Popular opinion favors the latter theory. The following year, Virginia school officials were chagrined to learn that one of their state-adopted textbooks was teaching fourth graders that thousands of loyal slaves took up arms for the confederacy.Īt the bottom of all of these is one basic question: was the Civil War about slavery, or states’ rights? In 2010, for instance, Texas school officials made the news by insisting that Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address be given equal prominence with Abraham Lincoln’s in that state’s social studies curriculum. But it’s not always about the Stars and Bars. (As I write, there are two such cases pending-one in Oregon and the other in Florida, making this an average news week.) Another common forum is the classroom. Evidence of this crops up all the time, often in the form of a legal dispute over a display of the Confederate flag. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question-to wit: what caused the war? One hundred and fifty years after the event, Americans-at least the vast majority who toil outside academia-still can’t agree. The Civil War is like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. The next day, Kout said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a message: This is our heritage. On Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic students brought Mexican flags to school. In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned something else-an incident that had happened the previous spring at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. Excerpted from "The New Mind of the South"
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