Margot Stern Strom, Anti-Bigotry Educator, Dies at 81

Ms. Strom confronted opposition from america Division of Schooling when she sought federal grants from 1986 to 1988. An outdoor member of a evaluate panel complained in 1986 that Going through Historical past’s curriculum didn’t characterize the views of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Get together. The subsequent yr, the panel labeled the curriculum “leftist,” “antiwar” and “offensive to fundamentalists.” The conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly opposed it.

Ms. Strom mentioned the Nazi movies and paperwork that had been utilized in Going through Historical past’s curriculum amply demonstrated the horror of the Nazi place. “What on this planet is the view of the Nazis, that it’s good to homicide individuals?” she requested in an interview with The New York Instances in 1989, after the group’s funding had been denied for a 3rd time. “Going through Historical past doesn’t educate that that’s an applicable standpoint.”

The difficulty arose once more in 1995. Weeks after being employed because the historian of the Home of Representatives, Christina Jeffrey was fired by Newt Gingrich, the Home speaker, after he discovered that she was the evaluate panelist who had criticized the Going through Historical past panel for not giving steadiness to the Nazi and Ku Klux Klan factors of view.

“It’s outdated historical past,” Ms. Strom mentioned on the time, “and I by no means anticipated it to return.”

Margot Stern was born on Nov. 10, 1941, in Chicago. She was 5 when her dad and mom, Lloyd and Fannye (Wener) Stern, moved to Memphis, the place they owned a furnishings retailer.

As a lady, Margot got here to grasp the realities of dwelling in Memphis, the place an indication confirmed the place “coloreds” may enter the zoo; just one Jewish teenager a yr was allowed on her highschool cheerleader squad; and water fountains had been marked “coloured” and “white.”

“In case you’re a toddler, in fact you select ‘coloured,’” she advised The Globe in 1986. “‘Coloured’ means rainbows, blue, purple, pink. It’s much more fascinating than white water … but you observe the principles of the world. You get pushed towards the white fountain.”

She earned a bachelor’s diploma in historical past on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1964, then taught center faculty in Skokie, Ailing., earlier than transferring in 1968 to Tampa, Fla., the place her husband, Dr. Terry Strom, was serving as a captain within the Air Drive. She labored as a mannequin for 2 years, showing in print ads for Pepsi and different merchandise, then moved to Massachusetts in 1970 and resumed instructing, on the Runkle Faculty. In 1977, she acquired a certificates of superior research from a program on ethical improvement at Harvard College’s Graduate Faculty of Schooling.