A state-sponsored
Kids told at Jefferson Davis home: Slaves thought well of him
Alabama museum teaches schoolchildren that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was leader of a “heroic resistance” who was held in the “highest esteem” by his black slaves.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Schoolchildren who visit the First White House of the Confederacy learn that its famous former resident, President Jefferson Davis, was leader of a “heroic resistance” who was “held by his Negroes in genuine affection as well as highest esteem.”
Such ideas, once mainstream Southern thought, have largely been abandoned by historians. But they are still part of the message at this state-supported museum in Alabama’s capital city that hosts thousands of grade-school students from different ethnic backgrounds on field trips every year.
Some critics say presenting discredited notions about the Confederacy at the antebellum home where Davis lived in the early months of the Civil War helps perpetuate a skewed version of the past and shouldn’t be supported by Alabama tax dollars.
“You’re essentially giving money to push historical narratives that we haven’t heard since the Klan era in the 1920s,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the hate-watching Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The museum perseveres in a newer era, when many Confederate memorials across the South are being re-evaluated. South Carolina lowered the Confederate flag at the state Capitol after a 2015 mass murder at a black church in Charleston. And last month, New Orleans officials took down a 35-foot granite obelisk that honored whites who tried to topple a biracial Reconstruction government installed in New Orleans after the Civil War.
On a recent trip to the Montgomery museum, fourth-graders from rural Wilcox County in southern Alabama trudged up a nearly 200-year-old staircase into the Relic Room, where a painting of Gen. Robert E. Lee hangs amid the four flags of the Confederacy. Tour guide Robert Wieland tells the children the room was formerly called a “shrine.”
The pupils heard about the importance of the South’s cotton economy and learned how to spin raw clumps of the stuff onto wooden spools but were told little about the slaves whose forced labor drove the textile industry.
Tours and literature there make little mention of African-Americans, except for a copy of “Jim Limber Davis: A Black Orphan in the Confederate White House,” an illustrated children’s book about a boy adopted by the Davis family. The book is displayed across from a framed image of some of the South’s most prominent leaders titled “Our Heroes and Our Flags.”
Democratic state Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma said the house, which in recent years cost Alabama taxpayers more than $100,000 a year to operate, presents a history that ignores African-Americans.
In response to such criticism, representatives of the museum ask why they should have to tell students about slavery.