Beck Barnett

May 3, 2023

Over the past few years, Republican state legislatures have placed restrictions on teaching what they see as Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public school classrooms. Most recently, North Carolina Republicans attempted to pass legislation banning the teaching of “Thirteen Prohibited Concepts,” including “an individual, solely by virtue of his or her race is inherently racist” and “The United States was created by members of a particular race for the purpose of oppressing others of another race.” [1] While scholars who teach CRT disagree with conservative claims that these concepts are taught by the discipline or taught in primary and secondary schools, at all, legislators from both sides of the aisle should make reforms to the American racial history taught in high schools. Specifically, they should increase the education on this subject so the average American student will learn about some of the darkest yet most influential events from our past. Five such events which current curriculums barely address also challenge some relevant misconceptions of current U.S. racism: the Dakota War, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, the Tulsa Massacre, the Insular Cases, and the Philippine-American War. These events occurred after 1860 and should be taught to reflect the modern relevance of violent racism in America.

Americans learn about the Civil War with tunnel vision, only focusing on the main battle, ignoring other consequential conflicts during Lincoln’s term. For example, few know France conquered Mexico during the period of U.S. weakness or that America fought another war at the same time. The Dakota War of 1862 was a violent ethnic struggle revolving around the founding of Minnesota on Native American land. The corruption, colonialism, and treaty violations the Dakota faced encouraged some of them to kill over 600 settlers in their former land. [2] After anti-war Dakota leaders forced a surrender, the U.S. marched every person from the tribe into concentration camps and sentenced 303 people to death through an illegal military commission. [3] President Lincoln approved a fraction of the sentences out of fear of further violence, and 38 of these sentences were publicly executed. [3] The U.S. then banished the Dakota from Minnesota. [2] These types of conflicts quickly ceded most remaining Native American land to the United States for the rest of the 1800s. Teaching about the war would reveal the institutional injustice and oppression enforcing manifest destiny.

The most well-known racist organization in the U.S., the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), is thankfully mentioned in history classrooms. However, the quantifiable extent and brutality of their violence, plus their origin, requires thorough examination. The KKK and similar terrorist groups in the South sought to suppress Black suffrage, not only through occasional acts of violence but also through thousands of murders. [4] These groups largely originated from former Confederate officers, who continued to utilize their battlefield knowledge to kill Black voters and Republican officials. Some of the largest massacres they perpetrated included estimated 200 casualties in Opelousas, Louisiana; 150, in Millican, Texas; 150, in Colfax, Louisiana; along with many more lynchings and assassinations. [5] This mass violence intentionally destroyed Reconstruction and cemented the ability for Democrats to establish Jim Crow laws. [6]

While early KKK membership was relatively small and disjointed, successful Confederate attempts to rewrite history, which blurred the motives of the anti-black South, drastically spread the Klan’s institutional reach in the 1920s. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson hosted a showing of the racist film, Birth of a Nation, at the White House; this film glorified the Klan and gained immense popularity, fueling its modern resurgence. [7] Membership was in the millions at the KKK’s peak, encompassing many Northerners and about 30% of Indiana’s male, native-born population. [8] The ultra-violent and previously widespread prevalence of the KKK needs to be taught to counter notions that the Klan was just a couple instances of violent people in goofy costumes. In fact, the costumes were most likely meant for that purpose: to present the organization in a theatrical manner to ward off serious investigation. [9] These Confederate remnant groups are largely responsible for the Confederate monuments and flags still in the South today. [10]

Today, economic injustice plays a major role in the hardships of the African American community, continuing the pattern of economic racism from our history. Even when Black communities accumulated wealth, racist violence destroyed it, as demonstrated by the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. This instance of violence began with a false accusation of assault causing a armed, white mob to burn the rich, Black neighborhood of Greenwood to the ground, killing 300 people and detaining 6000 in internment camps. [11] Former veterans used their World War I planes to commence aerial bombings, and many in the mob were deputized to commit the acts. [11] After the massacre, the neighborhood lost nearly 27 million dollars in property, reversing Black economic progress in the area for decades. [11] Wealth is built through generations, so it is important for American students to understand the historic crimes that destroyed Black investments, without repayment.

 After the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, most people under the American government had the de jure right to vote, besides those in our conquered territories. The people in the unincorporated territories of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands have a second-class form of citizenship due to the Insular Cases of the early 1900s. After the Spanish-American War, Spain sold some of their colonies to the United States. To the dismay of the people who inhabited these areas, American troops occupied these areas. [12] Since Congress did not want to incorporate the new territories as states, the civil rights of those who lived there remained in limbo until a series of Supreme Court cases in 1901, including Downes v. Bidwell. [13] The same set of judges who established the “separate but equal doctrine” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruled that the U.S. could create “temporary” governments in conquered territory and the constitution did not need to apply in them. [13] Currently, some of these territories are given one non-voting delegate to elect to Congress and cannot vote for President. These territories are still torn between independence and statehood, looking for any path to gain suitable federal representation. Students should be able to explore the colonial and exploitative establishment of these territories, so they can contemplate the justification of its persistence.

Although classrooms teach that American isolationism prevailed until the World Wars because of the Monroe Doctrine, America expanded and frequently engaged its military abroad to secure new markets for its growing economy. While the Korean Expedition of 1871 and the Japanese Black Ships incident in 1853 provide some early examples of the military breaking the doctrine to increase trade, President McKinley committed the greatest and most gruesome violation of the doctrine during his term. In the Philippine American War of 1899, the United States struggled to conquer the Philippines after defeating the Spanish, fighting on the wrong side of a war for independence. [12] The U.S. committed an assortment of war crimes against the Philippine people, including torture, establishing concentration camps, village burning, and civilian massacres. [12] In his testimony to Congress, General Jacob H. Smith admitted to ordering his soldiers to “kill and burn.” [12] Specifically, he wanted them to kill everyone “who is capable of bearing arms” who he defined as “everyone over the age of 10.” [12] Through this, America dehumanized the people they fought and colonized, spewing the myth that they were “cleaning up” the country and establishing “civilization.” [14] In 1902, when speaking on his support for the war, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that it saw “the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism.” [14] This event shaped the justification for future military interventions and is one of the multitude of blemishes on the U.S. military’s legacy.

While these events portray America in a bad light, learning about them would challenge citizens’ pride in some of the nation’s accomplishments, such as the Civil Rights Movement, the successful expansions of suffrage, and our role in both World Wars. Teaching the history we have swept under the rug would help students understand and contextualize institutional criticism, rather than subconsciously denying anything critical of our modern history.

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References

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colfax_Riot_sign_IMG_2401.JPG, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

[1] Withrow, Emma. 2023. “North Carolina GOP hoping second time’s the charm with new anti-CRT bill.” FOX8 WGHP. https://myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/north-carolina-gop-hoping-second-times-the-charm-with-new-anti-crt-bill/.

[2] Carol Chomsky, “The United States-Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1 (January 1990): 13-98

[3] Berg, Scott W. “Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History, by Gary Clayton Anderson.” (2021)

[4] Daniel Byman; White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States. International Security 2021; 46 (1): 53–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00410

[5] Equal Justice Initiative. “DOCUMENTING RECONSTRUCTION VIOLENCE: Known and Unknown Horrors.” RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876. Equal Justice Initiative, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep30690.6.

[5] Hogue, James K. “The 1873 Battle of Colfax: Paramilitarism and Counterrevolution in Louisiana.” University of North Carolina, Charlotte. 2006. www.warhistorian.org/hogue-colfax.pdf

[6] Daniel Byman; White Supremacy, Terrorism, and the Failure of Reconstruction in the United States. International Security 2021; 46 (1): 53–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00410

[7] McVeigh, Rory “Structural Incentives for Conservative Mobilization: Power Devaluation and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1925.” Social Forces 77, no. 4 (1999): 1461-1496.

[8] Moore, Leonard J.. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928. United Kingdom: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

[9] Parsons, Elaine Frantz. “Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan.” The Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (2005): 811–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/3659969.

[10] Little, Becky. 2021. “How The US Got So Many Confederate Monuments.” History. https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments.

[11] Williams, Josh. 2021. “What the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html.

[12] Kinzer, Stephen. The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. Macmillan, 2017.

[13] Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901)

[14]  Paul A. Kramer, Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War, Diplomatic History, Volume 30, Issue 2, April 2006, Pages 169–210, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2006.00546.x