When I was growing up in the South, I had one of those textbooks in history class approved by the Daughters of the Confederacy. (Their descendants are now in Moms for Liberty.) One of the issues of being a history teacher is having limited time to teach all of the amazing things that our nation has gone through, but in my private school in Virginia, we used a book that devoted pages to learning about the Ku Klux Klan. I had to learn about their founding and history after the Civil War, and there was even an image of them marching in “konklave,” which was described as a “beautiful” parade with white satin robes and flags.
I could have told you all about the 30,000 white supremacists who marched on Washington in 1926, but not a damn word about theTulsa race massacre, where a white mob stormed a major Black town with the Klan’s help, supplied with munitions from government officials, to completely destroy it. I learned nothing about Black heroes like theTuskegee Airmen,Bessie Coleman,Robert Smalls, orMadam C.J. Walker. Over the past few decades, a more inclusive curriculum has been demanded. Unfortunately, racists have been pushing back hard to either whitewash or ban the history of oppressed groups.
I was hoping things would improve in my adulthood, but I live in Florida where white supremacist Republicans appointed to the Board of Education are now requiring students to be taught that slavery had benefits and that Blacks must share the blame for their own massacres. Our nightmare started in January, when a law was passed that essentiallybanned the teaching of African American history. If a lesson made a white person feel guilt,it couldn’t be taught, or a student could sue for damages. A Florida judge who blocked the worst aspects of the law called it “positively dystopian,” but that didn’t stop Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from appointing the worst people he could find to write lesson plans on Black history.
Even textbook companies have made special adjustments for Florida. A Florida publisher rewrote Rosa Parks’ story by saying she was famous because she refused to move after “she was told to move to a different seat.” No reason given. Not that it was a well-planned strategy involving a woman deeply entrenched in the Civil Rights Movement. Well, I’m not a teacher, so I can’t be sued. (At least not yet.) DeSantis has tried hard to getpolitical bloggers to register with the state, but so far he hasn’t succeeded. I’m therefore going to cover a very interesting—and incredibly disturbing—part of history that would definitely make a racist uncomfortable. You won’t learn about any of this in a Florida school. Here we go.
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