Teaching the Holocaust just got harder in Mississippi

A new state law forbids education increasing ‘awareness’ of issues relating to race. How are educators supposed to teach history?

This article was originally published in The Bulwark and is reprinted with permission. Margaret McMullan is a frequent contributor to The Mississippi Independent.

As a writer, educator and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I sometimes receive invitations to speak at schools or to teach, and this spring I was invited to teach a session on Holocaust history to lifelong-learning students. We met on a campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, where I offered candid accounts of the realities of life in Nazi-occupied Austria.

We talked about how the Nazis turned Judaism into a racial issue, and how they targeted my mother and her family, forcing them to emigrate from Austria. I explained the circumstances of those of my relatives who escaped and those who were killed. In this way, we used my family’s story to examine in detail issues that can sound bloodless and abstract in the summaries of history books.

I’m always a bit anxious when discussing the Holocaust in Southern classrooms because I never know if I’ll encounter antisemitism, hate, denial, or conspiracist nonsense. Thankfully, our conversations remained polite and based in fact.

But another problem has since come up: If I were to teach that same class again this summer, I might break a new Mississippi law.

If asked to teach it again, I’d of course do so. I’m not sure every educator would.

On April 17, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law House Bill 1193, “Requiring Efficiency For Our Colleges and Universities System and Education System (REFOCUSES) Act”; around here, people refer to it simply as the anti-DEI bill. The new law forbids a variety of DEI-related practices according to a set of tendentious definitions. One term, “diversity training,” is defined in a particularly expansive way: “any formal or informal education, seminars, workshops or institutional program that focus on increasing awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex, color, gender identity, sexual orientation or national origin.”

The law establishes reporting requirements and a complaints process, and, starting next summer, it will allow for public hearings in front of the state legislature to investigate infractions. Institutions found to have violated the law are given twenty-five days to “cure all actions relating to the violation”; leaving violations uncured can lead to court injunctions to comply with the law, and repeat violations are grounds for state funds to entire school districts to be withheld until the “violating entity demonstrates full compliance with the provisions of this act.”

The meaning here is plain enough: Under the vague threat of a penalty that will harm their students most of all, educators must avoid any discussion, as the ACLU put it in a press release about opposition to H.B. 1193, of “slavery, the Civil War, various forms of discrimination in the past and present, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movements, the LGBTQ rights movement, and many other aspects of American life and life throughout the world.” PEN America also raised the alarm, noting before it was signed that H.B. 1193 amounts to an “educational gag order” that “would impose extreme restrictions on speech and ideas in public schools, colleges and universities” in Mississippi.

Last week, a coalition of civil rights and legal organizations (including the Mississippi Center for Justice, where I serve on the board) filed a federal lawsuit against Mississippi’s statewide education boards. The lawsuit centers on the new law’s restriction of free speech and its instruction to schools at all levels across the state to violate the First Amendment.

The complaint alleges that H.B. 1193 produces a wide range of consequences: To make sure they’re compliant with the law, constitutional law professors must cut out references to the Fourteenth Amendment and to cases about discrimination—a huge branch of American judicial history—from their lectures and even their textbooks. Classes at all levels must proceed without any discussion related to sex and gender identity. Canonical books by canonical American authors—Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner among them—would be subject to de facto bans, because you cannot talk about them, let alone teach them, without getting into race or gender.

The lawsuit also claims that the new law will force a complete revamp of various K–12, postsecondary, and law-school curricula and require fundamental revisions to Mississippi’s educational offerings in history, biology, and English literature, altering education as we know it in the state.

These are terrible outcomes for Mississippi students, and they all result directly from the problem at the heart of H.B. 1193: How can you ban from state classrooms anything that “increases awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or national origin” while still claiming to offer a full education?

For that matter, how can you ban anything “that increases awareness or understanding” of a subject? Isn’t that the entire point of education?

Mississippi is on the front lines of the battle over American culture, as we’ve always been. If this law holds, it may serve as a model to other states. Remember that the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade, handed down exactly three years ago today, originated in Mississippi with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

While visiting classrooms to discuss my books, I’ve found that students invariably get into deep conversations with me and one another about slavery, reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the Holocaust.

I was invited to talk about my recent memoir, Where the Angels Lived, during my spring course; the book was made possible by a Fulbright scholarship that gave me an opportunity to teach at the University of Pécs in Hungary, where I researched my mother’s Jewish family. Most of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by white German Christians against Jews. How do you teach about the Holocaust without getting into race, religion, or national heritage?

The answer is that obviously, you can’t.

Maybe the fact that six million Jews were murdered by Nazis will remain in Mississippi textbooks. Maybe it won’t—it’s too early to say anything about the fate of the new law or how its purposefully broad provisions will be enforced. In any case, six million is an overwhelming number that often numbs students’ minds. The stories of individuals are what help to make the number real, pushing students to read about, learn, and remember what the terrible count actually means.

So here is how I help my students begin to grapple with this subject matter.

I start with a picture of Adolf Hitler standing in an open car in Vienna. My mother saw him that day, when she was at the dentist’s office having a cavity filled. There was a parade, and my mother, who was 9 years old, went to the window with everyone else and clapped as they did. It was March 12, 1938—the Anschluss.

The students who were outside in the streets cheering Hitler with swastika flags that day were the same age as the children in fifth grade I often teach in classrooms throughout Mississippi.

I explain that my research was challenging. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (a man President Trump said could be his twin) has erased most of the evidence of Hungary’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. In Pécs, there are no markers commemorating the deportation in 1944 of more than 4,000 Hungarian Jews, including my great uncle, Richárd, to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. I had to find out his story for myself.

I walk students through my search for Richárd. I show a picture of his house in Pécs, where Nazis arrested him, then seized his home and everything else he owned. They held him at a deportation center before they loaded him on a cattle car headed for a concentration camp. I show documents from Yad Vashem and the Mauthausen Memorial in Austria. Then I show the picture of Richárd’s death registry, dated April 30, 1944, with a black line drawn through his name.

This is often when students ask, Why?

Why did they arrest Richárd? Why did they take his home and everything in it? Why did they kill him?

On a plain reading of Mississippi’s H.B. 1193, I cannot say that Richárd was seized from his home, sent to a concentration camp, and killed because he was Jewish, and white Hungarian Christians wanted to kill him and steal his things for that reason, because doing so would require increasing my students’ “awareness or understanding” of “race, . . . religion or national origin.” That is to say, while Mississippi law would permit me to make a statement of circumstantial facts, it would seem to prohibit me from describing the motive for Richárd’s killing.

If I can make a factual statement but can’t answer the why, the student learns nothing.

I’ve taught this material in classrooms with students of German origin. Should they be made to feel discomfort learning about the Holocaust, as the law expressly forbids? Of course not—but that doesn’t mean they won’t feel discomfort anyway, and it would be more than okay if they do. Sometimes learning is uncomfortable.

There on a campus of the University of Southern Mississippi this spring, after I brought the story of Richárd’s life to its conclusion, I paused to give everyone a moment. Some lifted their glasses to dab at their eyes. Then we began an earnest discussion of the Holocaust, discrimination, and the importance of standing up to—and for—others.

It’s in these sorts of moments that history becomes real, and powerful.

This is why I’m inclined to say that when it comes to H.B. 1193, everybody loses—but especially the students who are getting cheated out of an education. Not only are they being denied access to important domains of knowledge; they are also being robbed of hard-earned moments like this, where learning becomes profound.

It is ironic that Mississippi, once a bastion of “states’ rights,” is now willingly bending the knee to the federal government. Already, the Trump administration has removed Medgar Evers, a fearless veteran and civil rights leader martyred by white supremacists, from an Arlington Cemetery website commemorating black soldiers. Now the Pentagon may strip Evers’s name from a naval vessel. They are erasing our state’s history as we watch.

I still try to plan for the coming year. Fall is coming. That’s usually when I visit middle schools, high schools, and universities in and around Mississippi. Will educators still invite me? The risks are great.

According to the new law, if someone reports problematic discussions, the complaint would work its way into the system as a problem that must be “cured.” Although the law requires schools to “cure” any alleged violations, it does not state what a “cure” would require. Perhaps a teacher or administrator would need to be fired. Perhaps a student would need to be suspended or expelled. Two or more “uncured” violations will result in the stop on federal funding. It’s conceivable that schools might close because of this law.

In October, Imani Perry will visit us here in Pass Christian for our One Book One Pass reading program to talk about her book South to America. Every year, we invite authors such as Erik Larson, Jon Meacham, Natasha Trethewey, Jack E. Davis, Jesmyn Ward, and others to come talk to the community about their work. Often, the authors will also visit local high school classrooms to speak with students. I wonder—will the high school administrators be anxious about these classroom visits, fearful they may lose their jobs or school funding?

After all, what if a student asks, “why?”

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Image: Composite by Hannah Yoest (photos: GettyImages)