Great story. We never learned about most of the Jim Crow violence in high school history class. It might have had something to do with the fact that my hometown was a mostly white former sundown town and KKK base, but I actually had a pretty decent history teacher who never shied away from telling us other awful thing that often get whitewashed, like Columbus’ genocidal behavior.

While slavery is big and unavoidable, some of these other incidents are easier to sweep under the rug. We learned about the Klan and lynchings and Emmett Till but I didn’t learn of the massacre in Greenwood Tulsa until much later. I had to find out from a Facebook post. I found out about Red Summer from a Wikipedia article. I also learned on my own that there were two race riots in neighboring Beaumont in the 1960s.

History classes are less about actually teaching young people what happened and more about giving them a story that makes them feel better about themselves as members of the nation, i.e. things were bad but they got better, we had slavery but we struggled to abolish it. We were never taught in our Texas History unit that Mexico’s abolition of slavery was the main reason Texans wanted independence.

The race riots don’t really fit that narrative. They want to focus on the positive, like the Civil Rights Movement, and give the impression of progress, that history is moving ever forward and upward.