About 65 years ago I read an essay on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, who was portrayed as a wise and gentle man intent on knitting the country back together after the Civil War. I’m now finally able to translate that. Johnson was a racist intent on making what became Jim Crow legal in the South.
In the original essay, some lunatic radicals in the House of Representatives had impeached Johnson (for his efforts to deny black people civil rights). The anti-slavery Senate was about to remove Johnson from office, but they needed one more vote. That vote, if I recall correctly, belonged to a junior senator from Kansas. The senator voted in favor of keeping the racist President, which cost him his career, but to this day (which was 1950) we supposedly should be grateful for his integrity and courage.
I was so impressed by this essay and its message of self-sacrifice and courage that I remember it today.
That should give you some idea of the sort of history Californians were taught in 1950. We were taught that anti-racists were mad radicals. We were taught that the South had been overrun with thieving “carpetbaggers” (anti-racists), who had to be run out of the South, a land with impeccable White kindness and good will (where Black men were lynched at the rate of about two a week). Brutal Jim Crow, unchecked by the North, terrorized Black people into a condition very near slavery for about 70 years. But it took our high school history texts 100 years to catch on.
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