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Moreover, violence was only the most visible component of a broader pattern of white resistance to black progress. Attacking education was an important element of the white supremacists’ program. “The opposition to Negro education made itself felt everywhere in a combination not to allow the freedmen any room or building in which a school might be taught,” said Gen. O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau. “In 1865, 1866, and 1867 mobs of the baser classes at intervals and in all parts of the South occasionally <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/men-tshirts-urban-glory-c-1001_987.html"><strong>urban glory popular t-shirts</strong></a> burned school buildings and churches used as schools, flogged leachers or drove them away, and cheap nike air max in a number of instances murdered them.”1”’ With the exception of The American Way and Discovering, American History, each of the twelve textbooks cheap nike air max 90 includes at least a paragraph on white violence during Reconstruction. Six nike air max 97 of twelve textbooks tell how that violence, coupled with failure by the United States to implement civil rights laws, played a major role in ending Republican state governments in the South, thus ending Reconstruction.’ 5* Hut, overall, textbook treatments of Reconstruction still miss the point: the problem of Reconstruction was integrating Conjvdfrates, not African Americans, into the new order. As soon as the federal government stopped addressing the problem of racist whites, Reconstruction ended. Since textbooks find it hard to say anything really damaging about white people, their treatments of why Reconstruction failed lack clarity. Triumph presents the end air max usa of ^construction as a failure of African Americans: “Other northerners grew weary of the problems of black southerners and less willing to help them learn their new roles ;is citizens.” The American Adventure echoes: “Millions of ex-slaves could not be converted in ten years into literate voters, or successful politicians, farmers, and businessmen.” Because 1 too “learned” that African Americans were the unsolved problem of Reconstruction, reading Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was an ‘e-opening experience for me. Myrdal introduced his (944 book by describing the change in viewpoint he was forced to make as he conducted his research, When the <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/men-coats-c-1136.html"><strong>men down coats</strong></a> present investigator started his inquiry, the preconception was thai it had to be focused on the Negro people. . . . But as he proceeded in his studies into the Negro problem, it became increasingly evident that little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves. . . . The Negro problem is predominantly a white . .. problem.69 “GONE WITH THE W I N D ” – 1 5 3 154 ?LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME This is precisely the change textbook nike air max 95 authors still need to make. Their I failure to make it lies behind the appalling results of a 1976 national survey of first-year college students, a majority of whom ventured that Reconstruction led I to nike air max 360 “unparalleled corruption among the entrenched carpetbagger governors and I their allies in the black dominated legislatures of the defeated states”precisely I the Confederate myth of Reconstruction.70 Textbooks in 1976 no longer said I that. nike air max tn But they failed and still fail to counter this pervasive myth with an analysis I that has real power. As one student said to me, “You’ll never believe all the stuff I 1 learned in high school about Reconstructionlike, it wasn’t so bad, it set up I school systems. Then 1 saw Gone wiih the Wind and learned the truth about I Reconstruction!” What is identified as the problem determines the frame of I rhetoric and solutions sought. Myrdal’s insight, to focus on whites, is critical to I understanding Reconstruction. Focusing on white racism is even more central to understanding thefl period Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations”: the years I between 1890 and 1920, when African Americans were again put back into! second-class citizenship.7′ During this time white Americans, North and South, 1 joined hands to restrict black civil and economic rights. Perhaps because thcfl period was marked by such a d Air Max 2011 iscouraging increase in white racism, ten of thH twelve textbooks ignore the nadir. The finest coverage, in American History, sunn marizes the aftermath of Reconstruction in a section entitled “The Long Night j Begins.” “After the Compromise of 1877 the white citizens of the North lurnfl their backs on the black citizens of the South. Gradually the southern statfl broke their promise to treat blacks fairly. Step by step they deprived them of the right to vote and reduced them to the status of second-class citizens.” America History then spells out the techniquesrestrictions on voting, segregation in public pl nike air max shop aces, and lynchingswhich southern whites used to maintain wbH supremacy. Triumph of the American Nation, on the other hand, sums up in these bUflil words; “Reconstruction left many major problems unsolved and created newifl equa nike air max shoes lly urgent problems. This was true even though many forces in the NolB and the South continued working to reconcile the two sections.” These sentences are so vague as to be content-free. Frances FitzGerald used an earl nike air max 2009 ier^B sion of this passage to attack what she called the “problems” approach ? American history. “These ‘problems’ seem to crop up everywhere.” she deli panned. “History in these texts is a mass of problems.”" Five hundred pifl later in Triumph, when the authors reach the civil rights movement, race rtfctions again becomes a “problem.” The authors make no connection between ? failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen. <a href="http://www.theapparelend.com/sport-shoes-mbt-women-c-998_1135.html"><strong>mbt brand shoes</strong></a> In fact, during Reconstruction and the nadir, a battle raged for the soul of the Southern white racist and in a way for that of the whole nation. There is a parallel in the reconstruction of Germany after World War II, a battle for the soul of the German people, a battle which Nazism lost (we hope). But in the Uniied Slates, as American History tells, racism won. Between 1890 and 1907 every Southern and border state “legally” disfranchised the vast majority of its African American voters. Lynchings rose to an all-time high, (n 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. No textbook explains the rationale of segregation, which is crucial to understanding its devastating effect on black and white psyches. Describing the 19 Wholesale air max 54 Supreme Court decision that would begin to undo segregation, The American Way says, ”No separate school could ttuly bv equal for Blacks,” but offers no clue nike air max shoes as to why this would be so. Textbooks need to offer the sociological definition of segregation; a system of racial etiquette that keeps the oppressed group separate from the oppressor when both are doing equal tasks, like learning the multiplication tables, but allows intimate closeness when the tasks are hierarchical, like cooking or cleaning for while employers. The rationale of segregation thus implies that the oppressed art a pariah people. “Unclean!” was the caste message <a href="http://club.rexiaodg.net/view.php?id=7406"><strong>Bay Area Sports Blog ยป Timberland forge ahead sequence debut sail</strong></a> of every “colored” wa nike air max 90 current ter fountain, waiting room, and courtroom Bible. “Inferior” was the implication of every school that excluded blacks (and often Mexicans, Native Americans, and “Orientals”). This ideology was born in slavery and remained alive to rationalize- the second-class citizenship imposed on African Americans after Reconstruction. This stigma is why separate could never mean equal, even when black facilities might be newer or physically superior. Elements of this stigma survive to harm the self-image of some African Americans today, which helps explain why Caribbean blacks who immigrate to the United States often outperform black Americans,” During the nadir, segregation increased everywhere. Jackie Robinson was iiii the first black player in major league baseball. Blacks had played in the major agues in the nineteenth century, but by 1889 whites had forced them out. In 911 the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys after they won fifteen of the