How Project 2025 will Destroy Public Education and Multi-Racial Democracy [View all]

The Heritage Foundation’s Racist Origins and What That History Tells Us

https://washingtonspectator.org/heritage-foundations-racist-history/



CRENSHAW: These wars on curricula are not new, of course; they go far back in our history. What folks might not know is that the Heritage Foundation, the main convenor of Project 2025, cut its teeth on curricular wars in the 1970s. Can you tell us about this formative history and what it reveals about the sort of organization Heritage and its 2025 partners are?

MacLEAN: The Heritage Foundation today is the 800-pound gorilla on the radical right. With an annual budget of over $100 million, and a huge, multistory office complex in Washington, D.C., it is one of the top agenda-setting organizations on the right, if not the dominant one, so it’s not surprising that it took the lead in creating Project 2025. What people need to know is that—unlike some other groups on the right—from its outset the Heritage Foundation blended the toxic cocktail that today’s right is gulping in large doses to achieve its goals: libertarian economics; Christian nationalism; and the weaponization of racism, gender anxiety, and parental fears about sex. Back in 1974, a year after its founding, Heritage had a staff of five people in a rented office above a garage. That’s when its co-founder, Paul Weyrich, sniffed a big opportunity in West Virginia—in a textbook fight brewing in Kanawha County, home of the state capitol in Charleston. As Weyrich said later: “The alliance between religion and politics didn’t just happen.”

Heritage worked hard to make it happen. Heritage’s then-tiny team inserted itself in a fight opened by Alice Moore, a school board member, and the wife of a fundamentalist minister. She didn’t like the new multicultural language arts textbooks the district was adopting that including some 300 titles she had not read but objected to. First, she complained about literature that had any dialogue, whether Appalachian or “ghetto,” that was not “correct” English. Then it was that the books were “filthy, disgusting trash”— also “unduly favoring blacks.” Then it was that The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an option for high school seniors, disrespected Christianity. As with today’s culture wars, this one had interested backers from the beginning. Moore was already in the orbit of the John Birch Society and received counsel from Mel and Norma Gabler, the Texas-based couple who were transforming textbook adoption in states like their own by claiming bias over what they viewed as offensive content, such as evolution rather than creationism. Moore soon traveled to address the Christian Crusade of Tulsa on the theme “Public Schools Undermine God’s Law.”

All the while, the fledgling Heritage Foundation provided training, publicity, and links to potential allies. The result? The most violent textbook battle in U.S. history to date. Over the ensuing months, parents of one-fourth of the students in the county had kept them home to boycott the schools, some set up private “Christian schools,” gunshots were fired, Moore’s allies physically attacked supporters of the new curriculum at a school board meeting, and arson and bombings caused several schools to close. Some local protesters cut right to the chase and denounced the new recommendations as “n—–r books.” (From the start, the NAACP saw the all-white campaign against the new books as racist). As Maya Angelou once wrote: When people show you who they are, believe them—the first time. Because what Heritage showed then is that it would bring gasoline to any fight that would help to build a bench of reactionary religious voters—a strategy which was still in its earliest stages of development. And they would not blink at violence if it seemed to help their cause. Heritage provided legal counsel to a Christian minister, Marvin Horan, who was charged with plotting school bombings. Moran was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. (The Ku Klux Klan rallied support for Horan too, though at demonstrations, not in court).

snip