Negro History Week countered the growing myth of the South’s “lost cause”

Throughout the 1930s, Negro History Week countered the growing myth of the South’s “lost cause”, as epitomized in the novel and movie “Gone With The Wind. That myth argued that slaves had been well-treated, that the Civil War was a war of “northern aggression,” and that blacks had been better off under slavery. “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson wrote in his book “The Miseducation of the American Negro.” “You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it.”