Textbooks: Big Drive for Balance

Civil rights groups are plunging into a new and foggy field of combat. In Congress and state legislatures they are pressing the fight for the multiracial textbook, with plenty of pictures and stories about Negroes and integration. And they are Getting Results.

The Michigan legislature this summer passed a law requiring the state’s school to use only history texts that “include accurate recording of any and all ethnic groups who have made contributions to the world. American or the State of Michigan societies.” California enacted a similar law last year. The N.A.A.C.P is compiling lists of text it considers fair, vows “community action and protest” against school boards that approve books it deems “distorted or segregated.” Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell will question textbook publishers at hearings on the topic by his House Education and Labor Committee late this month.

Fight for Acceptance. Book publishers, scenting big sales, are rushing to give ethnic groups a better break on their pages. The N.A.A.C.P.’s education director, June Shagaloff, says that 175 elementary and preschool books—mostly readers, health and science texts—now meet N.A.A.C.P. standards. But she complains that not enough school systems are buying them. Sales have been made mostly to schools in large northern cities, but the books are also in use in parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Publishers are so competitive that they commonly do not divulge sales; McGraw-Hill, however, reports that it has sold 100,000 such books—an indication that they are moving well throughout the field. Other successful textbooks have been put out by Scott Foresman, Macmillan, Follett, Chandler, and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Typically, the books have brightly colored pictures—on the cover and inside—of Negro, Puerto Rican and white children sitting together on tenement steps or splashing together in the spray of a fire hydrant. They depict the plight of slum children with touches of humor and pathos. One story tells of a kid who moves to Manhattan’s Tenth Street and has to beat up the toughest boy on the block to be accepted. Main flaw in some books is that the integration is too tidy: illustrations too often show exactly three kids together—one Negro, one Puerto Rican and one white.

Changing the Histories. As the multiracial reader begins to catch on, Negro groups are making an even greater push to eliminate distortions and omissions in history textbooks. Until recently, some popular texts depicted the plantation life of Negro slaves as a carefree round of play, song and dance but did not mention slave uprisings or the Underground Railroad to freedom. Researchers at Tufts University last month completed a study of 24 elementary school social studies books, found that many are “tinged with racism.” A B’nai B’rith study of 24 high school social studies texts disclosed that half of them did not even mention the 1954 Supreme Court school decision, half did not deal with the Negro after 1876, and only three contained pictures of Negroes and whites together.

The publishers’ main effort to correct this has been to produce thin supplementary books that fill the gaps in Negro history, ranging back to the fairly rich empires of 8th century Africa. They show the degradation of U.S. slavery, profile such authentic but little-known Negro leaders as Suffragette Mary Church Terrell and Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. They span the terrors of lynch law and report on today’s freedom marchers. Best of the supplements are Doubleday’s Zenith Books, written in a sixth-grade vocabulary but with an adult perspective.

Too Much Glory? It takes longer to produce an entirely new, minority-balanced history, and the first, Benziger Brothers’ Land of the Free, is kicking up a storm. It says that “in a few instances, an aroused slave killed a hated overseer or his master.” Later, it reports that the present-day civil rights drive “drew savage resistance from local police, the White Citizens Council, the Ku Klux Klan, and mobs and assassins.” When proposed for use in California schools, Land of the Free was denounced from the right as being “unAmerican” and too “internationalist,” and from the left for not paying enough attention to Mexican and Chinese-Americans. The prime complaint, says Retired Los Angeles Principal Beulah Quiette, is that the book “does everything to glorify the Negro.” Its authors—U.C.L.A.’s John W. Caughey, University of Chicago’s John Hope Franklin and Harvard’s Ernest R. May—admit they made some bloopers. The text, for example, relates the pioneering civil rights leadership of W.E.B. DuBois, fails to note that he became a Communist in later life.

Land of the Free has been approved, with minor revisions, for use in all California public schools and in such large cities as Kansas City and St. Louis. So far, its main competitor is a revised edition of Houghton Mifflin’s This Is America’s Story.

The Law & Poison. Most textbook publishers insist that they do not produce separate editions for North and South. Though they are not aggressively marketing multiracial books in the South, they do expect to get more sales there. Some publishers tell school-district leaders that books bought with federal aid must be racially balanced. Actually, the law has no such requirement and, says an official of the U.S. Office of Education, that kind of federal control would be “just political poison—totally out of the question.”

Even under local control, the selection and creation of books that portray minorities realistically are difficult, delicate matters. The happy primer whose Negro, white and Puerto Rican kids always laugh together can be as misleading as portrayals of the ever-grinning slave. Histories that try to make heroes out of such rightfully obscure Negroes as Sojourner Truth, who was merely one of many Negro campaigners against slavery shortly before the Civil War, lose their credibility. Despite these flaws, the long-overdue drive for balanced books has produced texts that are generally more accurate, realistic and engrossing than those that today’s adults used.