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True.
Another uncovered topic is current events.
In the 60 years since Till was murdered, some half-million black people have been murdered by other black people. Most people in this country couldn't name any of them, unless it was a family member or friend, but probably every black person (& most whites) in this country know who Trayvon Martin was.
Fox News Talking Point Alert
What does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting that history classes should be covering every black on black homicide over the past 60 years? Shouldn't you begin with the 2 million whites who have killed themselves (or white on white homicides erroneously classified as suicides) over that same period of time? Isn't that truly your primary concern?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cruzincat
Emmet Till was a victim of racism, no doubt. I suppose the reason his experience is not covered in school as much as Rosa Parks, is because the schools are trying to use uplifting stories of heroes, and are not trying to stir up anger in people.
Since when is it the job of schools and the discipline of history to uplift people rather then anger them? History is history. If you are leaving out critical details and historical figures to serve some social or political agenda then it is not history, it's propaganda.
I guess different schools have different curriculums. In the very white suburb where I grew up, we learned bout Emmet Till in my private grade school and the public high school that I attended. His name might not be as remembered as Rosa Parks, but his name rings more bells than the names of other arguably more influential people of the civil rights movement, like Ella Baker.
Are you also angry that the full story behind the March on Washington of 1963 is never told in history books, how it was intended to be grassroots movement about poverty until the government inserted Dr. King and other representatives to make the message more "acceptable"? Or how Dr. King himself began to feel, towards the end of his life and after a visit to Chicago, that the problem of racism in the US is so impossibly deep-rooted?
You expect history books to cover a single murder when most barely cover the civil war, WWI, WWII...
Within "The American Pageant" (a pretty standard textbook for AP US History classes and one thoroughly analyzed by James Loewen) AT LEAST ten of forty-two chapters are dedicated almost exclusively to wars:
@The OP: I am not sure about the schools in your area, but I think that I was in fact taught about the Emmett Till murder and trial back when I was in school.
If it is not taught in the schools in your area, then maybe this is because some people consider it too grotesque to teach to children or something like that. Just an educated guess on my part.
Within "The American Pageant" (a pretty standard textbook for AP US History classes and one thoroughly analyzed by James Loewen) AT LEAST ten of forty-two chapters are dedicated almost exclusively to wars:
That's nearly 1/4 of the entire book. Wars are actually disproportionately covered in American History books.
There are a lot of thinks not taught in most American schools, like the incidents at Potawatomi Creek and Bloody Kansas,The Molly Maguires, The Homstead Strike or the Pullman Strike in Chicago, The life and fate of Joe Hill, Who was John Reed, The Harlan County War, What the McCarran Act was all about and why people like Zero Mostel, Pete Seeger,Charley Chaplin ended up on the blacklist, who were the Rosenbergs and who were Mark Rudd, Jerry Rubin or Angela Davis? There are a lot of things we sweep under the rug.
Last edited by mwruckman; 06-03-2014 at 10:57 PM..
Why would you use a grinning smiley face icon for this topic? Very distasteful.
Exactly, that was the only thing I took away from the post; how sad and sick that someone would use a smiley emoticon for this topic.
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