Tackling Textbooks of the Times: The Telling Truth About Race in Textbooks from 1945-1970

As a key classroom tool, textbooks offer concrete insights from the past. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal’s study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, convinced Americans that the issue of American prejudice and racism could be eradicated using education. In response, intellectuals, educators, and activists moved the front of the battle against racial prejudice and discrimination to the classrooms and textbooks. In the Cold War geopolitical context and the American Civil Rights Movement, the approach to teaching race shifted rapidly and dramatically between 1945 and 1970. This thesis examines how textbooks shifted due to these influences to show how intellectuals, educators, and activists shaped their attempts to solve the American dilemma. However, textbooks are not without their own limitations. In the twenty-five years after World War II, textbook publishing and adoption rates were generally slow and new classroom sets were expensive. The textbook lag was acknowledged and somewhat amended through supplemental teaching material. Nevertheless, textbooks limited the success of education as the method in which to solve racial prejudice. An evaluation of the shifts textbooks did display, represents that the role of education in solving social issues is possible. There is hope for the future of education and textbooks, as technology continues to diminish the inherent limitations of textbooks