Nikkolas Smith is not surprised by the book bans and culture of fear dominating schools in his home state of Texas.

If anything, recent events make his work as a children’s book illustrator and self-described “artivist” more urgent.

“I’m gonna keep making books that will probably be on banned lists… because all they do is tell the truth about history. And it’s just ridiculous that accurate history is trying to be suppressed, basically, by those in power who have benefited from racism for centuries,” said Smith, who collaborated with Nikole Hannah-Jones to illustrate The 1619 Project for children. 

Growing up in Houston, he was taught to celebrate the tales of Davey Crockett and the Alamo — “whitewashed” stories “always from one perspective:” glorifying those who owned and killed other human beings, he told ����Ӱ��.

Now, alongside the words of Hannah-Jones and children’s book author Renée Watson, Smith’s art flips the script to teach young readers the legacy of slavery rooted in humanity; a Black history rooted in joy. 

In Born on the Water, the to The 1619 Project, Smith’s paintings bring the cultures of West Africans to life, showing the pre-enslavement history often omitted from classrooms.

“One of the things that me and Nikole talk about is there’s so much rich history, and culture, and so much joy in these tribes and these people that were stolen from their land,” Smith told ����Ӱ��. “You really have to understand all of that to understand how heavy it was, and how tragic it was… We really just wanted to show that life.”

From his plant-filled Los Angeles home, Smith paired Hannah-Jones and Watson’s poetry with family traditions, beautiful hair, dances, imagery that evoked death and spirits. Using a digital , his illustrations began as monochrome shapes and skeletons in Photoshop, impressions of how he felt after reading and internalizing their verses. 

The book hit shelves last fall amid a wave of proposed state laws aimed at preventing students from learning a mythical “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” In , legislation attempted to ban the 1619 Project explicitly. So far, Florida has succeeded.  

While a vocal minority of lawmakers and parents believe school aged children are too young to grapple with just how violence against Black people was intrinsic to the nation’s founding, many for the content. Born on the Water topped bestseller lists as families headed into 2022, looking for ways to talk to children about the country they’ll inherit. 

Smith’s artistic approach seemed a natural fit. In digital paintings, he added layer after layer of color and symbols — clouds modeled after picked cotton, the shape of a person sinking underwater, or a green toy tied to a tree, the only sign of life left after colonizers stole a tribe — to convey anger and fear in ways young readers could feel without being traumatized by explicit violence.

Long-inspired by Nina Simone “,” he’d balanced trauma and life in children’s illustrations for years, painting Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain and others killed by police. 

His second book, , explored the internalized hatred young Black children develop from racism and microaggressions. 

Through , which he describes as “art as therapy”, he tries to help himself and viewers heal “the broken bones of society.” 

“For them to say, we have a book about the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and all of these very heavy things that we as Black people in America, we think about it all the time … I felt like that’s one of the biggest broken bones in America,” he said.

“…Remember that these weren’t slaves that were taken, these were brilliant people, and they did some amazing things … They knew how to design and build cities, they built this country, and that’s why they were stolen, because they were brilliant and good at what they do. We just want to remind people of that, and also how much they fought and resisted and got their freedom back.”

“And [for] the young folks who are not Black, there’s no shame in anything we’re saying. We want people to grow up having an accurate understanding of what happened in this country. I feel like it’s really not until we address all of these things openly and honestly that we’re gonna really grow and move forward as a nation.”
—Nikkolas Smith

Smith blurred linear understandings of time by using symbols across generations, to help young readers understand that “[ancestors’] vision of the future, their wildest dreams are now embodied in us — [we’re] having to take that mantle and move forward.” 

And in faces, Smith balanced the world of feelings bound up in the Black experience: from shame, when the protagonist cannot make a family tree beyond three generations, to pride, after her grandmother recounts the rich history of tribes pre-enslavement. Her hair, in Bantu knots, and clothing give reference to past generations.

Ultimately, Smith hopes his work can help the next generation of Black youth have a sense of pride. Over the next few months, he’ll paint scenes of Ruby Bridges, the first young person to integrate a Southern school in 1960. And next year, he’ll collaborate with celebrated author Timeka Fryer Brown on a picture book about the Confederate flag. 

He expects both will end up on some banned lists.   

“All we can do is keep putting the truth out there,” Smith said, “and it’ll get into the right hands.”

All paintings are illustrated by Nikkolas Smith for Born on the Water, a publication of Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. 

With repeated controversies erupting this year over how schools teach issues of race, gender, and sexuality, Republican lawmakers in state after state have proposed and passed laws focused on classroom discussions of “divisive concepts.” The movement — only the latest to ensnare local education officials in national political debates — has won the approval of some families, who fear their children are being taught anti-American propaganda about systemic oppression and the sins of whiteness. But many teachers say the bans trample on their free speech and risk sanitizing the realities of American society.

To Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, a fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the pushback against what she calls “thought reform” in the classroom is overdue. A former teacher and school counselor, she is the author of Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools — and What We Can Do About it, by Bombardier Books. And while she proclaims herself somewhat uneasy with the prospect of legislating what can and can’t be said in the classroom, she also believes passionately that teachers in too many communities have lapsed into preaching about politics.

It’s an accusation that has at board meetings and led to calls for some teachers to be . But the controversies also vary widely in substance. On the one hand, critics point to to describe their identities in terms of privilege and oppression, and major school districts ; on the other, educators around the country are earnestly attempting to refocus some lessons on long-neglected episodes from American history, such as the Tulsa race massacre.

The struggle over politics in teaching is typically associated with higher education, which is where FIRE focuses most of its efforts. The nonprofit often represents faculty members suing their colleges over restrictions to free speech on campus and of students accused in Title IX investigations of sexual misconduct. It also takes a nuanced view of the proposed restrictions on classroom speech, with Kerrigan Snyder and organization president Greg Lukianoff that many are “probably constitutional,” though not above criticism.

FIRE does not presently take on K-12 cases, but Kerrigan Snyder — who helps lead FIRE’s high school outreach program — argues that K-12 educators are becoming increasingly willing to indulge their own ideological predispositions, in large measure because of teacher preparation programs that have developed into what she describes as political “monocultures.” When it comes to the teaching of intrinsically controversial subjects, she adds, instructors need to ask themselves: “Is it age-appropriate? Is it aligned with the curriculum? Can I be even-handed? And could the discussion become inflammatory?”

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��, Kerrigan Snyder discussed her views on how schools began to drift toward “indoctrination.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: FIRE is an organization I associate with the cause of free speech on college campuses. Where does K-12 teaching, and controversies around its content, become a free speech issue? A lot of your book focuses on protecting the rights of kids to be able to speak their minds in the classroom. But many argue that the state laws being proposed to curb discussion of “divisive concepts,” such as race or or gender, just end up censoring teachers. Where do you stand on that?

Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder: At FIRE, we’re paying close attention to this legislation that seeks to ban certain ideas in K-12. We support what the First Amendment says and what the Supreme Court has ruled on freedom of expression. We’re very concerned about the thought reform aspects of this, where teachers are attempting to enter the private realm of thought and belief and try to compel students to affirm views that they might not wish to. And we’re concerned about students who self-censor. When children are afraid that if they say something the teacher doesn’t like, there’ll be retaliation, then everybody is being inauthentic in the classroom, and nothing meaningful is being discussed.

Students are showing up on college campuses with some very strange notions about the First Amendment, their rights, and other people’s rights; they seem to think they have the right to censor other people if they don’t like their speech. So a lot of what we try to do is educate teachers, students, and parents to counteract this, and generally, we’re in favor of more speech versus enforced silence. That’s why we would prefer that these disputes over curriculum be settled through persuasion, not coercion. When the government gets involved, it’s a matter of might making right.

That being said, at the end of my book, I warn teachers that if they lose the trust of the community, they’re going to be micromanaged and see greater supervision than they have before. I submitted the book earlier this year, and already what I said is coming true: With these laws coming down from legislatures, we now see that teachers could lose professional discretion in ways that will limit the scope of their operations within the classroom.

When there is goodwill and trust between parents, teachers, and the community, teachers can operate with a great deal of flexibility. But I’ve unearthed some teacher communications where they call themselves “co-conspirators,” or they talk about “creative insubordination.” I wrote giving the example of a district official in Missouri that was getting complaints about some of the lesson plans; the official just instructed teachers to so that parents wouldn’t know what was being taught. When these sorts of duplicitous means are being used, it does not surprise me that the state gets involved. [Editor’s note: The district placed private security at the home of the literacy coordinator in question following what the local teachers union described as “personal attacks and outright threats of violence” in response to the incident.]

In the end, checks and balances come into play. Teachers are going to speak their minds, it plays out at the school board, and we get to vote for the people in our legislatures. These bills have been proposed, not all of them have been passed, and we’re going to see where it goes. But the phrase that comes to mind is, “When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.”

But aren’t you concerned that if whole areas of inquiry are banned from the classroom, it will prevent students from becoming informed participants in democratic discussion? It strikes me that if teachers are nervous about initiating any uncomfortable conversations, kids will just be living in an intellectual safe space.

Teachers should absolutely have some flexibility, and it goes back to the issue of trust. The more professional you are, the more trust you build, the greater the latitude you should have in addressing those controversial subjects.

in the Journal of the Middle States Council for the Social Studies about guardrails for educators. I know teachers are concerned about this, so I looked at the existing legal precedents from when teachers have found themselves in hot water. Based on what the law shows, one of the guidelines you should follow is, “Is it age-appropriate?” If you’re an elementary school teacher, should you be talking about, for instance, Afghanistan? What would make you think that you’re the right judge of what’s happening? Maybe it’s too recent for you to have sufficient perspective.

Another question is, “Is it aligned with the curriculum?” Do you even have a curricular mandate to be talking about current events? Possibly in social studies, but unlikely in other classes, so you might have to ask yourself why a certain topic is coming up. Then you ask, “Is it even-handed?” If you’re going to talk about something that’s going to ruffle feathers, it needs to be done in a way that gives the perspectives of competing sides. Teachers are expected to be honest brokers — are you doing that? If not, you’re liable to hear from angry parents.

And the last question is, “Is it inflammatory?” Which basically means that people get so upset, you can’t meet your learning objectives for the day. I tell teachers that sometimes you can hit a tripwire, and there’s no predicting that you just stepped into some inflammatory material. But anything that’s trending on Twitter or in the op-ed pages of your local newspaper probably won’t make for the best learning experience. Adolescents in particular can become very emotional, especially with things that are really personal to them, and then your rational faculties go out the window.

So you do have to exercise a certain amount of professional discretion, but that doesn’t mean that you steer away from every topic that might be considered controversial. You want to be somewhere between “So boring that the kids fall asleep” and “So incendiary that an argument breaks out and no learning takes place.” A lesson can work in four classes and then just explode in a fifth because of the maturity level of the kids. That’s what professional experience helps teachers to navigate. So those questions I put forward are guardrails, but teaching is a practice; educators are not just functionaries, they have to apply their accumulated wisdom to an ever-changing array of circumstances. That’s what makes it a challenge.

Some of the backlash against what’s being called “critical race theory” in schools has been directed at efforts to broaden the curriculum and educate kids about the history of America’s racial problems. In one instance, the teaching of a curriculum that includes one of the first African-American students to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. Are you concerned that casting too wide a net can hurt learning?

I absolutely agree that so much negative attention has been attracted by some of the more objectionable aspects of CRT that reasonable attempts to broaden the curriculum could be undermined. On the other hand, all of the negative attention focused on CRT — they call this the “” — might just make it more appealing, more alluring to students. If you tell somebody they can’t study something, the natural instinct of a young person would be to defy that, so it’s important to be careful not to overstate the dangers of it. The theory at FIRE is that more speech, not enforced silence, is the best way to deal with what might be deemed bad speech. While I could argue that other things should occupy more curricular space, the wholesale banning of an idea typically can backfire.

I’ve actually worked with [an educational project launched by the nonprofit Woodson Center in 2020 what it described as the “dangerous and debilitating message” of the New York Times’s 1619 Project], which includes a lot of African American scholars, as they develop lesson plans around these topics. And I discovered in that process many gaps and deficiencies in my own education on topics such as these. I learned about the , which were some of the schools that Brown vs. Board of Education eventually decided were separate and inherently unequal. I’ve lived in South Carolina, and this was in plain sight, but it was just invisible to me because I grew up in a different part of the country and didn’t know anything about it.

I would love for kids to learn more about Native Americans in the curriculum, not to mention women. I’m a woman, and probably 95 percent of the U.S. history I’ve studied has been either written by or about men. That being said, it never really stopped me from looking for the common threads that are relatable to me. There are lots of stories about people, or by people, who look different from us, but we all want to see ourselves reflected to some extent in what we learn. That’s completely understandable.

Going back to your book, could you describe the problem you address? You refer to it as “thought reform.” In your view, how prevalent is it in K-12 schools, as opposed to university settings, where FIRE is most active?

I would describe it as teachers exceeding the boundaries of their prescribed role in the classroom and commandeering the classroom for personal or partisan ends. When we’re talking about public schools, they’re a public good that’s paid for with tax dollars, so that really is a misuse of public funds.

I think this is much bigger than the current controversy. It’s not actually new; this problem has been with us for decades, and it’s been low-grade and chronic. But recently it’s become acute, like an underlying condition in your body that you’re able to ignore until you have some sort of sudden medical incident. It’s pretty well understood that this year, there was just a lot more transparency and ability for parents to see what’s going on in the classroom. And with all the cultural upheaval, some educators felt emboldened to do what they’d been inclined to do anyway, and what they’ve been doing in classrooms for quite some time.

As to how much of this is going on, I think it varies from district to district, school to school, and classroom to classroom. It’s partly a function of location and partly one of demographics. At FIRE, we’ve seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that the problem is most acute in affluent areas and private schools, and seems more common in cities than in rural areas. Certainly I’ve mentioned this problem to people in a few places, and they didn’t even know what I was talking about.

I suspect that it is increasing because of the retirement of Baby Boomers, who were themselves educated by teachers from older generations with more traditional ways of instruction. I was educated by people who were probably trained in the ’50s. So you have to think not just of the age of the educator, but the age of the educator who educated them! It seems like the younger teachers coming out of ed schools are much more activist-minded, so I think this problem is increasing rapidly.

​​You’re arguing that a big pedagogical change has occurred over the last few generations, as older teachers have been replaced by younger, more radical ones. Isn’t it possible that the movement toward “anti-racist” pedagogy is driven by a much broader change in racial attitudes among whites along with a desire by younger, more diverse Americans to see themselves more reflected in schools and classroom materials?

There are some demographic changes that are driving this. One would probably be the decreasing number of white people in the population, but there’s also this who were born in the ’40s and ’50s. So it’s a confluence of demographic forces. I think the Baby Boomers have tended to portray themselves as being radical, but having been taught by prior generations, their education very much was not. That said, the Baby Boomers had a big hand in educating this generation, so maybe their radicalism is now showing through somewhat.

Historically, whenever there is a large group of young people, you tend to see big movements form. What we have now is a Baby Boom-let, the Millennials, who are their own bubble in the population. In the same way that Baby Boomers created something more than a ripple, partly because of their huge numbers, I think part of what we’re seeing now is a large generation that is of an age where people tend to be inclined to upend the existing order and make dramatic changes. It’s a stage that people pass through as they mature. In that sense, it’s not surprising, and it’s probably a factor in the appeal that these ideologies hold with such a large group of young people.

Where do you think these intellectual trends came from, particularly in K-12? For most of our history, it seems like public schools promoted a view of American history and society that was essentially patriotic, if not chauvinistic — certainly not one that questioned existing power structures.

FIRE where we talked about how common schools in America were established by the government to promote government speech and ensure domestic tranquility. It’s not surprising that they would teach a view that promotes cohesion and patriotic ideas.

So there is a dominant position on American history that is open to interrogation, and I certainly would never want to interfere with a student’s right to critique it or with exposing kids to a reasonable amount of competing views; that’s part of what a thorough education provides. But when the critique seeks to become the dominant narrative, it’s giving kids a pre-digested conclusion and asking them to retrofit all the information they haven’t yet been given to this preconceived conclusion.

I’d also say that this critique seeks to suppress competing narratives and disallow dissent, which short-changes kids’ education and, really, trains them not to question authority. I just think this isn’t a healthy learning environment, and it doesn’t let kids develop the intellectual muscles they need to prepare them for self-government.

FIRE often defends the rights of university professors who say they’re being censored by their institutions. You’re not part of the legal team, but can you see a role for FIRE, or other organizations like it, in coming to the aid of teachers who are disciplined under laws restricting discussions of divisive concepts in K-12 classrooms?

We have people who ask FIRE to jump into the K-12 legal realm all the time, and I’d say it’s something that is under consideration. Teachers have the unions, which will obviously help to defend them. My understanding is that [leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association] have come out to say that they will defend teachers who teach CRT.

I would say that parents have rights, and students have rights, but teachers have responsibilities. That’s why they’re paid. Teachers’ speech in the classroom is hired speech, and it’s really government speech; the government is hiring you to deliver a curriculum that’s democratically adopted by districts, in accordance with state legislatures. So I think that teachers have to realize that their instruction needs to be aligned with the learning standards that their state has adopted.

Anything you’re teaching, you should be able to relate it to the published learning standards for the grade and subject that you’re teaching. You don’t want to present a conclusion to students and work backwards from that because these are open-ended questions that we’re trying to figure out as a society. Critical race theory is a lens through which to view the world, but it’s not the only one. If I were going to talk about it, I would always want to present it in the context of competing versions of how to interpret historical and current events.

I want to pose another argument I’ve seen, even from those who are probably sympathetic to your views: There may be some teachers mixing ideology into their history or social studies lessons, but the fundamental issue is that too many kids just don’t reach proficiency in those disciplines at all, according to year after year of standardized test results. Given that the overall academic performance is so poor, shouldn’t we be more concerned about just providing kids with basic knowledge?

Yeah, it’s kind of amazing that teachers have time to be discussing these esoteric, advanced perspectives. I just don’t consider most of it to be introductory, it’s more in the realm of a late-night graduate study session. It’s not a good way to introduce students to basic material, so it really serves teachers’ needs more than students.

One of the problems we’re seeing is that teachers are covering content that is of interest to them but isn’t necessarily what their students need, and that’s poor pedagogical practice. The teacher is paid to meet the needs of the students, and the learning outcomes we’re seeing show that these ideological itches that are being scratched are not serving students in the classroom well.

I also think that the way these ideologies are being expressed in the classroom is being perceived by students and parents as abrasive and, in some cases, tantamount to bullying. As Maya Angelou said, “People forget what you said, but they remember how you made them feel,” and I suspect that a lot of students don’t feel good about what’s going on in their classrooms. Kids are not a means to anyone’s end, they’re ends in themselves; their compulsory presence in your classroom is not to serve some partisan goal that you cherish. The word education means “to draw out” — to draw from the student what is inside of them. Each one is a unique, autonomous being, and you’re there to find out what they are capable of, not to enact your worldview.

Parents are mobilizing around this issue. There have definitely been some heated school board meetings this year, and state lawmakers seem happy to make this a campaign issue, but do you think it’ll go further than that?

Parents are certainly coming forward, and they’ve obviously had a great impetus to want to come forward: These are their children, and nothing’s nearer to their hearts.

I’ve been following this problem as a sort of unpleasant hobby for over a decade. Going back years, I’ve heard anecdotally about incidents all over the place, though I’ve focused on the ones that appear in the press. But for a long time, the strategy has mostly been to say, “It’s just a few more years, I’ll get my kid through and fly under the radar.” But it’s suddenly become very acute, so parents are speaking up — some would say too much, though I happen to think that we’ve been complacent too long, and people should have always been more involved with their school boards. Some of them are being too aggressive, but I do get it. They feel like their children are being targeted.

I think I’m optimistic at this point, mostly because I see parents asserting themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re right about everything they say, but it’s good that everyone is in the conversation and the checks and balances are operating as they should. Parents have been way too uninvolved, handing everything off to the teachers, and now they realize they’re going to have to pay closer attention to what’s going on in school board meetings.

If you’re ambivalent about the laws being passed in legislatures around divisive concepts, what do you think education authorities should be doing to address the concerns of parents? One of the avenues I’ve usually heard discussed involves changes to teacher preparation programs. 

FIRE has previously when it came to [the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education] trying to impose “social justice dispositions” on educators — meaning that you’d have to believe in certain political ideas in order to be certified as a teacher. We fought back on that because of the aspects of thought reform, and we won. [Editor’s note: In 2006, following protests from FIRE and other groups, NCATE — formerly a leading accreditor of teacher education programs, and since reorganized as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation — referring to “social justice” in its glossary of recommended dispositions for future teachers.]

Definitely, we recognize that the best way to change this is in the ed schools. It’s going to be a tough climb, but it’s necessary at this point. Teachers are licensed for the same reason that doctors and dentists are licensed: They’re in a position to do real harm to vulnerable people, and no one in our society is more vulnerable than children. States have all the power they need to award or withhold licensure, and I think they’re going to have to apply more oversight.

One of the recurring questions in this book is, “Where’s the oversight?” Department chairs and principals and curriculum directors should be applying more consistency throughout schools. The subtext needs to be that this isn’t a free-for-all; you can’t have one teacher who’s a freewheeling zealot doing whatever they feel while the rest of the classes are teaching to the end-of-year tests. That’s just a failure of administration.

Any time you have a one-party monoculture, things go awry. Things have definitely gone awry, and we’re overdue for a correction in our ed schools.

The thing is that teacher prep programs are themselves downstream of the larger intellectual culture. In the book, you talk about a need for a return to “normative social agreements” — basically, ideological restraint and respect for diversity in thought from all people, not just educators. It seems like it will be a lot harder to develop those traits than to just pass a law saying what teachers can and can’t say.

I actually think it’s kind of easy to legislate how contentious issues should be handled, which is that they should be approached from a variety of angles, leaving room for dissent. There are some things on which I think we’ve achieved cultural consensus — for example, that we were the good guys in World War II. I suppose somebody could advance a counter-narrative, though I wouldn’t give a lot of class time to that because I think we have a near-unanimous consensus. But when it comes to current issues under debate, you have to show some epistemic humility and leave room for the possibility that you might be wrong.

When you have this unscholarly certainty that you’re in possession of the absolute truth, that’s where you’re likely to get in trouble, because it’s a very un-academic stance for an educator to take. It’s that old John Stuart Mill idea, “He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that”: You have to give the devil his due.

Even as a young girl, the shadow of a dark history hung over Orlice Hodges. At seven years old, she remembers her grandmother offering an explanation — chilling in retrospect — of what happened to young women taken away by social workers: they went to Black Mountain to get “fixed.”

“I used to always wonder, what do they mean by ‘fixed?’” the North Carolina native told ����Ӱ��.

Only as she got older did the awful meaning become clear. “Fixed meant sterilization,” she understood. “They were sterilized.”

Her own aunt, according to what Hodges was told by family members, was one of the 7,600 people sterilized, or medically robbed of the ability to have children, by North Carolina between 1929 and 1974 under the state’s eugenic sterilization law. As a young, Black woman growing up in Winston-Salem in the 1960s and ‘70s, she could not help but know about the program, which sought to “” disabled and so-called “feebleminded” individuals. By the time of her childhood, the effort had become distinctly racial, with more poor Black women forcibly sterilized than any other group.

Countless others, when Hodges was a girl and up until today, remain unaware.

“Why was that never mentioned?” wondered Skylar Sharkey, a rising senior at Middle Creek High School in Apex, North Carolina, upon learning about her state’s history of eugenics for the first time as a high school junior. Thanks to a scheduling glitch this past spring, she landed — by what she now sees as a fortunate accident — in an elective course that covered some of the grimmer moments in her state’s history. It included information she had never had the slightest inkling of.

, she learned, but North Carolina carried out the third-highest number of sterilizations in the nation, after California and Virginia. While most states pulled back from their programs after the atrocities of Nazi Germany laid bare the ethical flaws of eugenics theory, North Carolina accelerated its campaign, conducting . More than , the youngest being a 10-year-old boy, and procedures often occurred against the will of victims and their parents.

In the latter years of the campaign, 60 percent of those sterilized were Black and 99 percent were female, leading a recent Duke University study to conclude that the state worked to through its eugenics program during the late 1950s and ’60s.

That North Carolina’s K-12 schools have almost without exception ignored the state’s past practice of forced sterilization offers a compelling example of the suppression of racially motivated, government-inflicted harm long before the nation began debating critical race theory or states started .

“It really kind of upset me when I found out about it, because I was like, ‘This is something that is such a major part of not only North Carolina history, but U.S. history, and it’s just something that had never been mentioned to me,’” Sharkey told ����Ӱ��. “Some of these things were so close to home.”

None of her friends had any idea of their state’s history of eugenics, either. She would tell peers about what she was learning, only to receive shocked and horrified reactions. Even her mother’s parents, who lived in North Carolina while the program was active, were unaware.

“[It] left me feeling a little bit like I was being rigged of some information,” said Sharkey. “Like it was being hidden.”

Intentionally or not, North Carolina has largely failed to deliver on efforts to use public education as a tool to reckon with its history of eugenics, despite a nearly two-decades old from a committee convened by former Gov. Michael Easley that called on the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to “include information about the eugenics program in its curriculum on North Carolina history.”

Deanna Townsend-Smith, director of policy and operations for the state Board of Education, told ����Ӱ�� that she was not aware of the board ever having heard or considered the task force’s recommendation. In an email to ����Ӱ��, John B. Buxton, senior education advisor to former Gov. Easley, explained that because there was never a legislative requirement for the board to act, “that likely undercut the momentum for including content in the curriculum guidance documents.”

With the benefit of hindsight, June Atkinson, who served as state superintendent from 2005 to 2017, acknowledged that the Department of Public Instruction did not do enough to move the ball forward on teaching the state’s history of eugenics during her tenure.

“I believe we could have done some more about helping teachers incorporate eugenics as part of their curriculum by having more curriculum guides or more resources for them,” she told ����Ӱ��.

While the current state history standards do mention the word “eugenics,” the reference is to the wider American eugenics movement rather than North Carolina’s program — and even that serves as an optional, non-mandatory example. The state’s U.S. history standards were recently given an conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

����Ӱ�� reached out to the state’s 10 largest school districts and none indicated that they include their state’s eugenics program in their social studies curricula. One district, Cabarrus County Public Schools, told ����Ӱ�� that a single school has an elective course that covers the topic. Its unit on eugenics is called “.” Another district, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Schools, said that they provide on the topic that teachers may use in class. No other districts said that their schools directly reference the state’s eugenics program in curricular materials.

Basically, “there’s nothing stopping a teacher [from covering the North Carolina eugenics program] … but there’s also nothing requiring it,” Wake County Public Schools Communications Director Lisa Luten explained to ����Ӱ��.

That’s in contrast with states like Virginia, where specifics on the state’s eugenics program are considered “essential knowledge” in statewide standards, according to information provided by the Virginia Department of Education. Or Oregon, where the Department of Education told ����Ӱ�� that will include the state’s history of eugenics as an example within a content area that examines structural disadvantages against people with disabilities.

It appears unlikely that North Carolina students will be learning anytime soon about the same disturbing history that, as Sharkey put it, was “going on in my own backyard.” That’s because conservatives across the country are taking aim are restricting “” topics in the classroom through state-level bans on critical race theory, a previously arcane academic topic, and North Carolina’s state Superintendent Catherine Truitt last month forced a sudden revision to a years-long update of the state’s social studies curriculum over concerns that the new version .

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‘An ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared’

By other measures, however, North Carolina was a nationwide leader in reckoning with its eugenics past. When a brought to light details of the state’s sterilization program that had previously been hidden in sealed records, the state took swift action. Then-Gov. Easley issued an apology and convened a committee tasked with leading the state’s reparations and healing process.

After more than a decade of persistent advocacy from late state Rep. Larry Womble, and with help from Republican ally Thom Tillis, who became the state’s speaker of the house in 2011, North Carolina in 2014 became the as financial compensation for the injustices they endured. That action paved the way for and to do the same in 2015 and July 2021, respectively.

In its response, the state also called for the creation of an exhibit “to ensure that no one will forget what the State of North Carolina once perpetrated upon its own citizens.” That task fell to Hodges, who heard stories as a child of her late aunt being among those victimized citizens and who was working at the state’s Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the time.

When the display was completed, visitors could inspect not only timelines and maps documenting the history, she said, but also copies of official records and the actual medical instruments that doctors used to perform sterilizations. One wall showed pictures of victims along with headsets. “You could pick up a headphone, and listen to the actual survivors in their voice,” recalled Hodges.

Yet after being created in 2007 and traveling to a handful of colleges and universities in the state, the exhibit was soon taken out of commission due to lack of funds in 2009, Hodges said. In 2011, it was put into storage in a vault operated by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, where the department’s public information officer Michele Walker confirmed it is kept to this day. Audio elements of the exhibit are out of date, and the information included is not updated with the state’s compensation of victims, according to State Archivist Sarah Koonts. Certain loaned artifacts were also returned, she said.

Hodges never understood why the exhibit — created to make sure North Carolinians never forgot and then itself forgotten — was stored away rather than updated.

“It’s just sitting in a basement,” she said. “It’s a waste. Because it’s such an ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared.”

A ‘complex subject’

Despite North Carolina’s trailblazing campaign to compensate some of the victims of its eugenics program, Charmaine Fuller Cooper, who led the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation through 2012, worries that the lack of public education could jeopardize the state’s progress toward reckoning with its past.

“Education is critical to the effort,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that still too many people are not familiar with.”

“To the victims and families of this regrettable episode in North Carolina’s past, I extend my sincere apologies and want to assure them that we will not forget what they have endured.”
—Former Gov. Michael Easley, April 2003

That squares with what Marion Quirici, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, sees in her disability studies classes, where she takes first-years to the library for primary source sessions on eugenics. While rarely discussed in current-day American classrooms, a belief in eugenics shaped U.S. education through much of the early 20th century, particularly in celebrating I.Q. tests as a way to weed out “feeblemindedness,” and .

“Students from North Carolina in particular always express shock at their own state’s especially egregious role in this history,” Quirici told ����Ӱ�� in an email. “They’ll say, ‘I’m from here; I can’t believe I never learned this!’”

The stakes are high, says Barbara Pullen-Smith, former founding director of the Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

“If our young people don’t understand our history, we are certainly doomed to repeat it,” she told ����Ӱ��.

In a twist of brutal irony, a figure who once propelled forward the effort to compensate North Carolina sterilization victims now stands in the way of students learning about eugenics and other dark moments of our nation’s history.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who as speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives played a key role in passing the 2012 legislation to disburse funds to sterilization survivors, in June co-sponsored the ‘Saving American History Act’ to . The is a Pulitzer Prize-winning effort from the New York Times Magazine that traces how systemic racism and the legacy of slavery impact America today, including Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, recently after the school originally denied her tenure amid a wealthy conservative donor’s that many supporters viewed as racist.

Regarding how eugenics should be taught in the classroom, Sen. Tillis expressed mixed feelings.

“This is a very important, dark chapter in our nation’s history,” he told ����Ӱ��. “It’s a complex subject that needs to be taught, but it needs to be taught at an age-appropriate level.”

When asked whether the North Carolina eugenics program’s absence in history standards and curricula presented a problem, he turned down the chance to comment.

Acknowledging his own opposition to the 1619 Project, Sen Tillis recommended instead convening a team of “academics and historians [with] some sort of an ideological balance for the preparation of curriculum so that you give these young people facts upon which they can draw their own conclusions.”

Teaching the ‘fractures’ in American democracy

Educator Matthew Scialdone, who taught Sharkley’s ‘Hard History and Civic Engagement’ elective at Middle Creek High School this spring, worries that the momentum — both local and national — against teaching about race could dissuade some educators from tackling difficult topics like eugenic sterilization.

“Given all of the pushback,” said Scialdone, “[eugenics] would probably be one of those topics that a teacher might back away from and say, ‘You know what, is it really worth stirring up whatever community uproar may come from me talking about this topic?’”

That’s unfortunate, says Dimitry Anselme, executive program director of the nonprofit , which creates online resources to help teachers effectively address the darker points of America’s past. There’s much to learn from difficult moments in history, Anselme says.

“For healthy democracies, you have to see the fractures,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The fractures can teach us … what to seek to avoid and not repeat.”

The fact that eugenics laws were eventually repealed “actually speaks to what’s beautiful about democracy,” said Anselme.

Scialdone emphasizes to fellow educators that there’s more than enough content available on the North Carolina eugenics program to engage students without worries over bias. The key in his classroom? Primary sources, says the 2015-16 Wake County Public Schools Teacher of the Year.

This spring, he presented students with testimony from survivors and medical records from the state archives that documented the paper trail of one young woman’s sterilization procedure.

“This isn’t somebody else’s interpretation that I’m putting in front of you. This is the real thing,” he told his class.

The impression on his students, many of whom were participating over Zoom, was immediate.

“The chat in that class just stayed scrolling,” remembers Scialdone. “There was a lot of OMGs. There was a lot of ‘wait what?’”

The content drew Sharkey and her classmates in. “I was so beyond engaged in this course,” she remembers.

But Scialdone knows that his class is the exception, not the rule. Teachers’ “default mode,” he knows, is to “teach what they were taught and how they were taught,” which means that North Carolina’s history of eugenics is “not really covered,” he said.

That’s a problem, he believes — for students and the state, alike.

“If I’m the only one doing it,” Scialdone said, “then the moment was lost.”

Educators interested in covering the history of North Carolina’s eugenics program may find curricular resources and

Lead Image: Proceedings of the Eugenics Board special meeting May 19, 1958 (Courtesy of Johanna Schoen / Video by ����Ӱ��’s Meghan Gallagher)

In a series of four November 2020 emails to Board of Trustees member Kelly Hopkins, two of which spanned a dozen paragraphs or more, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s telling of the American story over-emphasized the role of slavery and warned that her stance on reparations would be “detrimental” to the university, describing Hannah-Jones’s views as “controversial, contentious, and divisive.”

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“I do not dispute [Hannah-Jones] having her convictions in favor of reparations, nor do I dispute her right to advocate for it as strongly as possible,” Hussman wrote. “But I believe giving her a platform to argue for this as a tenured professor in the journalism school will not be beneficial, but instead detrimental, to the school.”

“No one knows exactly what she will say in the future,” he continued. “She could be fired from the New York Times. But as I understand it, she could not be fired as a tenured professor.”

Hussman, whose name adorns the UNC school of journalism thanks to a $25 million pledge in 2019, the balance of which has yet to be delivered, first shared his concerns with David Routh, UNC-Chapel Hill’s senior development officer in September. Emails indicate that board members Chuck Duckett, Jeff Brown and Richard Stevens were also made aware of the donor’s appeal, in addition to Kelly Hopkins. All four trustees have since left the board after .

Hannah-Jones would have been the first Black Knight Chair since the position was founded at UNC.

����Ӱ�� received the internal emails July 30 after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the university, as did several other media organizations, which have also reported on the communications.

In another message that included annotations of passages from an 1856 Abraham Lincoln speech, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s , a collection of essays from the New York Times Magazine that relates the country’s founding and development through the experiences of Black Americans and earned the journalist a Pulitzer Prize, overstated the role that slavery played in the American Revolution.

“The country may have committed its original sin,” Hussman wrote, “but it was not what the founders or the colonies were intending at that time, in 1776.”

“I thought to myself, who are you going to believe: Abraham Lincoln or Nikole Hannah Jones?”

In 2020, the New York Times to an essay from The 1619 Project, changing a line to clarify that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motivation for some, not all, colonists during the American Revolution.

In June, Hussman told NC Policy Watch that he , and that the balance of his donation was not dependent on their decision. He did not respond to requests from ����Ӱ�� asking him to explain his intentions in sending the November emails.

Text messages also indicate that Hussman and Hopkins frequently spoke on the phone through the fall and winter of 2020, and the spring of 2021.

After Hussman sent the series of four email messages, the Board of Trustees, which normally rubber stamps tenure recommendations already endorsed by the faculty, twice delayed Hannah-Jones’s tenure vote, once in November and once in January. In the latter instance, the deferral was due in part to , according to reporting from the News & Observer. In February, the university offered Hannah-Jones a five-year contract, breaking the precedent of offering tenure packages to previous Knight Chairs.

In late June, following widespread protests amid reports that North Carolina’s flagship university had , the university reversed course. The board June 30.

After initially accepting the university’s five-year offer, Hannah-Jones, a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, reconsidered when it became clear that her tenure process had been marred by what she called “political interference.” The 1619 Project creator eventually , instead joining the faculty of historically BlackHoward University, alongside author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Hannah-Jones, an alumna of UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school, did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s requests for comment.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me,” Hannah-Jones wrote in an early July published through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented her.

Her new initiative at Howard, the Center for Journalism and Democracy, “will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism,” she said.

Details on Hussman’s emails below:

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To wind down after a chaotic school year, Austin Ambrose, who teaches third grade in Nampa, Idaho, purchased some fun reads he hoped would keep his students engaged until summer break — and like much good children’s literature, provide a window into another culture.

One title, , tells a Harry Potter-type story set in Brooklyn featuring a young Black boy. But when the book turned up on a , one family at Gem Prep, a charter school, argued it ran afoul of the prohibiting schools from promoting critical race theory.

Under the school’s policy, Ambrose had to offer the student an alternative book to read.

“I told them, ‘I’m only trying to expose your child to different cultures and experiences,’” he said. “These conversations are going to help them when they get into the real world because they are going to meet people who are different from them.”

Idaho is among nine states so far to ban critical race theory — which holds that racism is baked into U.S. systems and institutions to purposely keep people of color at a disadvantage. Lawmakers in at least 20 more states have proposed similar laws to block what they see as a dangerously divisive form of indoctrination. But for many teachers, the backlash feels like a new kind of McCarthyism, one where they fear being harassed, for a wide array of classroom activities. It doesn’t help that the clash comes as school leaders are struggling to help students — many of them lagging up to a year behind in core subjects — bounce back from the pandemic. To that end, educators are steering an unprecedented influx of federal funds toward their recovery.

“It’s a huge distraction at a time when we can’t afford a distraction,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. “This has been a year the majority of students were not exposed to the kind of learning they should have been exposed to. Now you’re going to paralyze teachers because they are afraid to teach.”

The furor is hard to miss.

The Nevada Family Alliance wants teachers to wear to prevent them from “going rogue and presenting their own political ideas.” A mother in South Kingston, Rhode Island, to learn how the district teaches race and gender issues. And a conservative watchdog group, maintains an “indoctrination map” showing districts influenced by critical race theory.

In suburban St. Louis, tensions over issues of race and curriculum have grown so fraught that educators feared for their physical safety.

Several Rockwood School District administrators had private security officers stationed at their homes. In June, school officials spent nearly $5,000, according to district spokeswoman Mary LaPak, to place private security for two weeks at the home of a district literacy coordinator, who instructed teachers in an April email to remove a lesson plan for a “culture and identity” unit from the online classroom management system “so parents cannot see it.”

In a letter, the local teachers union called on district officials to protect educators from “personal attacks and outright threats of violence” following the backlash. Parents argued the district was teaching critical race theory and “making white kids feel bad about their privilege,” according to the email.

‘Eye of the beholder’

That’s a lot of mileage for an idea most Americans hadn’t even heard of until six months ago.

In that brief span, critical race theory emerged from grad school obscurity to become something of a Rorschach splatter of our anxious political moment. Some see little more than an attempt to reclaim episodes of Black history like the 1921 Tulsa race massacre or the long practice of Jim Crow redlining. For those who decry it, at school board meetings and , it encompasses a host of ills, from anti-bias training to that other “CRT” — culturally responsive teaching, the integration of students’ cultural and ethnic backgrounds into the classroom. Some have lumped social-emotional learning and restorative discipline into the mix.

Because it can be so hard to define, Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at the University of Pennsylvania, called the dust-up over critical race theory “scarier” than similar controversies, such as the recent clash over teaching The New York Times Magazine’s .

“The 1619 Project is a thing you can look up; it’s a very specific document with a curriculum attached to it,” he said. “Critical race theory isn’t in that category. It’s kind of in the eye of the beholder. And if that eye has watched a lot of Fox News, it’s going to behold a lot of critical race theory.”

Fox has used the term times so far in 2021, according to the Washington Post. And conservative organizations such as continue to highlight schools that focus on students’ racial or gender differences. found that least 165 such “grassroots” groups have sprung up over the past year, many with ties to GOP strategists.

Republicans see it as a winning strategy they can ride into the 2022 midterms. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, expects the fight to keep playing out in school board elections.

“We’ve gone through different waves, but school board races are very unequal terrain because the right spends so much time focused on them,” she said.

In Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools, a conservative group, Fight for Schools, has launched over board members’ support for equity-related initiatives of Lilit Vanetsyan, an educator in neighboring Fairfax County Public Schools, went viral when she appeared before the Loudoun board to declare that classrooms had become “indoctrination camps.” While the Fairfax district confirmed she is an employee, she also runs a Instagram account and is a correspondent for the Right Side Broadcasting Network.

In Tennessee, a chapter of , a group seeking more parental influence over school policies, opposes teachers’ use of the autobiography . Bridges wrote the 2009 book, which is aimed at second graders, about her experience as one of the first Black students to attend all-white schools in New Orleans. According to local news reports, the group objected to the book showing a crowd of “angry white people” protesting integration.

When parents equate key aspects of the civil rights movement with critical race theory, they “have become very confused,” said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach at Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit at the center of efforts to resist what they see as “harmful” political agendas in the classroom. (The organization’s website does not identify funders, and Nicole Neily, the group’s president, declined to to name them out of concern for “donor privacy.”)

Sanzi said she’s not necessarily in favor of the GOP-backed legislation because she’s “still hanging on to the belief that we beat bad ideas with better ideas.” But she does question the messages some young elementary students are getting about their “whiteness.”

At an elementary school in Bellevue, Washington, for example, a for the 2020-21 school year said that students would “have explicit conversations about race, equity, and access,” and that fourth and fifth graders would be responsible for implementing schoolwide anti-racist strategies. The plan has since expired and the district said it allows parents to opt their children out of “identity-related discussions.”

“These are children who believe in Santa Claus and put their teeth under their pillow,” Sanzi said.

At outside Columbus, Ohio, the confusion ran so deep that two families asked to remove their children from a course that focuses on critical thinking.

To their parents, that sounded a lot like critical race theory.

In a February email to the school’s principal, one father who pulled his child from class said “he didn’t want his kid feeling guilty about ‘Marxist critical race theory,’” recalled Robert Estice, who teaches the required course. The class syllabus has no mention of Marxism or critical racial theory. For seventh grade, course themes include “How do I know what I know?” and “How do I interact with others to understand their perspectives?”

“I don’t want to put ideas in kids’ heads that aren’t their own ideas — that they wouldn’t have come to themselves,” Estice said.

Some educators wonder whether the laws will take away a powerful tool that teachers have to connect with students — their own personal stories.

“I was a teacher, and one of the things I loved the most was the freedom to teach,” said Tramelle Howard, a board member in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System in Louisiana, where a bill curtailing the teaching of critical race theory failed to advance in the legislature this session. “I did not shy away from my lived experience. I had white male students in my classes, and it wasn’t my job to get them to think a certain way, but to think critically.”

‘Intentional agenda’

Little of this has anything to do with actual critical race theory, the legal term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1970s. It has become synonymous with a kind of racism that applies to institutions rather than individuals. It could, for example, describe police departments that disproportionately apply excessive force against African Americans.

In fact, it was one of these moments, the murder of George Floyd by a white officer in May 2020, that is most responsible for pushing critical race theory into the public consciousness. The cell phone video of Floyd’s death taken by a Black teen prompted months of protests and led many school leaders to take public stands condemning racism and calling out “white privilege.”

Some of those efforts prompted outcries not only from parents, but educators. Teachers in a New Jersey district about being required to participate in what they described as “insulting” anti-bias training. One white teacher reportedly said a presenter told her she was a “inherently racist” and a “white supremacist.”

And in the Virginia Beach Public Schools, where some board members are pushing to ban critical race theory, Superintendent Aaron Spence agreed that his district went too far when literacy coaches attended a February training in which a video speaker said white educators should say “of course I’m racist.” Such approaches, he said, alienate teachers when “the whole goal of equity is to keep everybody in the room.”

With public comments over critical race theory dominating the last three board meetings and staff members frequently responding to calls and emails from residents, he called the uproar an “intentional agenda of distraction” that “takes us away from the real work of addressing the challenges we face in public education.”

In September, former President Donald Trump put his stamp on the issue with an banning federal employees from receiving any training about critical race theory, further contributing to the perception that it promotes anti-American ideas. President Joe Biden reversed the order, but its language became a template for state bills to come.

Just last week, Republicans on the peppered Education Secretary Miguel Cardona with questions about critical race theory, specifically a notice for a that references the 1619 Project and the work of Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, a leading author in the field. (The department has since removed the references.)

Named last year as one of most influential people, Kendi won the National Book Award for . With such accolades, he is among speakers who can command over $20,000 an hour to address school districts on the issue. Kendi, like others, argues that everyone is born into a society founded on racism and that it requires to reverse disparities. He advocates for a , which would create an anti-racism agency to evaluate all local, state and federal policies to ensure they don’t contribute to inequity.

During the virtual hearing, some committee members tried to get Cardona to denounce Kendi’s work. “Do you realize how radical and how out of touch this guy is?” Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin asked.

Virginia Rep. Bob Good pushed Cardona to ensure that the federal government wouldn’t legally challenge state laws banning critical race theory. While Good was speaking, someone shouted “racist” and New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross’s name briefly showed on the screen. Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., later noted the “inappropriate comment” and asked the members to respect each other.

Cardona said multiple times the issue has become politicized and the department doesn’t dictate curriculum, but that he trusts teachers to navigate these issues and believes culturally responsive teaching “builds community.”

Scoring ‘political points’

In states where legislation has already passed, some educators are questioning how they’ll be able to address controversial topics this fall.

“How can we learn about U.S. history without feeling distress at times?” asked Eddie Walsh, an eighth-grade social studies teacher at Memphis Grizzlies Preparatory Charter School in Tennessee, one of the states that has passed anti-critical race theory legislation. “Our goal as educators isn’t to make kids guilty, but we also can’t lie to them or omit the truth when it comes to our past.”

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed this month that allows teachers to cover the history of white supremacy, including topics such as the Ku Klux Klan and the eugenics movement, which involved the forced sterilization of Black women. But it forbids instruction from causing students to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex.

Asia Klekowicz and Ryan York, co-CEOs of The Gathering Place, a San Antonio charter school with a focus on social justice, know they could be sued.

“There is a long history in the U.S. of laws being written as a way to score political points.” York said. “We welcome challenges to the way we [address these subjects].”

‘Thousands of critical conversations’

So, where do we go from here? Legislation designed to suppress the controversial philosophy’s influence is problematic for a few reasons, said Matthew Shaw, an associate law professor at Vanderbilt University. First, he said, the laws are difficult to enforce. And second, they’ve only created greater interest in the ideas they seek to wipe out.

“The irony is that trying to ban or limit critical race theory in conversations in such a public, blunt, legalistic manner has sparked thousands of critical conversations,” he said.

One of the more thoughtful exchanges occurred last week, when two Black educators addressed the National Charter School Conference. Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the debate a “massive distraction” from the fact that too many students — including white children — read below grade level.

“We want to create equality of opportunity for all our kids. Literacy has to be the anchor of that,” said Rowe, who sits on the board of the which aims to unite people based on “common humanity.” “I don’t want the whole hullabaloo around critical race theory to detract from something that is holding back kids of all races.”

He said students should know the history of racial oppression, including the Tulsa race massacre, alongside the “stories of racial resilience,” such as how Booker T. Washington founded more than 5,000 schools in Black communities throughout the South with Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears. And teachers should introduce critical race theory alongside ideas that challenge it. The problem, he added, is when it’s presented as a “sole theology.”

But at the same session, Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, described the backlash to critical race theory as “absolute hysteria.” He added that focusing on successful Black people who “made it” ignores the reality of why they had to be resilient in the first place.

“That is a pathway to the dark side without the full story,” he said.

—Reporters Beth Hawkins, Mark Keierleber, Asher Lehrer-Small, Kevin Mahnken, Marianna McMurdock, Bekah McNeel and Patrick O’Donnell contributed to this report.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story reported that Rockwood School District officials spent $2,500 to place private security guards outside two administrators’ homes. That expenditure was related to a district controversy involving the removal of the “thin blue line” flag — a police solidarity symbol that has become associated with white supremacy — from a high school team’s baseball cap.

Lead images: Getty Images, Teaching for Change/Flickr and /Instagram