He patiently explained to his class: Blacks have never taken over the Southern states. All had white governors, and all but one had a white legislative majority. Restructuring governments “did not make a mess”. They created the best constitutions the South had in the 19th century and better governments than any other in the South. And the whites didn’t make things right by taking control again. The people who took on the task were white supremacists, and some were original Ku Klux Klan members.
As for the problem of textbook distortions, Dr. Loewen found that government review and purchase panels control the use of public schools’ books. The history text, which has been widely used in Mississippi for years, has described Black people as complacent or troublesome. He said Black officers were corrupt during Reconstruction and called the Ku Klux Klan “a secret social and fraternal club.” The lynching was not even mentioned.
Dr. Loewen and Millsaps College historian Charles Sallis, writing and editing together, produced an outstanding response within a few years.Mississippi: Conflict and Change” (1974), a complete revision of the historical past of the state. In an interdisciplinary approach, less concerned with linear facts and histories, the book examined the social, political, and cultural components of Mississippi life throughout history.
He has profiled politicians, blues singers, writers and others who have left their mark in different fields. He detailed years of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the modern struggle for civil rights, the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, and current accounts of race relations and conflicts. He called the KKK a terrorist organization created to protect a “Southern way of life” and said Black schoolchildren were segregated under false “separate but equal” doctrines.
Pantheon Books publishes Mississippi: Conflict and Change, which won the 1976 Lillian Smith Book Award for best Southern fiction. But Mississippi officials vetoed its use in schools, calling it racially provocative. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Mississippi-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Dr. He filed suit in federal court on behalf of Loewen and his co-authors.
In 1980, a United States District Court, referring to the First and Fourteenth Amendment freedoms, ruled that Dr. He ruled in favor of Loewen and his colleagues. The American Library Association described it as a victory for the “right to read freely.”
Adoption of “Conflict and Change” and immediate use by 26 of the state’s 150 school districts, Dr. It started with what Loewen called a major shift in the Mississippi history books. The book remained in use there for six years. And in the following years, many authors wrote more objective and comprehensive volumes and the state accepted it.