1 “Statement of Principle” (ms, 15 June 1944), frames 265–66; press release by Davis, Benjamin J. Jr., 15 June 1944, frame 264, both in reel 22, Part 16B, Papers of the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994).Google Scholar

2 Following social scientists Sniderman, Paul M. and Carmines, Edward G. this essay uses “liberal” to connote Americans who shared four basic values: “commitment to equality, belief in the efficacy of government as a [sic] agent of social change, openness to change, and concern for the less well-off.” Sniderman and Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4–5. Before World War II, white liberals largely ignored the many ways that racial segregation and discrimination violated their core principles. But the global conflict against fascism—and, subsequently, the Cold War struggle against communism—brought this contradiction into broad relief, placing civil rights at the heart of the American liberal agenda. Gerstle, Gary “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043–1073; Takaki, Ronald Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000); Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Borstelmann, Thomas The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

3 “Bigotry, Intolerance,” New York Age, 20 Oct. 1945, p. 6; Paine, Lola “Superintendent Wade on ‘Poison’ List as Author of Anti-Negro Textbook,” unidentified clipping, 24 Dec. 1945, fiche 004.909–1; New York Teachers Union, Bias and Prejudice in Textbooks in Use in New York City Schools: An Indictment (n.p., 1950), fiche 004–909–5, both in Schomburg Clipping File [hereafter SCF], Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York; “Unbiased History,” New York Age, 17 Nov. 1945, p. 6.Google Scholar

4 Board of Education of the City of New York, “To Publishers of Text Materials for the Schools: Policy Statement on Treatment of Minorities in Textbooks” (ms, 9 Oct. 1962), fiche 004.909–3, SCF; Horace Woodland, untitled ms, ? Feb. 1963, folder 16, Box 12, Floyd Logan Papers, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia. On the use of psychological evidence and “damage” imagery in the Brown v. Board of Education era, see Herman, Ellen The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 174–207; Jackson, John P. Jr., “The Triumph of the Segregationists? A Historiographical Inquiry Into Psychology and the Brown Litigation,” History of Psychology 3 (Aug. 2000): 239–61; Jackson, Walter A. Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 279–93; Kluger, Richard Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 1975), 315–45; and, especially, Scott, Daryl Michael Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 119–36.Google Scholar

5 For varied accounts of this trend, see Herman, Romance of American Psychology; Capshew, James H. Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Norton, 2001); and Moskowitz, Eva S. In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

6 “Vice President Humphrey Advocates the Study of Negro History by All Americans,” 113 Cong., 1 sess., Feb. 15, 1967, p. 3488. Published in Negro Digest, a popular African-American periodical, Humphrey's remarks were read into the Congressional Record by Michigan lawmaker John Conyers.Google Scholar

7 Feldstein, Ruth Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 73. On the complex links between civil rights at home and the struggle against communism abroad, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line.Google Scholar

8 Recently, historians have emphasized the critical role of World War II in galvanizing the black quest for civil rights. Indeed, the entire lens of civil-rights scholarship has shifted backwards 20 years, from the better-known “1960s generation” to their forebears in the 1940s. See, e.g., Lawson, Steven F. Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), 1–28; Takaki, Double Victory, 22–57; Fairclough, Adam Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2001 (New York: Viking, 2001), 181–226.Google Scholar

9 See, e.g. Gitlin, Todd The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1998); and Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, 194–228. Stressing the 1960s quest for African-American identity, other scholars see continuity—not divergence—between the civil rights movement and present-day multiculturalism. See, e.g., Sleeter, Christine E. Multicultural Education as Social Activism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Nieto, Sonia “From Brown Heroes and Holidays to Assimilationist Agendas: Reconsidering the Critiques of Multicultural Education,” in Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sleeter, Christine E. and McLaren, Peter L. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 191–220, esp. 192; and Grant, Carl A. “Reflections on the Promise of Brown and Multicultural Education,” in Brown v. Board of Education: The Challenge for Today's Schools, ed. Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe and Miller, Lamar P. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 107–21.Google Scholar

10 To be sure, a concern for racial identity marked textbook campaigns by Carter G. Woodson—the so-called “Father of Negro History”—in the 1920s and 1930s. Woodson focused his interwar efforts mainly upon segregated black schools in the South, where he promoted special history texts (including his own monographs) for “Negro History” elective courses. After World War II and the defeat of fascism, however, Woodson declared a new purpose for Negro History: to teach “brotherhood” across every race, not simply pride within his own. If whites learned of the black contribution to national and world civilization, Woodson wrote hopefully, they would turn a deaf ear to bigots—“American Nazis,” in Woodson's rich phrase—who still despised African-Americans. From the acquisition of his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1912 to his death in 1950, meanwhile, Woodson also insisted that historical scholarship and instruction should seek shared, objective accounts of the past. After Brown, by contrast, textbook critics often privileged the psychological effect of history over its accuracy and objectivity. Many contemporary multiculturalists reject the entire notion of an “objective” history, presuming that “all knowledge reflects the power and social relationships within society,” as James A. Banks has written. Zimmerman, Jonathan Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 42–47; Woodson, Carter G. “‘Negro History Week’ Stresses Race's Part in Civilization,” New South 1 (Jan. 1946): 4; Banks, James A. “The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education,” in Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action, ed. Banks, James A. (New York-Teachers College Press, 1996), 16.Google Scholar

11 Wilkins, Roy “Next Steps in Education for Racial Understanding,” Education (Tan. 1946), fiche 004.909–1, SCF.Google Scholar

12 The standard history of intercultural education before World War II is still Montalto, Nicholas V. A History of the Intercultural Education Movement, 1924–1941 (New York: Garland, 1982). A more recent and sophisticated account appears in Selig, Diana “Cultural Gifts: American Liberals, Childhood, and the Origins of Multiculturalism, 1924–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Berkeley, 2001), 100–168.Google Scholar

13 According to historians of “Whiteness,” World War II marked the final stage in the transformation of European “ethnics” into White people. Whether or not these scholars exaggerate the degree of race-based hostility that ethnics suffered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it seems clear that European immigrants became less noticeable—and more “White”—in the World War II era. Dialogues on race concentrated almost exclusively upon two supposedly undifferentiated populations, “Negroes” and “whites.” Jacobson, Matthew Frye Whiteness of a Different Color (Harvard University Press, 1998), 247, 258; Gleason, Philip “Americans All,” in idem., Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 155; Arnesen, Eric “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2002): 3–32, esp. 13–14.Google Scholar

14 Korstad, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988: 786; Sitkoff, Harvard “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,“ Journal of American History 58 (December 1971): 671, 678–81; Administrative Committee on Intercultural and Interracial Education to Bow, Warren E. 3 April 1944, frame 747, reel 7, Part 17, NAACP Papers; Shaffer, Robert “Multicultural Education in New York City During World War II,” New York History 77 (July 1996): 325.Google Scholar

15 Selig, “Cultural Gifts,” 417 429; Hilda Taba and William Van Til, Democratic Human Relations: Promising Practices in Intergroup and Intercultural Education in the Social Studies (Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies, 1945), 66–67, 343, quoted in Noffke, Susan E. “Multicultural Curricula: ‘Whose Knowledge?’ and Beyond,” in The Curriculum: Problems, Politics, and Possibilities, ed. Beyer, Landon E. and Apple, Michael W. 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 108; Stuart Svonkin Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 74–75.Google Scholar

16 Carver, George Washington to DuBois, Rachel Davis 31 July 1927, folder 3; DuBois, Rachel Davis Some Racial Contributions to America: A Study Outline for Secondary Schools (Philadelphia: Committee on Interests of the Colored Race, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, n.d. [1927?]), folder 5, both in box 2, Davis DuBois, Rachel Papers, Immigration History Research Center, St. Paul, Minnesota; Rachel Davis DuBois with Corann Okorodud, All This and Something More: Pioneering in Intercultural Edu-cation (Bryn Mawr, PA: Dorrance and Co., 1984), 48–52; Administrative Assistant to “Dear_____,” 18 January 1946, frame 798, reel 6, part 17; Jensen, Noma “Office Record” (n.d. [1945), frame 229, reel 16, part 19B; idem, “Summary of Intercultural Education Survey in Trenton, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis” (ms, 3 March 1945), frame 227, reel 16, part 19B, all in NAACP Papers; Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice, 52; Jensen, “Annual Report, Jan. 1, 1945—Jan. 1, 1946” (ms, 1946), frame 796, reel 6, part 17, NAACP Papers. Rachel DuBois and W. E. B. Du Bois were not related.Google Scholar

17 Davis, Frank Marshall “Now is Strategic Time to Start Improving Our School Textbooks,” Kansas City Call, 6 April 1943, frame 119, reel 83, Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File (Tuskegee: Carver Research Foundation, 1978); Korstad and Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost,” 786.Google Scholar

18 Wilkins, Roy to Jensen, Noma 22 April 1944, frame 257, reel 22, part 16B, NAACP Papers; Conrad, Earl “Fascism Lives in New York Textbooks,” Chicago Defender, 27 April 1946, p. 13; Rich, Faith B. “Summary Report of the 1946 and early 1947 Education Work…” (ms, 1948), folder 39, box 2, Faith Rich Papers, Special Collections, Harold Washington Library, Chicago Public Libraries, Chicago; Mrs. E. K., “A Textbook in Race Hate” Daily Worker, 17 Feb. 1950, fiche 004.909–1, SCF; Back, Adina “Up South in New York: The 1950s School Desegregation Struggles” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997), 83.Google Scholar

19 New York Teachers Union, Bias and Prejudice in Textbooks, 18; Boas, Franz to Campbell, Harold G. 25 May 1942, “Campbell, Harold G” folder, Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; Cora M. Patton to Marian Anderson, 6 Aug. 1952, folder 2, box 3, Rich Papers.Google Scholar

20 Spottswood, Stephen G. to Washington Post, 3 Oct. 1947; “Pros and Cons Pop Around Little Black Sambo, Still ‘Just a Story’ to Child,” Washington Post, 28 Sept. 1947; “‘Black Sambo’ Story Use Protested,” ibid., 27 Sept. 1947; Corning, Hobart A. to Hill, William Allyn 23 Oct. 1947, all in folder 871, box 78–44, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—Washington, D.C. Branch [hereafter NAACP-DC Papers], Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. For black attacks upon other literature texts, see, e.g. “AYD Asks Negro on School Board,” Daily Worker, 24 Jan. 1946, fiche 004.909–1; “How School Officials Poison Children's Minds,” Daily Worker 24 May 1951, fiche 004.909–2, both in SCF.Google Scholar

21 “Little Black Sambo,” Washington Post, 30 Sept. 1947, folder 871, box 78–44, NAACP-DC Papers. For other white satires of the Sambo controversy—accusing blacks of “censorship” as well as “hypersensitivity”—see Moore, Everett T. “Censorship in the Name of Better Relations,” American Library Association Bulletin, July-August 1961, fiche 004.909–3, SCF; McGinley, Phyllis “Tiger, Tiger,” New Yorker 21 (26 Jan. 1946): 22.Google Scholar

22 Morison, Samuel Eliot and Commager, Henry Steele The Growth of the American Republic, 4th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 537, 539; Jumonville, Neil Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 147, 297n; Bierstedt, Robert “The Writers of Textbooks,” in Text Materials in Modern Education: A Comprehensive Theory and Platform for Research, ed. Cronbach, Lee J. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955), 110.Google Scholar

23 White, Walter to Studebaker, John W. 10 May 1941, frame 70, reel 53, The Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1980); Patton, Cora M. and Rich, Faith to “Dear Committee Member,” 30 Nov. 1947; McGee, Henry W. to ?, 6 March 1947, both in folder 39, box 2, Rich Papers.Google Scholar

24 Spottswood, Stephen G. to Post, Washington 3 Oct. 1947, folder 871, box 78–44, NAACP-DC Papers.Google Scholar

25 Williams, Aubrey to Persons, Gordon 18 July 1952, frame 206; Southern Conference Educational Fund, “Should all discussion of racial and religious intolerance be suppressed in the school rooms of a Southern state?” (ms, n.d. [1952]), frame 207, both in reel 10, part 18C, NAACP Papers; Ruby Hurley to Persons, 27 May 1952; Persons to Herman Talmadge, n.d. [1952], both enclosed with Talmadge, Herman to Talmadge, May 5 June 1952, folder 5, box 8, May Erwin Talmadge Papers, Hargrett Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Established by executive order in 1941, the Fair Employment Practices Committee provided a frequent flashpoint for white-supremacist dissent in the years before Brown v. Board of Education. Although the FEPC had little practical effect upon workplace discrimination, it symbolized Yankee intrusion into Dixie's allegedly “natural” system of race relations. Grantham, Dewey W. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 195–96; Goldfield, David R. Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 33–37.Google Scholar

26 For brief accounts of these earlier textbook campaigns in the South, see Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 180–91; Zimmerman, Whose America?, 32–42.Google Scholar

27 State Board of Education minutes, 12 Sept. 1955, p. 11, folder 5, box 33, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

28 “Our Changing Social Order” (ms, n.d. [1955]), enclosed with Dean, George C. to Talmadge, May 22 April 1955, folder 8, box 8, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

29 State Board of Education minutes, 11 April 1955, p. 13, folder 3, box 33; State Board of Education minutes, 2 May 1955, pp. 14–15, folder 4, box 33; “Name Withheld,” “Opinion Offered on Textbook Revisions,” Atlanta Journal, 16 May 1955, folder 5, box 50; State Board of Education minutes, 24 May 1955, p. 9, folder 4, box 33; State Board of Education minutes, 12 Dec. 1955, p. 1, folder 5, box 33, all in Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

30 Bloch, Charles J. to Peters, James S. 4 March 1959; Talmadge, May to Bloch, 5 March 1959, both in folder 12, box 30, Talmadge Papers.Google Scholar

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32 “Negro History in the Curriculum,” Negro History Bulletin (December 1955), fiche 003–565–2, SCF. The unidentified speaker delivered his address to the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, America's oldest and most influential black history organization. Founded in 1915 by Carter G. Woodson, the ASNLH would change its name in 1972 to the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 14, 301.Google Scholar

33 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483; Kluger, Simple Justice, 318–19, 353–56; Scott, Contempt and Pity, 229n; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 183–84.Google Scholar

34 English, Walter H. “Minority Group Attitudes of Negroes and Implications for Guidance,” Journal of Negro Education 26 (Spring 1957): 99–100, 105. On the intergroup “Springfield Plan” and its influence in other cities, see Chatto, Clarence I. and Halligan, Alice L. The Story of the Springfield Plan (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1945); Grossman, Mordecai “The Schools Fight Prejudice: An Appraisal of the Intercultural Education Movement,” Commentary 1 (April 1946): 36.Google Scholar

35 For an example of earlier attacks on racist textbooks in the JNE, targeting the effect of these texts on white as well as black readers, see Abramowitz, Jack “Common Distortions in Textbook Treatment of Slavery,” Journal of Negro Education 18 (Winter 1949): 16–18; for similar attacks in other black publications, see “Mississippi Takes the Lead,” Negro History Bulletin 2 (November 1938): 12; “Negro Textbooks in the Public Schools,” Black Dispatch, 26 April 1939, frame 155, reel 63; “The Negro's Debut in Chicago Schools,” Chicago Bee, 7 June 1942, frame 521, reel 78, both in Tuskegee Institute News Clipping File; “Just Give Her a Generation,” Negro Digest 1 (October 1943): 3.Google Scholar

36 Withers, Pearl to “Dear Friend,” 26 January 1962, fiche 003.560–2, SCF; Detroit School Board minutes, 22 Jan. 1963, p. 389, “Task Force—Readings” folder, box 2, NCTE; “Criticism of Land of the Free” (ms, 25 July 1966), p. 140, folder 842, California Department of Education Records [hereafter CDER], California State Archives, Sacramento, California.Google Scholar

37 Wilson, Gertrude “The Text of our Textbooks,” Amsterdam News, 6 July 1963, p. 11; Detroit School Board minutes, 25 June 1968, p. 681, “Task Force—Readings” folder, box 2, Racism and Bias Task Force File, NCTE; “Still Missing,” New York Teacher News, 10 Feb. 1962, fiche 004.909–3, SCF. For other comments about the need for black “identification” with textbooks, see “UL Warns of ‘Squandering’ Child Potentials,” Urban League press release, 3 April 1963; “Harlem Parents to Write Primer,” New York Times, 27 December 1964, both in fiche 004.909–3, SCF.Google Scholar

38 The term “identity” was most closely associated with psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who used it to describe the necessary process whereby individuals linked themselves to human communities—in the past as well as in the present. A close student of Black literature and history, Erikson warned that African-Americans faced an especially difficult task in this regard: Blacks “are made to feel so inexorably ‘different,’” he wrote, “that legal desegregation can only be the beginning of a long and painful inner re-identification.” Erikson understood that Blacks across the political spectrum—not just in the “Black Power” movement—needed to construct a black identity, and that each individual would do so in his or her own way. Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 292; Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams, 127; Friedman, Lawrence J. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999), 261.Google Scholar

39 King, Martin Luther Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 43–44; Society, John Brown An Introduction to the Black Panther Party (n.p., May 1969), p. 2, Black Power General File, Tamiment Library, New York University.Google Scholar

40 Brandon, Brumsic Jr., “Readin’ Ritin’ ‘Rithmetic Racism,” in Harlem: A Community in Transition, ed. Clarke, John Henrik (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 228; Stewart, Charles E. “Correcting the Image of Negroes in Textbooks,” Negro History Bulletin 38 (November 1964): 42; “H. R. 12962,” 114 Congr., 2 sess., September 17, 1968, p. 27307.Google Scholar

41 “Providing for Establishment of Commission on Negro History and Culture,” 114 Congr., 2 sess., Sept. 16, 1968, p. 27016; Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 220, 233; Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 434.Google Scholar

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43 Slotkin, Aaron N. “The Treatment of Minorities in Textbooks: The Issues and The Outlook,” Strengthening Democracy 41 (May 1964): 2, folder 22, box 39, Philadelphia Fellowship Commission Papers, Urban Archives, Temple University; Black, American Schoolbook, 119; National Urban League, Textbooks, Civil Rights, and the Education of the American Negro, p. 2.Google Scholar

44 National Urban League, Textbooks, Civil Rights, and the Education, p. 2; Larry Cuban, “Not ‘Whether?’ But ‘Why? and How?,’” Journal of Negro Education 36 (Fall 1967): 435. See also Thompson, “Textbooks and Racial Pressure Groups,” p. 5.Google Scholar

45 Gonzalez, Eugene to Chunn, Ellsworth 3 April 1967, folder 843, CDER; “Textbook Crisis in California,” Interracial Books for Children 4 (Winter 1972–73), pp. 1–2, 8–9, box 11 (no folder), Racism and Bias Task Force File, NCTE; Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised (New York: Vintage, 1979), 96.Google Scholar

46 “Criticism of Land of the Free,” 130, 142, 119; “New U.S. History Textbooks Putting Stress on Minorities’ Contribution to Building Nation,” New York Times, 28 April 1974, fiche 004.909–4, SCF.Google Scholar

47 King, Where Do We Go From Here?, 41. For other examples of Blacks’ continued emphasis upon textbooks as a cause—and a potential remedy—for white racism, see “On the Use of Biased Textbooks,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 3 Nov. 1962, fiche 004–909–3, SCF; “Principal Urges Teaching Negro History to All Pupils,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 29 Feb. 1968, “Schools—Philadelphia—African-American-Studies” folder, box 204, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin News Clipping Collection, Urban Archives, Temple University; Gimlin, Hoyt “American History: Reappraisal and Revision,” Editorial Research Reports 2 (5 Nov. 1969), fiche 003–560–8, SCF.Google Scholar

48 Fitzgerald, America Revised, 101. On history textbooks’ ongoing neglect of racism, see Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 137–70.Google Scholar

49 Lukas, J. Anthony “Educators Turn to a Balanced Teaching of Negroes’ Role in American History,” New York Times, 8 July 1968, fiche 003.560–6, SCF.Google Scholar

50 Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, 5th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 524–27; Janis, Juel “Textbook Revisions in the Sixties,” Teachers College Record 72 (Dec. 1970): 300, 293; Bragdon, Henry Wilkinson “Dilemmas of a Textbook Writer,” Social Education 33 (March 1969): 297; Prugh, Peter H. “The Black Past: Civil Rights Movement Spurs Interest in Role of Negroes in History,” Wall Street Journal, 17 May 1967, fiche 003.560–5, SCF.Google Scholar

51 Zimmerman, Whose America?, 126–27; Orfield, Gary “The Growth of Segregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield, Gary and Eaton, Susan (New York: New Press, 1996), 58; letter from Andrew Blunt, Times-Dispatch [Richmond, VA.], 26 Feb. 1970, accession 7690–ac, Virginius Dabney Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.Google Scholar

52 According to historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, for example, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a “shift from civil rights universalism to the Black identity movement.” In workplaces as well as schools, she argues, “The [Black] therapeutic movement, with this ethos of empowerment, has trumped the civil rights movement, with its vision of the just society.” Likewise, Todd Gitlin chronicles “the swerve from civil rights, emphasizing a universal condition and universalizable rights, to cultural separatism, emphasizing difference and distinct needs.” Both authors date this development to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, which opened the way for a profusion of identity-based challenges to the civil rights ideal. As the textbook debate shows, however, “identity politics” lay firmly inside the mainstream of 1960s liberalism—not just on its radical fringes. Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, xii, 159; Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams, 153, 128–34.Google Scholar

53 This formulation closely follows the analysis in Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberals, Christians, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 343.Google Scholar

54 Herman, Romance of American Psychology, 312.Google Scholar

55 For further explanation and evidence of this point, see Zimmerman, Whose America?, esp. 6–7, 214, 221–22.Google Scholar

56 “Ghetto Education,” Center Magazine 1 (November 1968): 51.Google Scholar