Charles Sallis, 89, deceased; Turned the teaching of Mississippi history on its head

Charles Sallis, a Mississippi historian who co-authored a high school textbook that revolutionized the teaching of Mississippi's troubled history, died Feb. 5 at his home in Jackson, Miss. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his son Charles Jr.

Until “Mississippi: Conflict & Change,” which Mr. Sallis co-wrote and edited with the sociologist James W. Loewen, was published in 1974, high school students in the state were fed a bland pablum that depicted the horrors of slavery, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and largely skipped the civil rights movement.

Born in Mississippi, Mr. Sallis had grown up under his state's conventional racism. But he had long realized that most of what he had been taught was wrong: slave owners were not benevolent, Reconstruction was not a story of black corruption, and white supremacy was not inevitable. He and Mr. Loewen wanted to forever change the way young people in Mississippi thought about their state.

In 1970, as the most active phase of the civil rights revolution that had transformed his state neared its end, Mr. Sallis, a history professor at the relatively liberal Millsaps College, along with Mr. Loewen, who was then teaching nearby at the historically Black Tougaloo College, and a small team of students and faculty from both schools sat down to reconsider their state's past. Over the next four years, the group of nine produced a ninth-grade history textbook that was so powerful, candid, and unforgiving in its discussion of the state's grim history that the Mississippi State Textbook Purchasing Board almost immediately banned its use in schools as soon as it appeared.

Outside of Mississippi — a state that historian James W. Silver had dubbed “The Closed Society” in a seminal 1964 book — the efforts of Mr. Sallis, Mr. Loewen and the rest of their team were immediately recognized.

“Mississippi: Conflict & Change” was “pointed, clear and at times unnerving,” wrote child psychiatrist Robert Coles in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Historian Lawrence Goodwyn of Duke University called it “an extraordinary achievement” and “the best history of an American state that I have ever seen” in a letter to Mr. Loewen that is quoted in historian Charles W. Eagles' book from 2017, “Civil Rights, Culture Wars: The Battle for a Textbook in Mississippi.”

And in 1976 the book won the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Award for the best nonfiction book about the South.

But it would take five years of court battles against stubborn state officialsa lawsuit and an order that Mississippi accept the book in 1980 by a federal judge, Orma R. Smith, so that it would make its way into the state's schools.

When Mr. Sallis was called by the state's attorney to explain himself and the book at trial, he was modest: He said that he and his colleagues had simply wanted to prepare a textbook that would be “an antidote or remedy to the racial imbalance in the traditional Mississippi area'. texts.” In an earlier statement, he had condemned “the nation's failure to keep its promise of equality” during Reconstruction.

Mr Sallis himself concentrated in the book on that period, his specialty. Of the black people who briefly rose to power after the Civil War, he wrote, “They were reasonable in their use of political power and in their actions toward white Mississippians. All they asked for was equal rights before the law. Overall, Mississippi was especially fortunate to have capable black leaders during these years.

This was a radical departure from the view that students in the state had been fed for years with textbooks like John K. Bettersworth's “Your Mississippi,” which suggested that Reconstruction had been a period of unmitigated horror for white people. “Reconstruction was a worse struggle than the war ever was,” Mr. Bettersworth wrote inaccurately.

Mr. Sallis then described in some detail the brutal oppression of black people that followed Reconstruction and the so-called Mississippi Plan of 1875, which involved the violent suppression of the black vote. White people, he said, had “unleashed a reign of terror” to regain and maintain the control they would hold for the next ninety years.

It was a strong position for mid-1970s Mississippi, and it also represented the end point of a personal metamorphosis for Mr. Sallis, as Mr. Eagles' book makes clear.

Growing up in Mississippi, Mr. Eagles quotes him as saying: Mr. Sallis was a “good-natured bigot.” In other words, I honestly believed that blacks were inferior.” It was only after serving with black army officers at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and reading such seminal books as Vernon Lane Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi: 1865-90 that Mr. Sallis began to move away from conventional Mississippi thinking—a change which is reflected in his dissertation “The Color Line in Mississippi Politics” at the University of Kentucky, where he received his Ph.D. in 1967.

By the late 1960s, when Mr. Sallis began teaching at Millsaps, “he became active in the small liberal community in Jackson,” Mr. Eagles wrote, urging his downtown church, Galloway United Methodist establish a childcare program. The church rejected Mr. Sallis's idea. Mr. Eagles noted in his book that many black people live nearby in this part of Jackson

William Charles Sallis was born on August 27, 1934, in Tremont, Miss., to William Lazarus Sallis, who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Myrtle Cody Sallis. He attended Greenville High School and, after earning a degree in education from Mississippi State University in 1956, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army. He also received his master's degree in 1956.

He taught history at Millsaps from 1968 to 2000.

In addition to his son Charles Jr. he is survived by his wife, Harrylyn Graves Sallis; another son, David; a daughter, Victoria; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

“Mississippi: Conflict & Change” is now out of print, but it “opened the way for other historians to say, 'OK, we can tackle these issues,'” Charles Sallis Jr. said. “The reality of that book inspired later books.”