6

5
longer a problem. Smaller majorities of blacks believe discrimination persists.

Teachers investigating the past are affected by attitudes about the present; students who will not accept that white supremacy is present and pervasive in American culture will have trouble understanding how, despite the movement's successes, inequality persists today.

Movement history is the history of universal rights and the political power of individuals and groups. But it can be more than that for the young. Historian Vincent Harding notes:

"Everywhere we turn, the central role of young people is obvious, and we are certainly compelled to ask important questions about why young people in Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and later Prague and Leipzig took such responsibility for the future of their people, their nations. Of course such reflection leads naturally to explorations about young people today, about possibilities for their own development that may take them beyond consumerism, limited horizons, and random rebelliousness to a higher level of responsibility and hope."²

To prepare for this presentation, I ^recently looked at American history textbooks used in the most academically prestigious senior high school in the nation's Capito ^al.

One quoted extensively from James Jackson Kilpatrick, in 1962 the segregationist editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch, on the "delicate intimacy" between black and white Southerners, and from Mississippi editor and moderate segregationist Hodding Carter, discounting the overwhelming evidence against the two murderers of Emmett Till.

5
longer a problem. Smaller majorities of blacks believe discrimination persists.

Teachers investigating the past are affected by attitudes about the present; students who will not accept that white supremacy is present and pervasive in American culture will have trouble understanding how, despite the movement's successes, inequality persists today.

Movement history is the history of universal rights and the political power of individuals and groups. But it can be more than that for the young. Historian Vincent Harding notes:

"Everywhere we turn, the central role of young people is obvious, and we are certainly compelled to ask important questions about why young people in Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and later Prague and Leipzig took such responsibility for the future of their people, their nations. Of course such reflection leads naturally to explorations about young people today, about possibilities for their own development that may take them beyond consumerism, limited horizons, and random rebelliousness to a higher level of responsibility and hope."²

To prepare for this presentation, I ^recently looked at American history textbooks used in the most academically prestigious senior high school in the nation's Capito ^al.

One quoted extensively from James Jackson Kilpatrick, in 1962 the segregationist editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch, on the "delicate intimacy" between black and white Southerners, and from Mississippi editor and moderate segregationist Hodding Carter, discounting the overwhelming evidence against the two murderers of Emmett Till.