Textbook Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Boardman, and <i>Black Reconstruction in America</i>

ABSTRACT One familiar refrain concerning W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America is that the book is a rebuke of the disreputable historiography of the period, authored by historians including William A. Dunning, John W. Burgess, and Claude G. Bowers. For all the focus on these well‐known figures, our essay begins with Helen Boardman, the person hiding in plain sight at the start of the book's stirring final chapter, “The Propaganda of History.” A reporter for The Crisis magazine who undertook investigations of lynchings and other social plagues, Boardman's research on propaganda in school textbooks proved indispensable for Black Reconstruction. As one of the first sustained analyses of Boardman and her relationship with Du Bois and the NAACP, our essay, which draws on an array of primary source materials, makes several contributions on the 90th anniversary of Black Reconstruction . First, it demonstrates how fighting textbook propaganda was central to the NAACP's larger activism. Second, it extends the book's analysis of the psychology of racism to the context of school textbook indoctrination. Third, it highlights how Boardman and Du Bois's activism presaged the work needed today to challenge dangerous propaganda and the full‐scale assault on the critical teaching of anti‐Black racism.