Florida OKs new Black history standards; critics call it ‘whitewash’

Florida approved new standards for African American history Wednesday that state officials called “robust” and claimed address “the darkest part of our history,” but critics said they will leave public school students with a whitewashed version that does not deal with the “ugliness of what has happened to Black people” nor focus much on the last 150 years.

The State Board of Education adopted the standards at its meeting in Orlando after hearing from dozens of people, most of whom urged the board to table its vote. The standards spell out what students should learn about African American history in kindergarten through high school.

“This is robust curriculum,” said Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, whose staff devised the new standards and urged the board to approve them. “I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states.”

Diaz added, “if anyone takes the time to actually look at the standards, you can see everything is covered.”

But critics, many of whom noted they had read the standards, said they found too much missing or ignored.

“I have to give this a grade of I, for incomplete,” said Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Orlando, a retired college administrator who has served on the state’s African American history task force and helped found an African American history museum in Orlando.  “Let’s get it right.”

The board voted unanimously, and without comment, to approve the new standards. The seven members are all gubernatorial appointees, most of them tapped by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“It’s an attempt to whitewash our history,” said a disappointed Thompson said after the meeting.

Civil rights and other community groups had sent a letter to the state earlier this week urging the vote be delayed.

“We owe the next generation of scholars the opportunity to know the full unvarnished history of this state and country and all who contributed to it — good and bad,” read the letter by Equal Ground, the NAACP and the state teachers union, among others.

Though Florida has required the teaching of African American history since 1994, the new standards — required under a 2022 law — are its first effort to specify what should be taught at each grade.

Genesis Robinson, Equal Ground’s political director, said in a statement after the vote that the board’s decision “not only purposefully omits or rewrites key historical facts about the Black experience, but they ignore the legislative intent” of the 1994 law.

Critics who spoke at the meeting said they objected to a middle-school standard they think suggests slavery benefited some enslaved people. “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” it reads.

“Are you really insinuating that slavery could be personally beneficial to slaves?” said Clinton McCracken, an Orange teacher and president of the county’s teachers union.

They disliked another standard for high schools students that requires the teaching of the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre — two instances in Florida where white mobs destroyed Black communities – but says instruction must include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

“This is egregious,” said Stephanie Vanos, a mother of three who has filed to run for the Orange County School Board.

She and others said the standard seemed to equate Black residents in Ocoee defending themselves with the violence started by white residents angry that a Black man tried to vote. He was later lynched.

Others noted the elementary school standards focus on teaching children to identify famous Black Americans but do not provide lessons on how racism affected the lives of George Washington Carver, Mary McCleod Bethune or Rosa Parks, for example.

And they argued the discussion of slavery focuses on its existence in many parts of the world and fails to discuss its full impact on the United States or the role white leaders played in keeping the institution in place.

“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,” said Carol Cleaver, an Escambia County teacher.

What is left out, a man told the board, is “the ugliness of what has happened to Black people.”

But Paul Burns, chancellor of public schools at the Florida Department of Education, said the critics were wrong.

“Everything is there,” he said. “The darkest parts of our history are addressed.”

And he said the middle school standard was wrongly interpreted. “Our standards do not teach that slavery was beneficial,” he said, to boos from the crowd.

The teaching of African American history has become a controversial topic in Florida in recent years.

DeSantis earlier this year rejected the Advanced Placement African American studies course under development by the College Board and last year championed a law that bans critical race theory and limits some race-related lessons.

In June, the state postponed an African American history institute for public school teachers, upsetting those who’d planned it and who feared the delay would add to teacher “angst” about teaching the subject.

State leaders wanted to delay until after the board adopted the new standards, so teachers could be informed of them at the training event, now scheduled for Aug. 7

News Service of Florida contributed to this story.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.