To the Editor:
As a teacher of American history to junior high students, I had a problem to face – explaining why Andrew Jackson was the most racist president we ever had.
Showing students how he treated the Cherokee Indians made many students angry. This Georgia tribal nation had its own towns, with libraries, schools, stores and governments, and associated type buildings. They also had homes built in their towns.
Other white residents were jealous of the Cherokee success and wanted it, so President Jackson pushed legislation to allow the government to eject the natives from their land, then force them to march over 1,000 miles to Oklahoma under military guard to a reservation.
Jackson then joined others to buy at dirt cheap prices the land from his buddy partner land speculators.
In 1975, the U.S. government paid the Cherokee nation $5 million in reparations for taking their land that was worth $5 million in 1865. Great deal for the government, not the Cherokee.
In my view, this bred systemic racism into Georgia that still exists. This racism solidly entrenched in the Civil War, when Sherman marched to the sea, splitting the state in half, as well as the south.
