was Marie Bankhead Owen, the second director of the Alabama Department of History and Archives.” Among other things, she is responsible for Alabama’s Coat of Arms which includes Confederate symbols.
From the article:
The Alabama Department of Archives and History was the first of its kind in the country, born out of her husband’s collection of historic artifacts and documents.
Her fear was not what would happen should women get the right to vote, but rather, what would happen next — if women could vote, it was only a matter of time before Black Alabamians reclaimed that right, too.
Honestly, after reading about her I feel as though I should shower using lye soap. She did her work well. Even when I started teaching in Texas, I had to be fairly nimble to include truth rather then UDC propaganda (which was blatantly included on state required knowledge and skills to be taught, which meant it was also tested).
I decided upon a strategy of saying “(THIS) is fact…but if you see it on a test, you’ll need to choose (THIS) as the answer. My students did very well in testing. And I didn’t have to wrestle with my conscience.
Oh my God!
My wife went to high school in Virginia and she has some interesting things to say about how the Civil War was taught. Until ninth grade, she went to a public school in New York. Then a whole world of “the War of Northern Aggression” was opened up for her in the late 1970s.