Trial

Four years after filing a lawsuit, in a four-day trial in Greenville and Oxford, Frank Parker for the plaintiffs asked the court to order the Textbook Purchasing Board to approve Conflict and Change. Defense witnesses, including Howard E. Railes and John M. Turnipseed, showed the racial nature of their objections to the book. In April 1980 Judge Orma R. Smith ruled in favor the plaintiffs and ordered state officials to add it to the list of approved textbooks.

Reception

In Pantheon’s Andre Schiffrin, Loewen and Sallis secured, with Pat Watters’s help, an unlikely but sympathetic publisher. In addition to critiques by experts in the field, the authors also gained the cooperation of two teachers who tried their manuscript with their students. When published in 1974, Conflict and Change received enthusiastic reviews by Bill Minor, Robert Coles, and others in the few publicatons that reviewed it. In 1976 the Southern Regional Council awarded the book its Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction.

Project

The Mississippi History Project started in 1970 and received funding from the Southern Education Foundation. The Project sought to create a distinctively new type of history textbook that included the silent, the unnamed, and the dispossessed and that reflected modern historical scholarship. It wanted to correct the racial bias that dominate other textbooks. The radical book also featured original design and format features.

Writers

Jim Loewen, a sociologist, and Charles Sallis, a historian, assembled a diverse team of colleagues and students to produce a revisionist ninth-grade Mississippi history textbook. In addition to several disciplines, the group included black and white, male and female, northern and southerner. They drew on earlier tentative interracial contacts led by Ernst Borinski between the black Tougaloo College and the nearby white Millsaps College, both in Jackson, Mississippi. Loewen had published a book on the Mississippi Chinese, and Sallis had written about Mississippi politics in the late nineteenth century.

Change

Though a minority of school districts adopted Conflict and Change, its example encouraged other authors to more progressive positions on race. The textbook controversy marked a transition from the effects of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to the beginning of the culture wars of the 1980s and beyond. The fight involved interpretations of the past, values to be taught to children, who would control society, and the definition of state identity anticipated similar controversies in the culture wars over the National History Standards and the Smithsonian’s exhibit dealing with the Enola Gay.

Case

With the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Loewen and Sallis, joined by a dozen other plaintiffs, sued the state in federal court. Loewen v. Turnipseed sought to force approval of the textbook. Attorneys Melvyn Leventhal and later Frank Parker with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law fought the case for four years through endless delays, depositions, motions, and negotiations. Peter Stockett represented the state in Judge Orma R. Smith’s court.

Histories

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Mississippi histories celebrated a harmonious story from the perspectives of dominant white males. The textbooks discounted conflict and stressed conformity. Important authors included Franklin A. Riley, Charles S. Sydnor, and John K. Bettersworth, whose books dominated the field for the generation after 1959.

Conflict

The brief introductory chapter explains the Loewen and Sallis believed that conflict produces change. Their textbook sought to combat ignorance and promote change by introducing controversial topis such as race and class into the state’s history.

Controversy

After the Rating Committee for Mississippi history textbooks voted against Conflict and Change, the State Textbook Purchasing Board rejected it. Without the board’s approval, school districts could not purchase it with state funds. Racial issues, especially violence and lynching, caused the most objections from John M. Turnipseed, W. A. Matthews, and others. Loewen and Sallis’s appeals to the Board and to the governor failed.

Textbooks

The history of textbooks involves debates over their content, production, marketing, and selection. State regulation often tried to govern the often corrupt processes. At the local and state levels, controversies often erupted; Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, for example, wanted the state to publish textbooks. In the 1950s conservatives such as E. Merrill Root and the Daughters of the American Revolution objected to disloyal textbooks