Some history lessons are black and white

The climb was steep as we humped up 95 stairs in suffocating Atlanta humidity to the old Colored entrance of the Fox Theatre.

One woman, a high school teacher from California, was gasping near the top. Sean Bethune, who teaches U.S. history and contemporary issues in Nashville, was thinking about future lesson plans — and his grandmothers, who lived under Jim Crow in the South.

“It’s excruciating,” Bethune said. “Just think about the mental impact of what they went through. All I can think of is how strong they were to survive that.”

Before the climb, the group of high school teachers had sat in the front rows of the grand 1929 theater, marvelling at the extravagant architecture and Moorish themes. After the ascent, they sat sweating in the last four rows, near the ceiling and behind a short wall that would have separated them from the 4,000-plus whites sitting ahead of them.

The climb, which all black patrons of the Fox were forced to make until 1962, was part of a week-long immersion into Atlanta’s racially divided past. The participants were 40 teachers from across America who signed up for a workshop put on by Georgia State University professors.

Teachers are always desperate for methods to keep students’ eyes from rolling into the backs of their heads. The hope is that the hands-on experiences in Atlanta might give them a shot at keeping youths upright this fall.

The course has been offered for a decade but has taken on deeper meaning this summer with the Charleston massacre and the ensuing battle over all things Confederate — images and themes discussed repeatedly throughout the week.

The workshop started Monday morning in a GSU classroom with history prof Wendy Venet giving a quick run-through on local history. Participants heard about how the railroad came, how folks followed to make a buck, how pre-Civil War Atlanta had comparatively few blacks (20 percent of the population, versus 33 percent statewide).

They learned that, even though there was a busy slave market, Atlanta was a “Unionist” city before the war. Remember, commerce has long trumped politics here.

After the war, Atlanta lay smoldering but bounced back quickly because it was a hard town to hold down. But despite that civic bluster and can-do spirit, Venet said, “white Atlanta embraced the narrative of Atlanta’s victimization.”

“There’s still a great pride in the myths and holding onto them,” a teacher chimed in during the ensuing discussion.

That can make the Confederacy educational dynamite, a teacher from north Georgia ventured. “If you say something critical, you’re saying something about their parents.”

Many teachers just skip it. It’s better than the principal fielding angry calls.

The teachers piled into a bus and drove to Oakland Cemetery, gathering around the obelisk that honors “Our Confederate Dead.” Some 6,900 rest nearby.

Longtime GSU professor Tim Crimmins, who heads the workshop, said that after the war Atlanta’s citizens debated whether to erect its chief monument to the Confederate dead near the center of town at Five Points, where people would be reminded daily, or in a more traditional spot, the graveyard. Oakland won out.

“This is the point of memorialization,” Crimmins said, standing at the obelisk.

Soon, the site was not for merely honoring the dead, he said, it was the heart of a political movement. The narrative of the Lost Cause took hold, and large crowds gathered there for speechifying and flowery language concerning the War of Northern Aggression.

In 1890, a Mrs. George T. Fry summed up the feeling of local whites, a speech printed in the pages of The Atlanta Constitution. The Confederacy’s “patriot martyrs,” she said, died in “defense of Southern rights, honor, constitutional government and liberty.”

Slavery and subjugation? Nary a mention. And there hasn’t been much of that in some quarters since.

Mrs. Fry went on to refer to the “victorious slain.”

Victorious?!? Their city burned, soldiers slaughtered, populations starved, crops burned, their cattle scattered?

Well, it all depends what kind of a face one puts on it. In college football, coaches talk about “good losses.” I suppose this is where the term originated.

Dave Strausbaugh, a high school history teacher who also has a class on contemporary issues, can’t wait to return to Ohio and bring this lesson to his students.

“When we talk about racial issues I get push-back,” he said. Some kids, he said, ask, “Why do we have to talk about this?”

Civil rights is ancient history to them, he said. And political correctness has neutered much conversation.

“With the current discussion, it would be good to go back and talk about the narrative around the Confederate flag,” he said.

A stop at Piedmont Park brought the teachers to the site of the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, an ambitious trade show thrown by city boosters and a long-ago practice run for the Olympics.