Tuesday
A Tennessee high school teacher was recently fired for teaching about white privilege in a Contemporary Issues course, bringing to mind the John Thomas Scopes monkey trial, which occurred in another Tennessee town just under a century ago. Growing up in Tennessee, I remember being fascinated by the account we get of that trial in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. I remember the play assuring my adolescent self that the forces of enlightenment will always prevail. I’m no longer confident that this is the case.
According to an article in The Boston Globe, Matthew Hawn was fired for teaching the Ta-Nehisi Coates essay “The First White President” (about Donald Trump) and a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey to his students. I’ll see if I can track down the poem for a future post, but the Globe cited the following passage from the Coates essay:
“[Donald Trump’s] political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that Black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built,” Coates writes of the former president. “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”
According to the Globe article,
Hawn’s firing was precipitated by a parent who complained to the district that the essay conveyed a “somewhat angry, and hateful opinion towards President Trump” and contained words he believed should not be “introduced to our children by a high school teacher,” according to documents provided to WJHL.com.
According to the documents, Hawn said he was comfortable assigning the essay because “those were the words of the President and I thought the kids were mature enough to handle it.”
When asked what other reading materials he could have assigned to offer a differing viewpoint, Hawn replied: “There is no credible source for a differing point of view.”
Most of the public accounts of the affair are from the School Board so I don’t have the full story. Some former students report that Hawn was a balanced teacher so there’s that. If the School Board is right that Hawn was simply preaching to the class rather that getting his students to probe the issues—well, that would not be good teaching, although if teachers who lecture their classes regularly got fired, there would be a teacher shortage.
I want to know what the school board means by balanced, however. If they think that Hawn should be open to, say, debating whether Barack Obama is Kenyan-born or not, that’s not teaching but just lending legitimacy to fringe theories (as though facts are open to debate). It’s one thing to debate reasonable positions, but is a teacher supposed to rub his or her chin thoughtfully if someone trots out the latest “Democrats are pedophile cannibals” QAnon theory? You can see the challenges teachers face. Teachers have to listen to where students are coming from, but they can’t surrender intellectual integrity.
Meanwhile, another Tennessee parent is objecting to her school teaching “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” written by Bridges about her experience as the first Black child (she was six at the time) to integrate a segregated New Orleans school when she was six. As The Week reports,
Robin Steenman, who heads Moms for Liberty’s Williamson County chapter, reportedly pointed to this book and others at an education committee meeting, claiming its mention of a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school” was too harsh and pointing to the fact that it didn’t offer “redemption” at the end, the Tennessean reports. Steenman also reportedly objected to another book about school segregation and expressed disapproval of teaching words like “injustice” and “inequality” in grammar lessons. https://theweek.com/news/1002407/anti-critical-race-theory-parents-reportedly-object-to-teaching-ruby-bridges-book
I have some experience with Tennessee race education, although admittedly it is from over 55 years ago. In our seventh grade Tennessee history course at Sewanee Elementary School, we were taught that the Civil War was about economics, not slavery. Fred Langford, who would go on to become a corrupt county superintendent of schools, told us the Civil War was actually “the War between the States” because the main issue was states’ rights. (At least he didn’t call it “The War of Northern Aggression,” as some did.) While we learned almost nothing about actual slavery, we were taught that Reconstruction failed because African Americans were incompetent at governance. Nothing was said about the use of white violence to establish Jim Crow rule.
Incidentally, I was once punished (this in sixth grade) for not standing up for “Dixie.” At the local high school, meanwhile, anti-government feelings were so strong in the 1960s that “Dixie” replaced the “Star Spangled Banner” at football games, and I’ve heard that it continues to be played there to this day (although no longer, following Black student protests, after every touchdown). The team is still called the Franklin County Rebels.
My history education didn’t become any more balanced in high school. I remember walking into my U.S. History class the day after Martin Luther King was shot and being told by Jim Miller that King “had lived by the sword and died by the sword.” These teachers were not fired for their views.
Nor were they thrown into jail, which is what happened to Scopes for teaching evolution in a 1925 biology class. In the play, his name is Bernard Cates, and I’m hoping that Hawn can hold onto Cates’s sense of humor as he goes through his ordeal. For instance, at one time Cates tells fellow teacher Rachel,
You know something funny? The food’s better than the boarding house. And you’d better not tell anybody how cool it is down there, or we’ll have a crime wave every summer,
The actual trial pitted populist politician and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady in the play) against legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond) against each other. I remember being a Darrow fan in high school, having reading Irving Stone’s biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense.
In any event, I found the play reassuring because it’s so clear that reason and truth win out against superstition, even though the jury verdict goes against Scopes. While the fundamentalists have the power at the moment, it’s seems clear that the tide of history will go against them.
Why my confidence has sapped, as I return to Tennessee in retirement, is that the rightwing seems to have as much power as it ever had. In my childhood, segregationist Democrats ran things. Now it’s Trump evangelical Republicans, but the politics seem to be the same. Many today have the same opinions of Democrats as Cates’s neighbors have of him:
Cates: People I thought were my friends look at me now as if I had horns growing out of my head.
Drummond: You murder a wife, it isn’t nearly as bad as murdering an old wives’ tale. Kill one of their fairy-tale notions, and they call down the wrath of God, Brady, and the state legislature.
Of course, politicians make hay out of culture issues in the play just as they do now. Drummond notes, “Matthew Harrison Brady came here to find himself a stump to shout from.”
But in some ways, while trying to ride this evangelical wave to political power—or at least relevance again after three failed presidential bids—Brady finds himself like numerous GOP politicians: he thinks he can exploit the evangelical vote, only to discover that these people are crazier than he ever imagined. This he realizes at a revival meeting when he discovers that Reverend Brown is willing to consign not only Cates to hell but his own daughter Rachel if she stands up for him:
Brown: (Deliberately shattering the rhythm, to go into a frenzied prayer, hands clasped together and lifted heavenward) O Lord of the Tempest and the Thunder! O Lord of Righteousness and Wrath! We pray that Thou wilt make a sign unto us! Strike down this sinner, as Thou didst Thine enemies of old, in the days of the Pharaohs! (All lean forward, almost expecting the heavens to open with a thunderbolt . Rachel is white. Brady shifts uncomfortably in his chair; this is pretty strong stuff, even for him) Let him feel the terror of Thy sword! For all eternity, let his soul writhe in anguish and damnation—
Rachel: No! (She rushes to the platform) No, Father. Don’t pray to destroy Bertl
Brown: Lord, we call down the same curse on those who ask grace for this sinner— though they be blood of my blood, and flesh of my flesh!
In the end, both Bert and Rachel, who have previously been uncertain, decide to think for themselves. To do so is not easy, as Drummond tells Bert and Rachel earlier when they’re both thinking of backing down:
Drummond (to Rachel) Can you buy back his respectability by making him a coward? (He spades his hands in his hip pockets) I understand what Bert’s going through. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world— to find yourself standing up when everybody else is sitting down. To have everybody look at you and say, “What’s the matter with him?” I know. I know what it feels like. Walking down an empty street, listening to the sound of your own footsteps. Shutters closed, blinds drawn, doors locked against you. And you aren’t sure whether you’re walking toward something, or if you’re just walking away.
After the case ends, Drummond tells him what he’s achieved, despite being found guilty:
Drummond: You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you? Tomorrow it’ll be something else— and another fella will have to stand up. And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!
Then Rachel comes in, having determined to leave her father, and gives what can be seen as the message of the play:
Mr. Drummond, I hope I haven’t said anything to offend you. You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think— so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be bom. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too! ( Pointing to the book) Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don’t know. Bad or good, it doesn’t make any difference. The ideas have to come out— like children. Some of ’em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don’t you, Bert?
While I enjoyed Inherit the Wind, I thought, even as a high schooler, that it read too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Drummond tears apart Brady’s religious views so effectively that he all but causes Brady’s fatal heart attack. Then he grandly proclaims him to have been a great man. If you’re confident that Science is on the rise and will eventually dispel the mists of darkness, as many thought in the 1950s, you can afford to be magnanimous.
Could the authors have foreseen, however, that evangelical Christians would still be in the ascendency 75 years later, at least in parts of the country. They held the reins of power for four years with Trump and currently hold the GOP in thrall. Currently, they have Republican lawmakers running away from the Covid vaccine and denying the facts of the January 6 insurrection. Dark things are possible if they return the GOP to power.
The easy Enlightenment optimism of people like me is being sorely tested. Inherit the Wind may think it can get fundamentalists to stumble on the witness stand, but you don’t stumble if you can make up reality as you go along.