You may be surprised to learn that in this study, commissioned by the ACLU of Georgia for its Southern affiliates, the sample consisted entirely of Southerners. So the results likely underestimated the effectiveness of our messages nationally. 

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Just to hit some of the highlights of what went into this message and how it could do so well against an emotionally powerful message that weds nationalism, feelings about "wokeness" and "cancel culture," and bigotry:​

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• The message uses what we call "the language of the kitchen table" - the ordinary language ordinary people use. No acronyms, no inside baseball (e.g., mentioning Tulsa, or "Juneteenth" without explaining them and expecting most people to know what we are talking about), and no language that feels confusing to most Americans and accusing to white Americans. For example, we have found that white working-class voters readily understand the concept of "systemic racism" and find it deeply unfair - if presented to them in a way that allows them to hear it, usually including an evocative example. But they respond very differently if put in Kafka's trial and told, "You stand accused of a kind of racism we will not explain to you." 

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• Over the past 15-20 years, we have identified a structure common to virtually every powerful message, with the exception of attack ads:

  • Connect with listeners, with a statement of shared values, often combined with a metaphor that transforms an issue about which they may know little to one they understand well (which is the psychological function of metaphors);

  • Raise concerns, in as visceral and visual a way as possible, so listeners can picture real people; and if someone is causing the problem, make sure to name the antagonist (and the protagonists, if doing so does not seem gratuitous);

  • Restore hope, with an example of a solution, the "gist" of what we can do to solve the problem, and a return to the dominant values and metaphors that have infused the message from start to finish.

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• In this message, we began with a values statement few would dispute, especially when taken out of the context of a racially loaded topic: that we want to teach our children about history with the same rigor and objectivity with which we teach them about science and math.

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• We then eased into the conflict, with a fact with which everyone had to wrestle as a child: that one of the "fathers" of our country, Thomas Jefferson, who penned those immortal words, that all men are created equal, could not see how it contradicted his own ownership of slaves.

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• We then learned how we could improve the message. In viewing dial-tests, you want to look at how people respond to specific phrases, clauses, or sentences within a section; at the trajectory of the section as a whole; and at the trajectory of the entire message, to see how people feel about it at the end. In this case, the dials told us that voters responded well to the Jefferson example, but unsurprisingly, they  dropped when the message presented the contradiction, that this man we so admire owned slaves. That led us to revise the message in a later version, adding how much he loved and respected his wife but could not see that she deserved the right to vote, which conflicted with the thinking of the times about gender - and 150 years would pass before women would gain that right. Then we moved to slavery.

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• Next, we gave voters a bit of an emotional break, introducing the idea that history, to be history, isn't all wine and roses. We described the extraordinary accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt, which drove the dials up - but then introduced what he did to Japanese-Americans, about which we suspect only a minority of voters were aware. But what was important, and made that segment "work," was its emphasis not only on the prejudice of his day but also on the progress we have made since, that we could not fathom doing that today (at least to citizens...). Note how the dials skyrocket there, as people hear about the ugliness of the past, even associated with a revered President, but how we have evolved as a nation in ways that are undeniable - a point that brings people whose values are more right-wing along with us.

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• The next section was experimental, and we were happily surprised by the results: testing the inclusion of the massacre at Tulsa, of which most people had just recently heard for the first time. It succeeded because we gave it two important forms of what we call values scaffolding: introducing a fact along with the values that allow people who might otherwise reject it to hear and embrace it. The first "scaffold" was the idea of teaching our kids things we didn't learn, emphasizing that not only does our history progress but so does our ability to talk and teach about it. The second, and even more important for "scaffolding" for speaking to people may even lean to the right was the fact that the African Americans slaughtered in Tulsa were doing everything we want Americans to do, and they were slaughtered for it.  Even those on the far right found that troubling.

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• A third form of scaffolding is worth mentioning as well. By this point in the message, voters across the ideological spectrum know that the narrator is coming from a place of both patriotism and honesty - that he is doing just what he said we should do, teaching about our history with the same accuracy and objectivity as he would describe an equation or a cell - but that the moral lessons are not lost on him, either. He is clearly not an "America-hater." But he is also not an apologist. You can tell by that point that he loves his country enough to tell its history truthfully and remain proud to be an American.

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• We then took the "experiment" of introducing new facts one step further in describing white lynchings, and the fact that white people were lynched for the same reason black people were: that they were not seen at the time as white enough. We suspected, and the dials confirmed, that that little-known fact would bring voters from the entire ideological spectrum with us, albeit likely for different reasons.