I don’t understand how the study of our history can be so upsetting when it shows how other races were involved in the creation of today’s America. Africans were bought and shipped to North America to be resold as slaves. Tens of thousands of Chinese were imported to build the railroads through the Sierra Mountains. Millions of Indians were killed so their land could be taken. We edged out thousands of Mexicans from their lands so ranches could be bigger or mined. Perhaps the latest of the ethnic mistreatment was in 1942 when we packed up all the Japanese and moved them to “relocation camps on plains east of the Rockies while their businesses, homes and possessions were taken by their neighbors and others.”

            I had a history class in high school in 1964-65 and twenty nine semester hours of history in college. Hardly any of the above was even mentioned. Perhaps because it was a Kentucky college with a small percentage of non-white students, it wasn’t part of the curriculum. We studied the Boston Massacre but we weren’t told the only person killed was a freed black man. We didn’t talk about the Trail of Tears displacement of the Cherokee to Oklahoma so President Andrew Jackson could sell the land to developers. The Supreme Court sided with the Cherokee but Jackson sent them on a forced march that killed hundreds of them.

            A great example of why all history should be taught in grade and high school is an East Tennessee reservation Cherokee who sat next to me in an American History class. He said they were taught Jefferson Davis was President and not Abraham Lincoln. Today a small group of Texans decide what is put in all school books.