Black professor defies law restricting lessons on race
“I can’t tell the story of the Newberry Six without expressing my disgust for the lynching of a pregnant woman. As a teacher who has spent 30 years going from place to place in Florida where the most atrocious things have happened, I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t want the state telling me that I must.” MARVIN DUNN, 82, PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Newberry, Fla. — The inscriptions on many of the tombstones at the Pleasant Plain Cemetery tucked in the North Florida woods are so worn by time and weather that they are unreadable.
But Marvin Dunn knows their stories.
On a recent afternoon, he gathered students and their parents at the cemetery and told them about the Rev. Josh J. Baskin and five other Black Floridians hanged by a white mob from an oak tree in 1916 after an accusation over a stolen hog sparked two days of terror.
The painful chapter in Florida’s history known as the Newberry Six lynchings is one the university professor has taken pains to help document over decades of research. It’s also one that he fears will be removed from Florida history lessons under a new education law championed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as part of a broader push to root out ideas he deems “woke.”
The law requires lessons on race to be taught in “an objective manner,” and not “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” It also says students should not be made to “feel guilt” because of actions committed by others in the past. DeSantis and other proponents of the law, which went into effect last summer, contend some teachers have inserted political beliefs into lessons related to race.
The language in the legislation dubbed the “Stop WOKE Act” is sufficiently vague that educators and civil rights leaders worry it is having a chilling effect. The new law doesn’t prohibit teaching events like the Newberry lynchings, but teachers in several parts of the state said they fear it will compel them to water down or glance over uncomfortable truths about Florida’s past.
“I can’t tell the story of the Newberry Six without expressing my disgust for the lynching of a pregnant woman,” Dunn, 82, a professor emeritus at Florida International University, said. “As a teacher who has spent 30 years going from place to place in Florida where the most atrocious things have happened, I don’t know how to do that. And I don’t want the state telling me that I must.”
Earlier this month, the state Department of Education rejected an Advanced Placement African American Studies course offered by the College Board after determining that it is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” The White House on Friday called the decision “incomprehensible.”
In Duval County, school administrators recently held back 26 books from elementary schools — including “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” and “Climbing Lincoln’s Steps: The African American Journey” — until a committee determines whether they meet the standards of the new state law.
Meanwhile at the university level, administrators are scrambling to prove they aren’t running afoul of the new law. The DeSantis administration required that all state colleges and universities submit details about “campus activities” and costs of anything “related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory.”
But Dunn is intent on defying the governor — even if it comes at a personal cost. Last year, a neighbor who complained to police that he was angry at seeing “busloads of these Black bastards” at Dunn’s property was charged with assault after allegedly yelling racial slurs to the professor and a small group preparing for an event.
Dunn is one of eight plaintiffs in a lawsuit over DeSantis’s Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, which also applies to public university professors. A federal judge ruled against the state in November, ordering a temporary injunction against portions of the act that restrict how college and university professors teach about race.
“Listen, if there is such a thing as the woke mob in Florida, I aspire to lead it,” Dunn said.
Meanwhile, Dunn’s statewide “Teach the Truth” tours are taking high school students to the sites of some of the worst racial violence in Florida history. His first tour in January took more than two dozen high school students from Miami and their family members to a museum that marks where married Black civil rights activists Harry T. Moore and Harriette V.S. Moore were killed on Christmas Day in 1951 when a bomb planted under their home exploded.
A nonprofit Dunn leads in Miami to promote Black history is sponsoring the tours, and he plans to take another group during the spring legislative session.
“These are things that nobody knew, it’s like it was swept under the rug,” said Shanika Marshall, who took her teenage son on the tour. “I feel very strongly that this history needs to be told. There’s no shame, it just is what it is, but it needs to be put at the forefront so we can all try to get past it.”
Dunn was born in an orange grove barn in the central Florida city of DeLand. He and his family harvested crops at a time when the Sunshine State had some of the nation’s strictest Jim Crow segregation laws. Dunn lived that history up close; he remembers being forced to use the “colored” beach and drinking fountain growing up.
After graduating from Morehouse College in 1957, he served as an officer in the Navy, and later went on to earn a doctorate in community psychology. Along the way, he began traversing the state to piece together the story of Black Floridians through photos, newspapers clippings and what was left of sites like the Pleasant Plain Cemetery.
His book “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” contains photos unearthed over 50 years of research, documenting lynchings and other crimes against Black Floridians. He donated a collection of 4,000 photos recording that past to FIU.
“Almost all of Florida’s painful racial past has been whitewashed, marginalized or buried intentionally,” Dunn wrote. “But I was born here. I know Florida’s flowers and her warts.”
While teaching in Miami, he got the idea to highlight Black stories by offering a tour to sites where historic events transpired. It was popular especially with adults who wanted to know about people and places seldom discussed today — like Arthur McDuffie.
The Black insurance salesman was beaten to death by six white police officers in 1980. Dunn took those who signed up for the tour to the exact street corner where McDuffie was attacked.
When DeSantis began pushing new rules on how race is taught, Dunn decided to take his tour statewide and to focus on students. If teachers were going to shy away from lessons about the Newberry Six lynchings or the murders of Black civil rights activists, he would take it upon himself to make sure that history was taught.
“We’re going to keep on teaching it,” Dunn said. “This is the antidote to the DeSantis-izing of history.”
DeSantis began urging restrictions on how Black history is taught in 2021, when he asked the Florida Board of Education to adopt rules banning critical race theory in public schools. Critical race theory is an approach to studying history that starts with the premise that racism is systemic in American society, including legal systems and other institutions.
Last year, he signed a law officially outlawing what he called “pernicious ideologies” like critical race theory. The governor has said he wants students to learn history — and by law, they are required to — but accused teachers of indoctrinating students to believe a “woke ideology.”
DeSantis, expected by many to run for president in 2024, has made “anti-wokeism” a cornerstone of his governing philosophy in the past two years. His staff has described the term “woke” as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them,” and said DeSantis doesn’t believe that theory.
The state Department of Education will hold work sessions in early February to determine what social studies curriculum should look like under the Stop WOKE Act.
“They’re going to try to flesh out exactly what can be taught,” said state Sen. Geraldine Thompson, a Democrat from Orlando, who served on the department’s African American History Task Force. “Because the teachers really have a lot of uncertainty around that.”
She said that with the most recent actions by the DeSantis administration — including prohibiting an Advanced Placement course on African American history — the work Dunn is doing is more imperative than ever.
“Dr. Dunn is filling a need. I’ve talked to college students who said they feel cheated because they never learned these things,” Thompson said.
Thompson wants Education Commissioner Manny Diaz and his department to use input from the task force to help design the curriculum. She has succeeded before — helping amend a bill to require lessons on the Election Day massacre in Ocoee, Fla., in 1920, when dozens of Black voters were killed and the rest of the community was forced to flee.
“We’re working to try to bring some light to what you can teach,” Thompson said. “And I think anything that is factual ought to be taught in the state of Florida.”
State Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican who co-sponsored the Stop WOKE act, said critics of the law don’t understand it. Fine — who sponsored another controversial piece of legislation, the Parental Rights in Education law, called “don’t say gay” by people who oppose it — said teachers can talk about race and explain racist events like the ones Dunn shows on his tours.
Thompson said teachers are looking to the department for explicit direction on how to teach racism, concerned that otherwise events like race riots and lynchings will be omitted or not explored in depth.
“We need to teach authentic history,” she said, “and not whitewash history.”