Oct. 28, 1798

Abolitionist Levi Coffin was born in North Carolina. His home in Newport, Indiana, became known as the “Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad.” 

In 1821, his cousin ran a Sunday school for Black Americans, but when slaveholders rebelled against this, the school was forced to close. After he and his family moved to Indiana, he began working on the Underground Railroad. 

“The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book,” he said. “I thought it was always safe to do right.” 

He helped thousands of Black Americans find freedom, and after the Civil War ended, he became a leader in the Western Freedmen’s Aid Society, raising more than $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.66 million) in a single year for African Americans who needed food, clothing, funds and education. His autobiography, “Reminiscences of Levi Coffin,” was published a year before his 1877 death. 

In 1902, a 6-foot monument was built to mark his grave, and his former home became a National Historic Landmark.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Oct. 27, 1924

Actress Ruby Dee was born in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Starting in the 1940s, she acted on Broadway, in movies and on television, starring alongside Sidney Poitier and others. She and her husband, Ossie Davis, acted together and served as master and mistress of ceremonies at the 1963 March on Washington. They were friends with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and later hosted a two-hour special, “The Second American Revolution.” 

Dee spoke passionately about “a racism that has made rage the basic rhythm of our lives. A racism that has trampled our self-esteem and numbed hope. Racism, that cancer on the bosom of our nation, that gnaws at the psyche of black America and keeps us screaming and shaking for relief. … Those who try to overcome in spite of all link us to survival, to hope, to ourselves. And so we must keep on telling the stories of our heroes and heroines, sung and unsung, as best we can. Because it is they who urge us to hang on, to join hands, to move relentlessly toward greater understanding among all people, to move toward justice and toward love.” 

During her career, she won a Grammy, Emmy, Screen Actors Guild Award and Kennedy Center Honor. In 2007, she became the second oldest woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie “American Gangster.” She died in 2014.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves might have found a soulmate for his long-pursued quest to ensure the teaching of only positive American history.

During a recent interview by the hosts on Fox News’ morning show, President Donald Trump was explaining his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and instead send federal education funds directly to the states.

The former president was interrupted by one of the hosts, Brian Kilmeade, who expressed concern that sending money directly to the states could allow liberal cities and states to “just decide we are going to get rid of that history. We have a new history. This is America built off the backs of slaves on stolen land, and that curriculum comes in.”

“Then we don’t send them money,” Trump boldly proclaimed.

This sentiment might sound familiar to some in Mississippi. Nearly every year since taking the office of governor in 2020, Reeves has proposed as part of his budget spending $5 million to create the Patriotic Education Fund.

“No American child should be taught that the United States is an inherently evil nation that solely acts in its own self-interest,” Reeves wrote in his latest budget proposal. “Unfortunately, that worldview is being taught by radical activists in too many schools across our country, and that’s why Mississippi must take proactive steps to ensure this warped ideology does not infiltrate our state‘s schools.”

The Legislature has for years now rejected funding the governor’s Patriotic Education Fund, but Reeves keeps swinging for it.

It is insulting to think Americans cannot learn about the nation’s brutal past treatment of Black Americans, Native Americans and many other groups and still love America. After all, what makes America special is its ideas, its continuing efforts to strive for equality and fairness and, yes, its educational transparency that allows for the true history of our nation to be taught. For many, the heart of America is that we always strive to be better, and part of doing that is understanding what we have done wrong and trying not to repeat those wrongs.

As Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez, the House minority leader, said recently in a television interview, “That history is history. You don’t have to White-wash it. You don’t have to Black-wash it. You just tell the truth.”

But Mississippi has a long history of whitewashing history.

For decades, Mississippi students learned a sanitized version of slavery and later a rose-colored version of the state’s violent segregationist past.

Mississippi historian Charles Eagles wrote in his book “Civil Rights, Culture Wars,” as cited in an Associated Press article, “At the behest of the white elite, the history books (taught in Mississippi schools) preserved ignorance of past inspirational heroes and, more generally, of lost possibilities and forgotten historical opportunities. The state-sanctioned amnesia played a vital role in the perpetuation of white supremacy and racial discrimination.”

In 1962, then-Gov. Ross Barnett, who had been given the authority by the Legislature to select the state’s textbooks, tabbed John K. Buttersworth’s “Your Mississippi” as a Mississippi history textbook.

“All of us ought to be against anything in our textbooks that would teach subversion or integration,” Barnett said. “Our children must be properly informed about the Southern and true American way of life.”

In the 1970s, Tougaloo College sociologist James Loewen and Millsaps College historian Charles Sallis edited a new textbook called “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” which provided a more accurate telling of Mississippi history.

Still, the then-established Textbook Commission rejected “Mississippi: Conflict and Change,” opting to select the whitewashed Buttersworth book as the state’s ninth grade Mississippi history textbook. A court challenge and the ruling of a federal judge was required to change that decision. The judge ruled that the landmark “Mississippi: Conflict and Change” should be placed on an approved list of textbooks for the state.

That opened the floodgates to more truthful textbooks for Mississippi students. Many of these students, despite learning a more accurate depiction of the state’s and nation’s faults and shortcomings, still grew up to love America and, yes, Mississippi.

The story of Sallis and Loewen and their textbook is important in today’s climate because, after all, there is that old saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Tate Reeves and Donald Trump sure do not seem to be heeding those words.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.