Celebrating Black History Month the Red State Way

Dr. Jerry W. Thomas
Superintendent, Union County Schools

Bill Cook
Principal, Walter Bickett Elementary

Dear Dr. Thomas and Mr. Cook,

I salute you for the creative way in which you are celebrating Black History Month. While other schools waste our children's time telling stories about Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver, you bring history alive by beating black children with a paddle, a punishment tool developed by our Confederate forefathers as a way of protecting their slaves' trade-in value.

And boy do you do it with a vengeance. Black children in Union County (North Carolina) Schools are twice as likely to get a beating as their white counterparts. At Mr. Cook's school, a full eighty-two percent of the paddlings are given to black children even though they comprise less than half of the school's population. Now that's what I call keeping history alive.

I imagine that it might be difficult to find resources which discuss the important part the paddle plays in our cultural heritage. If that's the case, you might consider George Ryley Scott's 1938 book, The History of Corporal Punishment, in which he writes:

Human ingenuity gets over most difficulties... With the slave-owners it was directed to the finding of a method of punishing the negroes without affecting adversely their market value. It was to an enterprising Virginian "white" that came the big idea whereby it was possible to "whip" or beat a negro into insensibility without leaving any traces of the owner?s handiwork. To this end, he devised a thin wooden 'paddle' punctured all over its flat surface with small holes. With this instrument, so it was said, a slave could be given such terrible punishment that he lost consciousness, and yet no lacerations, fissures, or other signs of punishment having been inflicted, would result.

Anyway, kudos to you for keeping tradition alive.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

P.S. Although I've already congratulated Isabelle Mims for Union County Schools recent honor of being named as South Carolina's leader in beating disabled children, I might as well take this opportunity to congratulate you as well.