Virginia

Outlook • Perspective

The lies our textbooks told my generation of Virginians about slavery

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds



The seventh-grade edition of the history textbook issued to Virginia pupils from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

By Bennett Minton
Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.
July 31, 2020

A series of textbooks written for the fourth, seventh and 11th grades taught a generation of Virginians our state’s history. Chapter 29 of the seventh-grade edition, titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery,” included these sentences: “A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes.” The masters “knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” Enslaved people “went visiting at night and sometimes owned guns and other weapons.” “It cannot be denied that some slaves were treated badly, but most were treated with kindness.” Color illustrations featured masters and slaves all dressed smartly, shaking hands amiably.

This was the education diet that Virginia’s leaders fed me in 1967, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Stall, issued me the first book in the series deep into the second decade of the civil rights movement. Today, Virginia’s symbols of the Lost Cause are falling. But banishing icons is the easy part. Statues aren’t history; they’re symbols. Removing a symbol requires only a shift in political power. A belief ingrained as “history” is harder to dislodge.

How hard becomes clearer when you understand the lengths to which Virginia’s White majority culture went to teach young pupils that enslaved people were contented servants of honorable planters — and why for all of my six decades we have been intermittently dismantling the myth that the Confederacy represented anything noble. That dismantling began with Reconstruction 155 years ago and still isn’t finished.

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By Bennett Minton
Bennett Minton, a policy analyst, blogger and grass-roots political organizer, was a Virginia resident until 2018. He lives in Portland, Ore.