We are engaged in a political feud between the right and the left … conservatives and progressives … Republicans and Democrats … over the issue of what and how black history is to be taught in our public schools. It also involves how black history is presented in various public media – news, entertainment and feature reporting (documentaries). The question centers on the issue of partisan bias.
Shaping history education along political lines is not limited to race. We see it every day as left-wing “historians” – such as Jon Meacham and Michael Beschloss use their academic credentials to spin history according to their political left-wing biases.
Democrats claim to be the political institution dedicated to equality … equal opportunity … equal justice. Conversely, they characterize Republicans as bigots and racists. It is a false narrative that gets undeserved credence from the left-wing media treating Democrat narratives as news. People cannot know the truth if they do not hear the WHOLE truth.
The black history that is taught and presented is a misrepresentation of fact – achieved by omitting critical portions of black history and offering a completely false view of history in other instances.
One of the major falsehoods is the claim that Republicans (conservatives) do not want black history to be incorporated into the educational curricula. Totally untrue. The black experience is an integral part of American history. We want a COMPLETE AND ACCURATE history to be taught – not the truncated left-wing version.
Blacks have played an important role in the American success story. It is not just the labor of slaves but the many accomplishments of free and educated (even self-educated) Negro Americans from the colonial period to modern times.
African blacks – slave and free – were part of the Revolutionary war. The first fatality of that conflict was a black man named Crispus Attucks. Former slave Frederick Douglass recruited blacks for the Union Army. Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) is more likely to have been remembered as where the future President died had it not been for a black military unit. On the first attempt, Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were surrounded by the Spanish. It was a black battalion that rushed to their rescue – preventing all but certain death or capture.
Segregated black units fought in both World War I and II. Most notable were the Tuskegee Airmen. They were segregated by indisputably the most racist white supremacist President since the end of slavery – Woodrow Wilson. The first integration of military units was ordered by then-General Dwight Eisenhower. He created a special unit that integrated Tuskegee airmen with regular white flight crews.
Wilson is somewhat known for segregating the military, but history often omits his segregation of the Executive Branch of the Federal government. He put in place policies that would deter the hiring of blacks. That is why he established the requirement that federal employment applications would have to be accompanied by a photograph. He did the same thing at Princeton University, when he was the school’s president. Has that been part left-wing black history?
It is ironic that the power-elite of a political culture that would tear down statues of President Lincoln – and remove his name from public schools — are the same folks who gather at a Washington, D.C. think tank named after Woodrow Wilson — and lecture alongside the statues and memorials to Wilson at Princeton.
The left-wing version of black history is a complete misrepresentation of Franklin Roosevelt – who was the second most racist President since the end of slavery.
Roosevelt was a hardcore white supremacist. His prejudice was not only against Negroes. His opposition to interracial marriage also extended to Asians. (More about Roosevelt in a future commentary.)
These are just small samples of how black history has been distorted or censored for partisan political purposes. In the next Black History Month commentary, we will look at the flagrant misrepresentation of the 1960s civil rights era.
So, there ‘tis