Education: Objection Sustained

Three Negro students of Queens College (of the College of the City of New York) called on the chairman of the history department, one day last fall, to lodge a protest. A textbook used in the basic U.S. history course, they said, was offensive to their race. The book: Volume I of The Growth of the American Republic, by two of the nation’s top historians, Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison and Columbia’s Henry Steele Commager.

Educators regard the Morison-Commager book, now used in more than 500 schools and colleges, as “one of the finest in its field. But Queens pondered the list of objections raised by its Negro students. One passage which struck the objectors as an insufferably lighthearted approach to human slavery:

“As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy.”

The protesters also rebelled at the description of pre-Civil War Negroes as “a race with exasperating habits” and the characterization of the typical Negro slave as “childlike, improvident, humorous, prevaricating, and superstitious.” Finally, they objected to the occasional use of “blacks” to refer to Negroes.

Last week, after long consideration, Queens College decided to drop Volume I of The Growth of the American Republic as a basic text, keep Volume II (1865-1950). Henceforth, Queens students will learn pre-Civil War history from the less celebrated but unoffending The Federal Union, by John D. Hicks.

Authors Morison and Commager were planning no changes. They felt that the passages were sound history, and that the phraseology properly reflected the spirit of the period they were describing. The objection to the word “black,” said Morison was “frivolous.” As for “Sambo,” “it’s quite a shock to find that that’s offensive. It’s been my own nickname in the family for years.”