Sergeant Schultz Republicanism: Racism? What racism? I know nothing! I know nothing!

John Banner in his famous role on “Hogan’s Heroes.”

You know a story has become “a thing” when the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post cover the same subject on the same day.  “Disputing Racism’s Reach, Republicans Rattle American Schools” is the Times headline.  “Texas bill to ban teaching of critical race theory puts teachers on front lines of culture war over how history is taught” is the way the Washington Post takes on the subject.  Both stories are about the same thing:  legislatures in Republican-controlled states all around the country are considering bills to return the teaching of American history to “the way things used to be,” when history class was a glossy celebration of founding fathers that left out talking about the stains of slavery and racism that so hugely dominated the nation’s founding.

“It’s based on false history when they try to look back and denigrate the Founding Fathers, denigrate the American Revolution,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said last month as he demanded that the state’s board of education ban teaching critical race theory in favor of teaching what Republicans are calling “traditional history.”  Twenty Republican state attorney generals recently signed a letter to the Biden administration demanding that the Department of Education withhold federal funding from states that allow the teaching of critical race theory, an academic discipline that teaches the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism are ingrained into law enforcement, the judicial system, and other American institutions.

In Idaho, Republicans have pushed through a bill that would withhold state funding from schools that don’t follow state guidelines on the teaching of slavery.  A similar bill was signed into law in Oklahoma in early May.  Bills restricting the way American history is taught are pending in Texas and Ohio, among other states. 

Local battles are heating up all over. Fights over the teaching of American history are affecting school board races and the appointments of school administrators favorable to one side of the issue or the other.  In Loudon County, Virginia, for example, groups of parents of schoolchildren have taken sides.  One group calls itself “anti-racist.”  The other group, headed by a former political appointee in the Trump administration, is leading a recall drive against six of nine school board members over the issue of teaching about systemic racism.

I know a little about Loudon County, located just to the west of Washington D.C.  My grandparents owned a farm there in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s that I used to visit as a boy.  In 2019, a report on “racial inequity” determined that there was a racial achievement gap in the county, that the use of racial slurs was common in the schools, and that there was a racial disparity in the way school discipline was meted out. 

Republicans don’t want to talk about systemic racism.  They want to limit the amount of teaching that can be done about slavery and its antecedents, the era of Jim Crow and segregation.  They want school children to be taught that everything has been magically equal and perfect and wonderful ever since the country’s founding.

Well, here is a little of the way things used to be in Loudon County, Virginia, which was one of the last counties in the United States to integrate its schools after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in 1954.  See if any of the following sounds to you like “systemic” or “institutional” behavior by the state of Virginia.

On November 10, 1955 the League of Virginia Counties met and voted for a resolution putting the League on record as “unalterably opposed to integration” and supporting an order that counties should not be allowed to integrate.

The very next day, the “Gray Commission” was appointed by the governor of Virginia to study how the state could respond to the Brown decision.  The commission found that the Brown decision was “bad law” and a violation of states’ rights.  It concluded that the state of Virginia could not compel any student to attend an integrated school.

On December 13, the state board of education supported the Gray Commission’s findings and issued a document calling for a state constitutional convention to address the issue of integration.  The board of education instructed all Virginia counties to continue their policies of segregated public schools.  It also issued a report that “Negros” were receiving state benefits far out of proportion to their contribution of state taxes.  The state board of education did not comment on racial inequities in hiring for state jobs or inequities in pay between white and Black citizens.   

On December 18, Senator Harry Byrd issued a statement in support of a constitutional convention to forbid integration of Virginia schools.

On December 19, the Loudon County Bar Association issued an opinion supporting amending the state constitution to forbid integration. 

On December 24, the Virginia State Teacher’s Association issued a report in the Virginia State Education Bulletin supporting the closure of public schools rather than allow their integration, recommending that children be sent to private and parochial schools rather than integrated schools.

In March of 1956, most of the congressmen and senators from Southern states – 77 representatives and 19 senators – signed “The Southern Manifesto on Integration,” written by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd.  The “manifesto” condemned Brown v. Board of Education as “a clear abuse of judicial power” that had been instigated by “outside agitators” and pledged Southern states to use “all lawful means of resistance” to integration.  The legislatures of eight Southern states voted identical resolutions that condemned Brown as an “illegal encroachment on states rights” and declared the decision “null, void and of no effect.”

Also in 1956, the Virginia legislature passed a law requiring that any public school that enrolled both white and Black children would be cut off from state funding.  The governor immediately closed three school systems in the state to prevent integration.  After the Virginia supreme court invalidated the state law defunding integrated schools, the legislature passed a new law enacting a “freedom of choice” program providing tuition grants of state funds for students who chose to attend private segregated schools.

In 1959, Prince Edward County Virginia closed its entire public school system after a federal court ordered the county to integrate.  The county created private schools for white students using state education grants and county tax credits.  More than 90 percent of white students enrolled in the new schools.  The 1700 Black students in the county were left with no state-funded schools for five years until the Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s tuition grants and forced Prince Edward County to integrate and re-open its public schools.

All during this period, school systems in Virginia counties like Loudon County owned yellow school busses and had bus routes that picked up school children and took them to school in the morning and took them home in the afternoon.  They provided yellow school buses for white children.  Black children, the sons and daughters of parents who paid taxes that bought the yellow school buses and paid the drivers, well, they walked to school.

There is nothing, nothing, more institutional and systemic than the commissions that were formed, the county associations that met, the bar associations that issued papers, the state legislatures that voted, the entire school systems that closed their doors, and the United States senators and congressmen who signed the “Southern Manifesto.” Entire governmental systems were brought to bear to promote racism and prevent integration.  How much more blatant can anything be?

And yet Republicans are trying to hide this history and replace it with their literally whitewashed version of an America that never was.  They have begun a campaign to give anti-racism the same black eye they have given anti-fascism.  They know what motivates their base:  the same thing that motivated the “base” of white Southern voters in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  They can’t turn the clock back on Brown v. Board of Ed. – yet – but they can turn the clock back on the way history is taught to the voters of tomorrow.

They have a plan, and they’re putting it to work in one Republican-controlled state after another:  feed the children lies and water them with glossy gaslighting and watch them blossom into the Republican base of the future.