Lisa Guernsey's column in The Times-Dispatch, "A more accurate teaching of history," reminded me of my first year teaching in a Virginia public school in 1977. While rummaging through a storage room after school in search of some helpful teaching materials, I found a beat-up copy of a recently replaced history textbook. In it were descriptions of the enslaved people in early Virginia as content, with their lot in the tobacco fields. Disgusted, I threw it in the trash. That year, I gave my students a healthy exposure to the realities of slavery, and some parents complained that I was "too liberal." Now I wish I had held onto that textbook and given it to a museum. It was an artifact of racist propaganda.