The NAACP and other black organizations criticized songs taught in music classes that used the words “darky” and “nigger,” history books that praised the Ku Klux Klan for keeping “foolish Negros” out of government, and the inclusion of “Little Black Sambo” in grade school readers. Schools, supported by progressive black and white activists, tried to combat racism by instituting “intercultural education.”īut, when it came to the content of school textbooks, African-Americans lacked the support of their white allies.

In the ’40s, Zimmerman writes, two million blacks migrated from the south to northern and western cities, where they were frequently met with racist white violence. In a 2004 paper, Jonathan Zimmerman looks at how black activists took on racism in schoolbooks in the 1940s-and how white liberals responded in a way that sounds remarkably familiar today. The incident is just the latest in a decades-long debate over the representation of black Americans in social studies classrooms. as slaves.McGraw-Hill has apologized for its caption on a map in one of its textbooks that seemed to characterize the Atlantic slave trade as the “immigration” of “workers” after the mother of a student in Texas brought the issue to public attention. For her, 'that word - 'workers' - was an attempt to erase that hard writing that slavery has had on the paper of our society.' She points out that, while the book describes many Europeans immigrating as indentured servants, she found no mention in this lesson of Africans forced to the U.S. Roni Dean-Burren, Coby's mother, is a former teacher pursuing her doctorate at the University of Houston. 'We was real hard workers wasn't we,' Coby texted, adding a sarcastic emoji.Ĭoby caught a textbook error that had been missed by several editorial layers, starting with mega publisher McGraw-Hill Education, followed by the official textbook reviewers and, finally, members of the Texas Board of Education who have the final say on materials like this. Next to a map of the United States describing 'patterns of immigration,' it read that the Atlantic slave trade brought 'millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.'

The 15-year-old quickly took a picture with his phone and sent it to his mother. In a lesson on the patterns of immigration, a caption refers to slaves as 'workers,' prompting mom and educator Roni Dean-Burren to protest the caption on social media.Ĭoby Burren was reading his textbook, sitting in geography class at Pearland High School near Houston, when he noticed a troubling caption.

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