Tennessee Tea Party Group Calls For US Textbooks to Overlook Slavery

When it comes to American slavery a group of Tennessee Tea Party members want to pretend it never happened.

There has been a push by Tea Party activists to remove references to slavery in school textbooks. The group would rather have school curriculums present the nation’s founders in a more positive light.

According to the Huffington Post, Hal Rounds, a Fayette County attorney and spokesman for the group, said there has been "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

"The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn't existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at," Rounds said during a news conference to propose the group’s agenda.

Members of the group handed out material that read, "Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government."

This latest push to put a more conservative spin on American history comes a month after the Texas Board of Education approved revisions to the social studies curriculum that would include exploring the positive impact of American slavery, and lifting the stature of Confederate leader Jefferson S. Davis.

More than 4.8 million Texas students may be impacted by this revisionist of history.