“We are living in a post-fact world.”   I hear this all the time from pundits and journalists. They say facts don’t matter anymore, and lies come thick and fast.  But I am a white Southerner; I grew up in a post-fact world.

To be fair, to be human is to live in world in which we believe all sorts of things that are not true.  Most things people in the year 1200 believed about how the world works we today would say are untrue. So we don’t really have the option of grasping the whole truth, a so-called God’s eye view of the cosmos.  

However, I was still startled when someone I know fairly well who has lived in the Staunton area for an entire lifetime began to tell me version of Southern history I recognized as untrue.  Where was this coming from?

Then I remembered the Virginia history textbooks that were being used in the public schools from the mid 1950s to the 1970s.  I had to use those textbooks when I taught 7th grade in Charlottesville from 1969-1972. There was a curriculum that mandated Virginia history be taught in grades 4 and 7, so the faculty at Buford School decided that we would teach U.S. history before 1865 to 7th graders, including state history, and U.S. history from 1865 to 8th graders.  

We who taught Virginia history used the state-adopted book but taught that it presented a skewed version of what had happened.  The book had been commissioned during the Byrd machine era and was put into use in 1957. It presented Virginia history through the lens of the “Lost Cause,” slaves as mostly happy, slaveholders as kind.  This gauzy, romantic picture of the South and of Robert E. Lee, was taught to every school child, black and white.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reported in 2016 that, “The GOP’s Linwood Holton became governor in 1970, and his administration clamped down on the books.  They were allowed to be phased out, however, and some were still in use in the late 1970s.”

My daughter entered 4th grade at McSwain Elementary in Staunton in 1987.  That textbook was used by her teacher in the classroom. I was appalled and called a former colleague of mine from my teaching days.  The late L. Neil Black was originally from Broadway, Va., and taught history his whole career in Charlottesville, at Buford and Charlottesville High School.  I asked him how this book could possibly still be in use and what the rules were. He told me a teacher could use a no-longer-commissioned text, but they could not be issued to students individually and could not be removed from the classroom.  

I went to the teacher and asked why she was using this book. She told me that it used a story form, and students liked it.    

Why am I still upset by this situation that happened so long ago?  I am upset because a person whose point of view I respect still believed what had been taught in local schools.  And it was not true.

I am upset because conversations about changing the name of Robert E. Lee High School, the conflict over Confederate monuments, even the framing of the Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville are being affected, I would even say tainted, by what was taught in the public schools.  

I sometimes read letters to the editor of this paper that make essentially the same arguments these textbooks made.  I hear comments from people that mirror these textbooks.

I remember standing in front of my students, and later my daughter, and saying, “Read this page.  If you were a Native American, how would this read to you? What if you are African American?” They got it.  They did not need for me to go into long explanations.

If you want to investigate it yourself, your local school may still have copies on a shelf somewhere.  You can order them from Amazon, but you would have to pay over $200 because they are so rare.  Or you can pull up “Happy slaves? The peculiar story of three Virginia school textbooks,” from the Richmond Times Dispatch.

On this issue, and other issues as well, ask yourself where you got your ideas and why you think as you do.  We all have to make assumptions, but we better know what they are and where they came from.

Write to Staunton columnist Patricia Hunt at


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