No one can deny that 2020 was a year of reflection. It seems that a lot of ugliness had slipped through the cracks when we were all too busy with a full social calendar or crossing off items on our bucket lists. But when it all stood still, we had to sit with the horrifying truths of our country. The biggest one of all, sparked by the death of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer, is racism.

In much-needed conversations with peers, I've listened to phrases like "I just don't understand how this could happen" or "I don't see why people would choose to be racist." History shows us that it's much more complex than that. Racism has infiltrated the entire system, especially education, and therefore it is not necessarily an individual's choice to have bias. White supremacy has been silently promoted through education starting at a young age, especially because of the history of textbook selection.

As Americans debate the use of Critical Race Theory in classrooms, and textbooks continually fall short on black history, taking a look at a woman named Mildred Lewis Rutherford can provide a lot of answers. More than a hundred years ago she preserved the elitism of the Old South and silenced Black stories in textbooks. Racism is not a passive, amorphous blob that mysteriously prevails. It has been forced into our lives since the day we were born, planned out, and amplified through academia by people like Rutherford.

At the start of the 20th century, there was a movement among Southerners to promote and push their white supremacist ideals through the retelling of history. They felt that books documenting the Civil War villanized the South and those young children were especially susceptible to these "lies".

The most effective way to ensure that white supremacist ideology would prevail in the South was to monitor school textbooks and have women spearhead the movement. They organized, wrote speeches, sent letters, made pamphlets, and wrapped racism so tightly in the South's identity that it could not be undone. And as women, they justified their actions by reminding people of their innate caretaker abilities, their "role in the home," and that it was all to preserve the innocence of their children.

In 1919, Mildred Lewis Rutherford attended the annual meeting of the United Confederate Veterans and presented her plan to propagate the "truths of history." As the former Historian General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she claimed that 81 percent of the southern schools were using "Yankee-authored" textbooks that stated slavery as the cause of the Civil War, diminished state's rights, glorified Lincoln, and fixated on the inhumanity of slaveholders. Rutherford utilized her place in politics to gain momentum. She argued that white Southerners were complicit in letting this happen and encouraged members of the UCV to donate time and money to mend the problem.

The UCV established the Rutherford Committee in response, and distributed her pamphlet entitled "A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges, and Libraries." This pamphlet was a guide to the Lost Cause ideology, in which the South is painted as the victim, and the abolishment of slavery identified as the end of the Southern way of life. "A Measuring Rod" was calling on Southerners to engage in selecting textbooks through state committees that would preserve the Old South and white supremacist beliefs in education.

By 1926, committees were successfully created in Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. They all chose textbooks for the states according to the Rutherford Committees' guidelines. One book that was approved by the Mississippi committee was titled the KKK by Laura Rose. In it, the author argued that the KKK was established as a reaction to black men wanting to take white wives. Additionally, because of this book, children in schools were taught that the KKK members were "the best citizens of our country" motivated by "love and protection of the home." She praised the Klan for uplifting "the purity and domination of the Anglo-Saxon race."

Rutherford continued to applaud similar books that made their way onto school textbook lists. Additionally, she called upon students, teachers, parents, and anyone involved in education to continue to preserve white supremacy and segregation in schools. It is a terrifying truth that women, especially Rutherford, dedicated their entire lives to this "cause." And it didn't stop at textbook lists. The UDC was successful in raising more than 100,000 dollars in scholarship funds by the 1920s, with the goal of sending white students to college to preserve their perception of history.

By the 1940s, the narrative of Confederate sympathy and romanticism of the South gained popularity nationwide. These textbooks did not reveal the horrors of slavery or include Black history as a part of the curriculum. In fact, in addition to twisting the history of the Civil War to justify the actions of the South, Black voices were completely erased from most textbooks. Rutherford and the UCV meticulously and persistently left their racist mark on education, and consequently, generations of schoolchildren would not learn about paramount events in American history such as Juneteenth or the Tulsa massacre.

In 1941, the author Mary Elizabeth Carpenter studied the content in 86 American textbooks between 1826 and 1939, making an even closer examination of the absence of Black history. She noted that the National Education Association (NEA) found that on a list of 31 topics avoided or diminished, racial problems were seventh. Furthermore, Black stories, leaders, writers, and artists were barely mentioned.

Carpenter also wrote that these textbooks justified the South's treatment of enslaved peoples. Most of the textbooks examined by Carpenter contained no pictures of Black Americans. In fact, because of intense censorship on behalf of Rutherford and her committees, the only textbook that mentioned Harriet Tubman had been eliminated from statewide adoption lists.

The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were prolific in establishing the education of young Americans. Every time that a teacher or board member has failed to examine the lack of Black history in our textbooks, white supremacy inherently endured.

By the 1960s and 70s, many of today's leaders were young students reading textbooks chosen by Rutherford and her committee. The issue is not only the distortion of the Civil War or the lack of transparency about the slave trade, but that white people have purposefully erased Black stories from the national narrative. Black history is American history, and if we remain ignorant of the fact that Black Americans have been silenced, this country can never begin to heal.

Source: McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Oxford University Press, 2020.