austin trip, texas state history museum, no race violence

I had no idea what procrastinators you CDMOM people are. Today’s the last day to sign up for April. 35 people signed up in the first couple of weeks of the signup form being posted, then a sudden rush of 14 more in the last couple of hours before the midnight deadline. (If you miss out, there’s always May, or June, or July, or…you get it.)
Just got back from Austin. Unbeknownst to me, some government official declared today Don’t Secure The Random Objects On Your High-Speed Vehicle Day on Interstate 35, and I was dodging things great and small all the way down and back. The highlight: a pickup truck that for some reason had a full gallon of milk in the back, tailgate lowered. An untimely bump sent it smashing to the asphalt, about five feet from my car. Was I concerned? Hell, no. That’s what rentals are for.
Julie and I went to the Texas State History Museum. It’s impressive from a purely museum-science point of view: cogently assembled and filled with nice graphics and signage. My inner historian, though, kept noticing what was left out or glossed over. (One might include the Kennedy shooting, for instance.) Since it was my main area of interest in college, I was mostly turned off by the near complete absence of race as an issue after, oh, 1876.
Southern historians/apologists too often get away with framing the race issue thusly: Some bad Southerners owned slaves. Then there was a big war, where everyone was very heroic. But in the end the North won, and times were hard here for a while. But look, we elected a couple black people to the legislature in the 1870s! The whole race issue was pretty much solved, okay? Get off our backs!
It’s a convenient way for a museum or a historian to put all the blame for racial wrongdoing on people who’ve been dead for 150 years. There’s no mention anywhere (that I saw today, at least) of the violent means whites used to take the vote back from blacks, the way Reconstruction’s race-blind laws were replaced with Jim Crow, and basically the way white supremacy returned, triumphant, to power in the 1880s-1910s, almost as if the Civil War had never happened. If you believe the museum, we all pretty much got along after 1876.
(Texas isn’t alone in this; there’s an African-American history museum being built in south Louisiana now that got community funding only after essentially promising it wouldn’t deal with anything racially charged from the 20th century. James Loewen goes into this issue in his two books, which are quite fascinating and only rarely lapse into the leftist rhetoric you might expect from a historian of his views.)
I suppose I shouldn’t expect complete honesty from something state-run that serves as a rah-rah postcard for the state, and it was certainly more honest than it could have been. And to be fair, Texas’ record wasn’t as bad as some other Southern states during the period. But it does remind you of the power of history, historians, and museums. What they say happened is what people learn, and in this instance, revisionist Southern historians did a job on the truth.