Texas Mom Criticizes Major Textbook Publisher for This Section on Immigration and Slavery

A Texas mom is celebrating after her complaints resulted in a major textbook publisher's promise to rewrite history — literally.

When Roni Dean-Burren saw a caption in her ninth-grader's world geography textbook that likened slaves to immigrants, she posted video evidence to social media which has now gone viral.

"The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations," the controversial passage in question read.

The Atlantic slave trade brought millions of workers...notice the nuanced language there. Workers implies wages...yes? My son @coby_burren sent this to me today. He's in 9th grade...he woke y'all! #staywoke #blackboymagic

A photo posted by @mscoachb_honest on Sep 30, 2015 at 10:05am PDT

The caption was included on a map under a section labeled "patterns of immigration."

"Immigrants. Yeah, that word matters," Dean-Burren said in her video that has since amassed more than 1.4 million views. Dean-Burren continued in the video to point out that a passage about European indentured servants mentioned that those people came over to work for little or no pay, but that was left out of the passage on African slavery.

"It just says we were workers," she said.

Within a day, publisher McGraw-Hill responded to Dean-Burren's criticisms and promised to change the caption immediately on the digital versions of the book, and the caption will be changed in the next printing of the textbook.

"This week, we became aware of a concern regarding a caption reference to slavery on a map in one of our world geography programs," McGraw-Hill wrote in a statement published to the company's Facebook page. "This program addresses slavery in the world in several lessons and meets the learning objectives of the course. However, we conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves."

Dean-Burren shared the statement on her Facebook page in celebration with the hashtags "#blackboysmatter" and "#blacklivesmatter." She also complimented her son, who KTRK-TV reported is a student at Pearland High School, for his "power" in enacting the change.

In her video, Dean-Burren flipped through the front pages of the textbook that lists academic consultants and reviewers and said it was "scary" to her that "all of these people who are seemingly wise" approved the slavery map and definition.

KTRK reported that Dean-Burren recently attended an academic conference.