US Authoritarianism

We were not taught this speech or exposed to this in our desegregated (as of 1965) classrooms in my public schools (70s and 80s). I was in "honors" history in the 80s and stuff like this would be skipped over or minimized.

The actual teaching of events is covered quickly and on easily tested facts/dates. There were no in depth ethical debates about why any of it happened. If a student tried, this would last at most a few minutes of of the school year on that subject.

Sometimes that's enough to get someone into the library or asking questions outside of school. But most students during this time have and had no idea who the Confederate VP was, let alone what he said.

BUT - there are people (white supremacists) who are proud of the Stephens heritage. Nowadays they say quiet parts out loud (Internet helped with that) when they used to save that for special occasions.

The one I met in the early 90s claimed the klan was like the NAACP for white people. I shit you not he claimed they were not against Other People having rights, just making sure white folk didn't lose rights in the process. This scared me a lot because it was, excuse the pun, whitewashing their murderous history to make it easier to recruit.

Tl;dr; My point is that you are correct, but also somewhat wrong in that for 80% of us that wasn't what we learned - we barely were taught anything. It was mostly treated in real life like rival football teams. (At least, if you were white and not getting a daily dose of racism) The ones that were taught this stuff, it was coming from specific groups not public classrooms.

Even shorter tl;dr; - there's a lot of cognitive dissonance and not a lot of actual education.