Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob start their book "Telling the Truth about History" (publ. 1994) with the words, "We have lost our grip on historical truth." The Roberts Report, "Listen to Lyndon," (Gazette-Journal, Aug. 5) in which Shirley Sherrod’s firing and Senator Webb’s article, "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege" are reviewed against a backdrop of (President) Lyndon’s (Johnson) words, attests to the truth of these historians’ opinion. The Roberts Report states, "To equate black resentment against whites with white racism aimed at blacks dangerously ignores hundreds of years of American history" and then proceeds to review, not American history, but the "sorry history of both blacks and whites in the post Civil War South."

In his last public address on April 11, 1865, President Lincoln explained that 12,000 white men in Louisiana had sworn allegian...