After a tense meeting, the Florida Board of Education unanimously approved a new set of standards for how Black history will be taught in the state’s public schools, ignoring protests from educators, politicians, and civil rights advocates who said the standards whitewash African American history. What drew the most outrage at Wednesday’s meeting was part of the middle-school standards that would require instruction to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to visit Florida on Friday to speak out against the new standards for teaching Black history adopted by the board, NBC News reported. She will meet with parents, educators, civil rights leaders and elected officials.
The trip to Jacksonville will highlight efforts to "protect fundamental freedoms, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach America’s full and true history," a White House official told NBC News.
“Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said at a convention for the traditionally Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta Inc, according to NBC. “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”
At Wednesday’s board meeting, Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani expressed outrage over the reference that slavery personally benefited slaves.
“I am very concerned by these standards, especially … the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved. It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Eskamani said.
Kevin Parker, a community member, told the board of education, “Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history, our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not.”
“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he was quoted as saying by the Florida Phoenix.
There is only one person of color on the seven-member state board of education. “To be discussing African American history in this moment, with no one present who has felt the pain of the infliction of harm on African Americans. It’s overtly problematic,”
said former state lawmaker Dwight Bullard, pointing at the non-Black members of the board. “Part of the reason the ’94 statute exists is because the state tried to cover up the Rosewood massacre.”
He was referring to
Jan. 5, 1923, when a white mob destroyed the Black community of Rosewood, Florida, killing more than 30 Black men, women, and children and burning the town to the ground.
In 1994, the state Legislature passed a bill that created an African American History Task Force and required that the state’s K-12 curriculum include instruction on the history, culture, experiences, and contributions of African Americans.
But then along came Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used his crusade against “wokeness” to boost his national profile for his challenge against former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The board was mandated to come up with new standards for teaching Black history after DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act” in April 2022. It restricts how race is discussed in schools, colleges, and workplaces and bans any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex, or national origin.
In January 2023, Florida’s Department of Education
rejected the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies course, claiming it violated the “Stop WOKE Act” because it included such topics as the Black Lives Matter and reparations movements, Black feminism, and LGBTQ+ studies. And so the battle lines were already drawn when the state board of education met to approve the new standards for teaching Black history.
Participants at the meeting raised other concerns about the standards, which they wanted the board to table to allow for changes. Democratic state Sen. Geraldine Thompson was outraged that the standards said that when high school students learn about events such as the 1920 Ocoee Massacre, instruction should include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” she told Florida Politics.
The Ocoee Massacre is considered the deadliest instance of Election Day violence in U.S. history. It started when a Black landowner, Moses Norman, was turned away when he attempted to vote. That night his friend, July Perry, was lynched and several dozen other Black residents were killed by a white mob. Their homes were burned, and surviving Black residents fled the town.
“When you look at the history currently, it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That's blaming the victim,” Thompson said.
Genesis Robinson, political director for the advocacy group Equal Ground, told the Pensacola New Journal there were glaring omissions in the new standards which recognize racism and prejudice but fail to examine who bore responsibility. She said the the curriculum does not mention that Florida seceded from the union during the Civil War. And while the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling is included, there is no reference to a 1957 resolution passed by the Florida Legislature opposing the Supreme Court decision that ended segregation in schools. Elementary school students through fourth grade are only required to identify prominent Black Americans.
“When you couple these standards, with the environment, the hostility towards daring to talk about certain subjects, it creates an environment where there's going to be a complete removal of these conversations and of these lessons in the classroom because nobody wants to run afoul of all of the laws or policies that have been put in place,” Robinson said.
Escambia County science teacher Carol Cleaver told the board, “These new standards present only half the story and half the truth. When we name political figures who worked to end slavery but leave anyone who worked to keep slavery legal nameless, kids are forced to fill in the blanks for themselves.”
The Florida Education Association condemned the new standards as “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
“How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” Andrew Spar, the association’s president, said in a statement. “Gov. DeSantis is pursuing a political agenda guaranteed to set good people against one another, and in the process he’s cheating our kids. They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad,” he added.
And NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson issued a strong statement condemning the board’s decision to approve the new standards:
"Today's actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back. The NAACP has been fighting against malicious actors such as those within the DeSantis Administration for over a century, and we're prepared to continue that fight by any means necessary. Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for."
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