After a Houston-area mother complained about how his son's ninth-grade Word Geography textbook defined African American slaves as migrants and workers, I was curious to see what my son’s seventh-grade Texas History textbook would say about slavery and immigration. So I looked at the online edition (the history teacher refused to let my son bring home the textbook) of the Texas History textbook published by McGraw-Hill, the same publisher of the now infamous high school World Geography book. And McGraw-Hill did not disappoint me!
Please, keep reading. You'll learn more about the deliberate choice of McGraw-Hill to define African American slaves as immigrants also in a middle school book.
In the online edition, chapter 15 is titled The Lone Star State and its lesson 4 is centered on the arrival of immigrants from the East Coast states in Texas. The lesson is called “Immigrants arrive”.
New Arrivals From America, In the early years of statehood, new immigrants led to a diverse Texas population.
How did Mexican Texans, African Americans, and Native Americans live during early statehood?
The population of Texas grew rapidly during the early years of statehood. The lure of available land encouraged Americans to head west, and many found Texas inviting. Since Texas still had control of its public lands, it could dispose of them as it wished. The Texas Homestead Law was generous, allowing settlers to obtain land merely by living on and improving it. Additional land could be purchased cheaply. Also, the Texas constitution protected a settler’s homestead from being taken by creditors.The national census of 1850 counted 212,592 Texans. Over the next ten years, the population nearly tripled to 604,215. As before, many of the new residents were from the Southern states, particularly Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. Nearly three of every four households in Texas consisted of families from Southern states. Visitors in Southern states often saw empty houses with the letters “GTT” on the doors. The initials stood for “Gone To Texas.”
At the same time, Texas had a more diverse population than most Southern states of the period. Its long history of Spanish settlement distinguished it from other Southern states, except Florida. Since much of Texas was still unsettled frontier, Native Americans remained an important presence. African Americans formed a substantial part of the population, as they did in the rest of the South. When compared to other Southern states, Texas had many more European settlers. This was due in part to the efforts of immigration agents during the era of the republic.
Although African Americans are listed among the new immigrants, the word slave does not appear in lesson 4 until several pages later. Actually you are left with the impression that everybody was welcome in Texas. After all
the Texas Homestead Law was generous, allowing settlers to obtain land merely by living on and improving it.
But of course we know that that was only true of whites, as Native Americans and African Americans were not allowed to own the land.
To confirm that the editor is maliciously manipulating the history of slavery in Texas, a figure titled “Immigrants in Texas, 1855” shows the US origin of immigrants in Texas, with big arrows representing the movement of immigrants from the east states towards Texas.
But pay close attention to the legend. Listed among the immigrants are: Anglo American, African American, Czech, French, German, Irish, Mexican, Norwegian, Polish. However, Anglo American, Czech, French, German, Irish, Mexican, Norwegian, and Polish, all arrived in Texas by their own free will, looking for new opportunities and a better life. But only a very small percentage of the Afro-american living in Texas were not slaves. Therefore African American did not arrive in Texas as immigrants but as victims of a domestic slave trade that displaced thousands of men, women and children.
I told you, McGraw-Hill did not disappoint me: African American slaves are again defined as immigrants exactly as in the high school textbook! Amazing, right?
Something else I noticed that does not make much historic sense in this figure: while the Anglo Americans represented in the map by the green color are shown to occupy all the south-east of Texas, African Americans in violet seem to occupy three well defined areas. However African Americans represented about one third of the population in 1855 and were widespread. So this map is not really representative of the population distribution at the time.
At page 3, the online textbook finally acknowledge the existence of slavery in Texas:
African American Texans
After Anglo Americans, African Americans were the largest group in antebellum Texas. The number of African Americans in Texas soared from about 13,000 in 1840 to 169,000 in 1860. That year, they made up about 30 percent of the state’s population. The vast majority of these people were enslaved. Only about 400 to 1,000 were free. While Texas encouraged the arrival of new settlers, free African Americans were not welcome. The state passed a law that prohibited free African Americans from settling in Texas. Other laws severely restricted the rights of those already in the state.
The laws passed to control enslaved people were even stricter. Enslaved persons were under the complete control of the slaveholder, who had the right to punish an enslaved person at any time. Punishments often included whipping. Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans escaped to the south, since Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. Running away was risky, however. If the attempt did not succeed, punishments were extremely harsh.
In conclusion, it is very clear to me that McGraw-Hill chose to ignore the forced migration of African Americans from the colonial states to the Lone Star State as the textbook does not mention the domestic slave trade. Middle school students are provided with a general introduction that does not mention slavery at all and a figure with a misleading legend that lists African American among the immigrants. Unless the student reads beyond the introduction, he is left with the wrong information that African Americans living in Texas in 1855 had arrived as regular immigrants like the Polish or the German.
McGraw-Hill needs to review also this textbook and needs to apologize again for another offensive mistake. Will they offer to provide students with another sticker?
This afternoon, our president and CEO David Levin sent a note to all of the company’s employees. Below are excerpts:
We made a mistake.
Last week a high school student and his mother in Texas raised an issue about a caption in our World Geography textbook. Many people who were understandably hurt and offended by the caption responded on Facebook and elsewhere.
We are deeply sorry that the caption was written this way. While the book was reviewed by many people inside and outside the company, and was made available for public review, no one raised concerns about the caption. Yet, clearly, something went wrong and we must and will do better.
To learn from this and to do all we can to prevent this from happening again, we are reviewing our internal processes to understand how it occurred. We have already committed to increase our list of reviewers to reflect greater diversity.
We are offering our customers who are currently using the book a choice of either a sticker to cover and replace the caption or a new, corrected, printed copy of the book.
All of us at McGraw-Hill Education care passionately for the students, teachers and communities we serve. People have been hurt by this mistake and we need to correct it. We will.
Sun Oct 11, 2015 at 3:32 PM PT: My son's teacher has offered to send the book home with my child, but only overnight as she does not have enough copies in the classroom. She also invited me to go to school and consult the textbook there. She is new to the textbook herself but she has been teaching Texas history for many years and she is willing to share her notes on Texas and slavery.