So much that wasn’t taught or that I knew, I have to say I share the same wonder at learning about all that has, well, whitewashed I’ve been discovering since the death of George Floyd. This article and many more like it keep bringing more awareness, like with God. It was the Pope Nicholas 5 that actually wrote a papal “bull” in 1452 and then twice after reasserting it for them and for Spain, the right to capture infidels and enslave them in perpetuity in request by the King of Portugal. So it was like God had bestowed to true believers the dominance of the white race forever, since slave trading was allowed to start and flourish for the next 300 years under that edict.

I also just learned that Lincoln actually choose not to accept the Critterdon Compromise to avoid the looming war. He said he would not compromise on slavery, and then the South broke off and the war started. No one mentioned this in the books either. Then again most of our history started getting whitewashed after the Compromise of 1877 that withdrew the Union (American, Republican, pro black suffrage) troops from the South. The more black Americans pushed out of office and lynched, the more whitewashed, until the last black congressmen, Mr. White, from North Carolina left Congress in early 1901. He decided not to run again under threat as his area in North Carolina had seen a violent insurrection that saw the white supremacist Democrats who lost ride into Wilmington and slaughter black and white ‘allies’ working together who won and drove them out of town and out of power. Not that was anything new, but just the last time it happened before white power was restored completely in the South after a 34 year struggle of guerilla warfare.

Then the real whitewashing began when the National Teachers association with financial support of the Klan in the 1910 and 20s created a program of “Americanization” because the “dirty hordes” of immigrants were coming into America from all sides and they wanted to show America was white, unified, and teach them white American values. (The teacher’s union wasn’t integrated with the black teachers union until the mid 1960s). The first Americanization school was created in Southern California to teach the ‘brown horde’ coming across that border. The fight to maintain segregated unified white history started in earnest back then and continued ever since.

That’s one of the principle reasons we do NOT have a national public school system, and the Department of Education only started in 1980: because that would mean the South in particular, in places like Texas pointed out in the article, would lose “their” history, their “hertiage” and would have to start instead teaching the facts of struggle, of fighting, of division that plague all our histories, and teach not just that they lost civil war, but that they fought afterwards to defeat the results of it. And Northerners like me are prevented from learning that the outcome of the first compromise was war and the of the second was Northern defeat, that the whites in the North and in power withdrew from the South, giving up on any hope of reforming the barbarous practices of white supremacists, who anti-constitutional killings and whitewashing of history only continued to grow and gain strength.