In a way, America’s classrooms have always been auxiliary battlegrounds for the country’s larger culture wars.
During Reconstruction, as the formerly enslaved, craving education, began that journey for themselves and their children, Negro schools became a favorite target of white terrorists. Many of those schools were burned to the ground.
Long after 1870, for decades, almost all education in the South and across much of the country was racially segregated.
When schools were finally ordered to integrate, that directive was met with vehement, violent opposition.
A main pillar of white supremacy is patriarchal sexism: White men justify their aggression and violence by claiming that they are merely protecting vulnerable and “defenseless” white women and children. This can, in the mind of the white terrorist, make his savagery and chicanery feel like chivalry.