Teaching Black history becomes a battle over who controls the past
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — For 71 years, the survivors of Rosewood, Florida, controlled their history. They guardedly discussed their stories only at family gatherings, haunted by the threat of retaliation in their rural Central Florida communities.
But in 1994, after the death of the last surviving witness, the families decided to speak up about the angry white mob that torched and destroyed the Black town in Levy County in 1923.
MILESTONE REPARATIONS
The painful details of the unpunished lynchings and vigilante violence went from being family secrets to the foundation for legislation awarding the first reparations paid by a state in the nation’s history to survivors of racial violence.
They also became the catalyst for the 1994 law requiring the teaching of Florida’s Black history in K-12 schools. The law requires that courses comprise five components: African beginnings, the passage to America, slavery, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War and the “contributions of African Americans to society.”
MOVING BACKWARDS?
But now, as Gov. Ron DeSantis mounts a political attack on what he calls the “woke mob,” he claims certain instruction of Black history is the equivalent of political indoctrination. And educators and advocates who pushed for the Black history standards say the governor’s policies are threatening to reverse the modest progress they have made.
As DeSantis defends against charges he is “erasing the state’s Black history,” he cites the 1994 law as evidence that it is required to be taught, but he is confronted with contradictions:
› Budget records show that the implementation of the law that has been on the books for nearly 28 years has been not only understaffed and barely enforced, but DeSantis and legislative leaders have rejected requests to beef up resources to expand the teaching of Black history in Florida.
› The word “reparation,” which is central to the Rosewood saga that spawned the Black history law, is now considered off-limits in Florida classrooms because state officials have determined that discussion of the reparation movement, which involves offering financial restitution to the descendants of enslaved people for the harms of slavery and racial discrimination, is an attempt at “indoctrination.”
“We proudly require the teaching of African American history. We do not accept woke indoctrination masquerading as education,” wrote Education Commissioner Manny Diaz on Twitter last month as he defended DOE’s decision to reject the Advanced Placement course in African American Studies because it “lacked educational value.”
Few Florida counties have it in core curriculum. Although African American studies is considered part of the K-12 core curriculum, only 11 of Florida’s 67 county school districts have developed a plan for providing the course, trained teachers, and integrated instruction in their required coursework, according to the Education Commissioner’s Task Force on African American Studies.
The Task Force was created in 1995 to help implement the law by aiding school districts in developing material for teachers to use and assisting in training teachers to use it.
CURRENT CURRICULUM
But most school districts limit instruction on the topic of African American history to lessons in February, Black History Month, said Bernadette Kelley-Brown, an associate professor of English at Florida A&M University and a task force member.
And while the state’s current standards for fourth grade curriculum includes a section on Florida history, there is no standard that requires African American history be included, she said.
“The reason it has taken so long is the history is so brutal,” said Marvin Dunn, 82, a retired Navy officer and professor emeritus at Florida International University who has written books about Florida’s Black legacy. “It is so bloody, and it is so pervasive in Florida history, that confronting that terrible, disturbing history is difficult. It’s not just difficult for white people. It’s difficult for Black people, too.”
In his tours across the state, Dunn said about a third of the Black people he talked to, including descendants of people who had been lynched, didn’t want to talk about it.
“‘We lived through that,’ they would say. ‘We don’t want to go back through all of that. Let it die,’” Dunn said. “Part of that pushback has to do with the emotional gravitas of the history itself.”