Dr. James W. Loewen
“Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present,” Loewen wrote. It was his guiding principle.
The book, which sold more than a million copies, was first published in 1995 and confronted incorrect or misleading historical pedagogy in American schools. Loewen went on to publish more in the series: Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus; Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong; and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Reader’s Edition.
Loewen’s books were inspired by his time teaching at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a historically Black college in Jackson, Miss.
The year was 1969 and Loewen was teaching a freshman social science seminar. On the first day of the semester, the Harvard-trained sociologist posed a basic history question to his students: define the period in U.S. history known as Reconstruction.
While the students’ answers ran the gamut, the overall response boiled down to something like this — Reconstruction was the period after the Civil War when Blacks, newly freed from slavery, assumed leadership positions in government, screwed up and Whites were subsequently called in to save the day.
“I was stunned,” Loewen told Diverse in a 2013 profile. “How hurtful this could be [that] the one time African-Americans have taken center stage in American history, and [they] believe that [they] screwed up? What does that do to your psyche?”
