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THIRTY YEARS AGO, IN THE DANGEROUS summer of 1964, Hollis Watkins was a young volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) helping to register black voters in southwestern Mississippi. Church and house bombings and at least a half-dozen murders would occur before the registration drive succeeded. Now Watkins occasionally lectures high-school students, white and black, on the history of the civil-rights movement. He tells the kids about the marches and the violence and the courage of ordinary people who risked their lives to bring justice to the South. Watkins was stunned recently when a black student in Jackson raised his hand to ask -- well, what did all this mean to them? Most kids in the class had never been told their school was once all white, Watkins explains just as most young Mississippians, black as well as white, know almost nothing about the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror or those who died with their Eyes on the Prize.
One of them was Medgar Evers, a civil rights activist who was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss., one night in June 1963. A born leader, Evers was state field secretary for the NAACP and a prime target for racists. Two weeks ago a jury of eight blacks and four whites in Hinds County, Miss., found an aging white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith guilty of murder in Evers's death. De La Beckwith, now 73, had been tried twice before, but both trials resulted in hung juries. His conviction after all these years has a bittersweet taste to movement veterans. But Edward Peters, the district attorney who finally nailed De La Beckwith, was struck that almost no one on the jury knew who Medgar Evers was. "I was shocked at how few people knew him and what he stood for," Peters said.
The De La Beckwith verdict was one more step toward coming to terms with Mississippi's turbulent past, and the state has made real progress toward equality. But the jurors' ignorance, like the question that shocked Hollis Watkins, suggests that many younger Mississippians have not learned the lessons of the 1960s. Although many black parents teach their children about the movement, others do not -- and those who remember the '60s think the public schools are failing to teach the history of that time. "Most school districts in the state of Mississippi do not teach the civil-rights period," says Samuel Hoye, principal of South Leake High School in Walnut Grove, Miss. "Today's children know they have the right to vote, but they don't know what blacks had to go through to obtain that right." In Mississippi public schools, Hoye says, "the idea is to keep us ignorant of what made the state what it is today."
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The reason, Hoye and other black educators say, is the continued opposition of at least some white parents to updating the history curriculum. "In a school where you have 50 percent black population or more, you won't have as many problems," he says. But in a school with, say, a 20 percent black student body, Hoye says, "white parents raise hell."
Public schools are required to follow state curriculum guidelines. The states approve lists of textbooks that the public schools can use. Textbook publishers are under pressure to produce history books that avoid controversy, and the people who write textbooks feel this pressure, too. Jeffrey Norrell, an associate professor at the University of Alabama, says parents object to anything resembling a frank discussion of "the truly negative aspects of racial exploitation." "There's some legitimacy" to Norrell's complaint, says Gerald Hasselman, associate superintendent for academic instruction for the state of Mississippi. But, Hasselman adds, "we have a greater awareness than we had maybe 20 years ago."
Meanwhile, says Dennis Mitchell, a white history professor at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., "if you're talking about rural schools in Mississippi, the civil-rights period probably isn't taught at all." That means thousands of kids all across the South will probably graduate without learning who Medgar Evers was. It leaves conscientious teachers, like South Leake High School's Tammy Bell, to round out the state curriculum with the PBS documentary "Eyes on the Prize." And it leaves historians like Dennis Mitchell wondering when candor will prevail. It wasn't long ago, Mitchell says, that a publisher returned his draft chapter on the pivotal summer of '64 with a strange editorial change. Where Mitchell had entitled the chapter "Freedom Summer," a cautious editor had rewritten the heading to read "So-called Freedom Summer." No wonder the kids are ignorant -- they're getting so-called history.
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