On July 12, 1964, a couple fishing in the Old River along the Mississippi-Louisiana state line found the bound and drowned body of one Charles Moore, badly decomposed and missing its head. When the find was reported, authorities rushed to the site immediately, believing possibly that this body belonged to one of the three civil rights workers who had recently and famously gone missing. The following day, divers retrieved the body of Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Neither of these young Black men were civil rights workers. As scholar Davis W. Houck writes in his new book “Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer,” Dee drew the attention of local Klansmen for two very specific things: “he traveled back and forth to Chicago to visit his family, and he would often wear a black bandana to protect his pressed locks.” Putting these two factors together, the local Klan concluded Dee “was running guns into Franklin County for the Black Muslims.” So the Klan kidnapped Dee and Moore (a friend who just happened to be with Dee at the time), took them into the woods and tortured them brutally, demanding to know where the guns were.
Of course, neither Dee nor Moore had any connection to gun running, but after 15 minutes of torture that left them falling in and out of consciousness, they told their eventual murderers the guns were at Roxie Colored Baptist Church. The Klansmen tore apart the church but no guns were to be found, and suddenly Dee and Moore were not potential witnesses to a communist-Muslim gun-running enterprise but, instead, witnesses to a brutal Klan beating, and they could identify their attackers. So these Klansmen drowned the two men alive by tying them to heavy engine and railroad parts. When the bodies were eventually found, one of the ringleaders of the murder, James Ford Seale, published a lengthy editorial in the local Franklin Advocate in which he urged people to rise up against the “communist menace”: “With the help of God we the people can win this battle by praying, fighting, and resisting this bill [the Civil Rights Act of 1964] to the fullest extent of Human ability and at election time by sticking together and voting an unpledged ticket, and kicking all the rotten communist garbage out of our public office.”
This whole affair is instructive for us today on many levels. But if the Conway School Board has its way, students in Conway public schools will not be allowed to learn about this civil rights–era murder. As Debra Hale-Shelton recently reported, the school board is considering the adoption of Policy proposal 5.5.2, which prohibits a range of so-called “divisive concepts” generally lumped under the rubrics of “critical race theory” or “gender theory.” The proposed policy also prohibits a whole range of terms and concepts including, but not limited to racial prejudice, structural racism, systems of power and oppression and white supremacy.
Now, when the Klan decided to kidnap and then murder Charles Moore and Henry Dee, they were, at the very least, exhibiting racial prejudice. They were motivated to carry out these acts of torture and murder with a goal of maintaining white supremacy in Mississippi. White supremacy is a system of power and oppression, as exemplified by the fact that the local sheriff was in on the whole affair. In fact, the whole system of governance in Mississippi at the time could well be described as structurally racist. So how does a teacher even begin to approach an event like this without finding himself or herself at odds with the Conway School Board’s demand that no “divisive concepts” be brought up in class? That would be impossible. The only conclusion a conscious observer might reach is that the Conway School Board is as invested in protecting the reputation of these murdering Klansmen as were the local elites in 1964 Mississippi.
Students of history (still extant, but who knows for how long?) could draw a parallel between the radical takeover of school boards and the ignorance behind the murders of Moore and Dee. The Klansmen in question had convinced themselves that Henry Dee was in league with radical Black Muslims on no basis other than his occasional trips to Chicago and his tendency to wear an occasional bandana. That was all. On that very thin basis, they built a conspiracy in their heads of a massive Afro-Communist-Muslim conspiracy to undermine and overturn the God-sanctioned state of white supremacy in the blessed state of Mississippi. A bandana and a bus ticket to Chicago, they were sure, signaled the end of life as these Klansmen knew it.
Likewise have present-day right-wingers woven whole webs of conspiracy from the thinnest of threads. One prominent conservative talking point about schools holds that teachers and principals have put litter boxes in schools for students who “identify as cats” or other animals. The Conway School District was itself the target of such social media rumors, so much so that Wampus Cat Student News had to issue a response earlier this year, noting that “many of us are watching people all around tell lies about the school that we go to, and being at a school being bombarded with people complaining about something that isn’t even happening is disheartening to see.” NBC News conducted a thorough investigation of this moral panic and could find no tangible basis for the “litter box” scare consuming conservative media space.
This litter box panic is part and parcel of the same outrage over critical race theory floated by Republican elites in 2020. Again, no one was teaching that “one sex, race, ethnicity, color, or national origin is inherently superior to any other sex, race, ethnicity, color, or national origin,” as Policy proposal 5.5.2 likes to define (wrongly) as a critical feature of critical race theory. But Republicans decided to interpret assertions of equality and instruction in the basic reality of our history as an attack upon the very idea of America itself. This moral panic evolved into ridiculous stories like the litter box rumor due to what the German historian Hans Mommsen called “cumulative radicalization.” Summarized by legal scholar Paul Campos, cumulative radicalization is “the structural rather than intentional process by which, in the essentially chaotic Nazi regime, radical ideology more or less organically begot radical measures by bureaucrats contending for power and Hitler’s favor, which in turn generated even more radical measures.”
In our present moment, such cumulative radicalization is not manifest simply in policies proposed by bureaucrats. You’ll find it easily in the web of lies spread across social media. The internet is the oxygen feeding the fiery panic about the mere existence of transgender people that results in policies banning books and bathrooms (again, at Conway public schools). Panic about Black assertions of equality and Black claims upon American history spawn policies set to prohibit such “divisive concepts.” And just like the Klan did in the days of yore, so, too, does the Conway School Board see the sinister hand of communists behind these claims for equality, insisting that the grim specter of critical race theory is derived from the “social philosophy espoused by the Frankfurt School,” a rather complex body of neo-Marxist social theory and philosophy that has become yet another byword in contemporary conservative thought.
Unless such cumulative radicalization is opposed, it will spin out of control and demand more and more restrictions upon free speech, more and more intrusion into the private lives of teachers and students, more and more sacrifice to keep the fires of divine purpose alive in the hearts of its adherents. Back in 1964, a gaggle of good ‘ol boys down in Mississippi decided to murder two Black men, believing that a bus ticket and a bandana constituted evidence of a communist threat to the God-ordained system of white supremacy. Now, a new set of radical Christian conservatives are spinning up new lies to justify the same old system.
No wonder these radicals do not want history, true history, taught in their classrooms. It would be unseemly for students to draw too many parallels between the past and the present.