Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Fight over a Mississippi Textbook

What history should schools teach? Who should decide? And how? These questions have always been central to the United States's tumultuous culture wars. With Civil Rights, Culture Wars, Charles W. Eagles offers a valuable new exploration of one twentieth-century battle over these questions. Eagles's book examines the career of a controversial new state-history textbook in 1970s Mississippi. The sociologist James Loewen and historian Charles Sallis hoped their book, Mississippi: Conflict and Change (1974), would introduce Mississippi's ninth-graders to the kinds of history that had been widely accepted by academic historians. Instead of preaching a bland, saccharine history of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement, Loewen and Sallis wanted to tell the full story of Mississippi's conflicted history. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mississippi's educational establishment balked. The new textbook was rejected by the state textbook commission as “‘unsuitable’ for classroom use” (p. 156). Critics worried that Loewen and Sallis's text harped on racial animosity. Images of a lynching, especially, caused consternation among commission members. Even one African American member of the commission believed the new textbook would remind African American students of a violent history “they want to forget” (p. 183).