How black history has changed in my lifetime

I didn’t learn much about black people when I was a kid. Growing up in the South Carolina public school system in the 80’s and early 90’s meant that all you learned about black people was that there was a time when we were slaves, and now we weren’t. We learned that Lincoln freed the slaves, and after that, everything was hunky-dory. Along the way, George Washington Carver did some great things with peanuts and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an amazing speech.

I do distinctly remember learning about “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.”

From Wikipedia, a carpetbagger is “a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain.” Meanwhile, the term scalawag is “a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.”

Now, why was I learning about carpetbaggers and scalawags, while I learned nothing about the contributions that my ancestors made to American society (other than peanuts)?

There are two reasons for this, I believe.

Share The Neighborhood Sociologist

First, the decision-makers in South Carolina’s educational system were middle-aged white Southerners. Given that it was the 1980s, many lived through the…