Thread by @martensmatt1

I've seen a number of people claiming our education system is just fine when it comes to history because we teach kids about "slavery" and "racism."

Well, my history education was not fine: A 🧵

I grew up in the northeast. I went to a public high school. I have a college degree, a masters-level seminary degree (with an emphasis in church history), and a law degree (from a top 25 law school). Here are *some* of the things I never learned about:

1. Nobody ever told me about lynching, much less its purpose (intimidate blacks out of voting), its frequency (at the peak, in 1892, averaging 4+ a week), the horror (burning alive, cutting off fingers and toes as souvenirs, pregnant women), or the spectacle (1000s of observers).

2. Nobody told me that lynchings were announced (date, time, and place) in advance in newspapers, pictures were taken of the participants, post cards of the event were produced and sold, and then newspapers would report that the lynching was "at the hands of persons unknown."

3. Nobody told me about the collapse of Reconstruction after our nation lost the political will to see it through.

4. Nobody told me that the federal govt paid reparations to slaveowners while they bankrupted freed slaves through the derelict management of the Freedman's Bank.

5. Nobody told me about the Wilmington coup of 1898, in which white supremacists overthrew the duly elected, integrated government of the city by force while the NC Governor and US President stood idly by.

6. Nobody told me that, in 1901, Alabama held a constitutional convention to adopt amendments to the state constitution to (in the words of the president of the convention) "establish white supremacy in this state."

7. Nobody told me about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which hundreds of blacks were killed and 35 blocks of their neighborhoods destroyed by an angry white mob. Nor did anyone tell me that no one was held accountable for any of this.

8. Nobody told me about Bloody Sunday in Selma in March of 1965.

9. Nobody had me read any of the major speeches or writings by Martin Luther King, Jr.

10. Nobody told me that, prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, essentially no blacks were able to vote in the South.

11. Nobody told me that, after the assassination of MLK in April 1968, a major party presidential candidate ran--and won in Nov 1968--on a platform challenging the civil rights movement.

12. Nobody told me that, until 1977, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a state-funded agency that existed to investigate people associated with the civil rights movement and to protect the state from "encroachment" by the federal government.

13. Nobody, at the SBC seminary where I took Baptist history, told me that the SBC was founded on a theology of white supremacy. Looking back at my class notes, there is only passing reference to the slavery issue involved in the founding.

14. Nobody in my church history classes in seminary exposed me to any of the thought of black theologians or the ministers who led the civil rights movement.

I suppose it's possible that I just got a singularly awful history education that is not reflective of what others received.

OR, maybe the passing references we teach about "slavery" and "racism" are sanitized to make us all feel less bad.