When he declared in March 2025 that he wanted the Education Department “closed immediately,” it wasn’t just a sound bite. It was a promise. A promise to dismantle the one system meant to protect the children this country has always underserved: Black children. The ink on the Emancipation Proclamation might be old, but the mindset that fought it never really went away. It just put on another suit.

After emancipation, freed Black families built schools with their own hands. They hired teachers, scraped together funds and insisted that their children would learn to read even if they had to do so in secret. The backlash was swift and violent. White mobs , , and state lawmakers passed inequitable that kept Black students in crumbling classrooms with hand-me-down, tattered books.

By 1980, after decades of states proving they couldn’t or wouldn’t by Black and poor students, the federal government stepped in. President Jimmy Carter created the Education Department to make sure that every child, no matter where they lived or what color they were, had a fair shot at learning.

I think of my grandson, an autistic Black boy with an individualized education plan who depends on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and other federal programs. Without these protections and funding that come from the federal level, the system will fail children like him. States don’t have an excellent track record of protecting students with disabilities, especially Black boys. When we remove federal oversight, we aren’t saving money. We’re sacrificing children.

As a former public school teacher, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when education depends on ZIP codes rather than fairness: Wealthy, mostly white districts keep thriving. Meanwhile, schools that serve Black and brown kids are stuck under leaking ceilings, flipping through worn-out books older than their teachers.

And yet here we are in 2025, watching the federal government try to hand over the keys to the states. Thousands of education workers are out of work, civil rights offices are closed, and the Trump administration appointees have completely gutted oversight.

They’ve shut down seven of the 12 regional offices for the department’s Office for Civil Rights and attempted to lay off employees, only to try to bring back some of those workers. All this chaos means fewer investigations into discrimination, fewer checks on racist discipline policies and fewer protections for Black children who are already suspended and expelled at rates than their white peers.

Now we are supposed to trust states to do the right thing? The same states shouting “local control” are banning DEI programs, censoring Black history and whitewashing textbooks. AP African American Studies. Texas once approved a curriculum that called enslaved people “.” Local control isn’t reform. It’s cultural erasure disguised as policy.

Black children are the first to feel the sting. To this day, our kids attend schools with fewer resources, larger class sizes and outdated materials. Federal programs like Title I and IDEA keep those schools alive. Without them, special education funding dries up, class sizes balloon and talented teachers walk away. Take them away, and you widen that gap on purpose.

When you strip education from federal protection, you don’t get freedom, you get chaos. You get 50 different versions of what a child is worth, determined by 50 governors with 50 different agendas. We’ve seen this movie before.

That includes examining the intellectual and cultural foundations of the holiday: the people, places and events that often get overlooked or erased in social studies curriculums.

Juneteenth, the federal holiday in American history, holds special significance for many educators as it was championed by one of their own. , a former teacher — well into her nineties — led the charge for national recognition. While many schools across the country are off on June 19 in observance, the reason why is not as often taught, says Knowles.

Knowles, CEO and founder of the educational consulting firm Teach Heal Build, focuses on creating culturally affirming classrooms and communities. In April, he published the latest installment in the BOLDLY BLACK workbook series “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa.” The set was designed for third graders to explore topical principles and practices tied to Black culture — offering lessons they may not encounter in a traditional school setting.

Ahead of this year’s Juneteenth holiday, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Trinity Alicia spoke with Knowles about what’s shifting in social studies instruction — particularly in Florida, the power of culturally responsive curriculums in today’s political climate and what motivates him in today’s sociopolitical climate.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: This year marks the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth, but it’s only been recognized as a federal holiday since 2021. Why is it so important, from an educator’s perspective, that Juneteenth became a national holiday?  

Juneteenth allows both teachers and students to explore some of the deeper, more despondent areas of American history that are often avoided. It helps us step outside traditional narratives and unpack the multiple perspectives and experiences that different people, particularly within the African-American and African diaspora communities, have had throughout American history. In this way, it gives students a chance to better understand the ongoing process of freedom.   

For example, Juneteenth is often seen as the definitive end of slavery, but that’s an oversimplification. In reality, it represents a moment in a much longer and more complex journey toward emancipation. This perspective encourages both teachers and students to engage with history in a more nuanced and meaningful way. 

It was also, for almost as many years, largely left untaught in schools. What impact does that have on America’s students and our society as a whole?  

Having been in education for almost two decades, I’ve seen that when we don’t talk about important historical events — like those highlighted and signified by Juneteenth — we miss the opportunity to open up meaningful conversations in the classroom.   

I’ve witnessed how this silence can lead to the creation of a generation of students who are apathetic, especially when it comes to social justice and socio-economic issues that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. However, when we engage with authentic stories and histories, it gives students the chance to develop empathy, compassion and a broader understanding of others’ experiences. This helps create more open-minded individuals who are better equipped to contribute positively to the diverse society we live in today. 

An educator named Opal Lee, known to be “the grandmother of Juneteenth” was a key advocate for the national recognition of the holiday. What significance does this hold for you knowing a fellow teacher led that charge?

Within the framework of American capitalism, we often fail to give educators the honor, respect and homage they truly deserve. Educators are the ones who mold the minds of our children — they have the power and potential to shape not only students’ academic paths but also their overall life trajectories. When educators are empowered to lead conversations about topics like Juneteenth — and when we recognize that the push to make Juneteenth a national holiday was led by an educator — it highlights the strength and influence we possess as a profession.   

It shows that our impact extends far beyond the walls of the classroom and can resonate throughout society as a whole. We have the ability to unlock the minds of the next generation and to use our knowledge, especially historical knowledge, as a powerful tool for change. By doing so, we not only inspire other educators but also challenge our country to examine all aspects of its past — even the ones that don’t neatly fit the traditional narrative of American history.  

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, over 10 years ago on Juneteenth, “We’re in denial of the African holocaust.” Malcolm X would’ve been 100 years old last month, and we’re also 60 years from his assassination. On this Juneteenth, what do you want students to remember most about Malcolm X that they might not get from learning about other civil rights activists?  

As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, we must also reflect on civil rights activists beyond the immediate historical context of the holiday — especially when you think about figures like Malcolm X, who are usually misunderstood. His ideals and philosophy were labeled radical when taking a look at what he’s done overall for American history and the Black community in terms of uncovering darker truths as well as the denial of the American government and the experiences of African-Americans.

We live in a landscape right now and we’re told to move on and forget about those things we’re literally still dealing with as a community, but Malcolm X would want us to continue to advocate for our people and our students to be able to share our authentic experiences. And some of those experiences weren’t happy and joyous. But they have perpetrated so much psychological violence, which continues to happen in the classroom. And it was Malcolm X who stated that “only a fool would allow his oppressors to educate his children.”  

What Juneteenth does within Black communities forces us to step up based on the sentiments that Malcolm X expressed within that quote to be able to affirm and be able to become more self-reliant when it comes to our economic issues and social issues. But when it comes to educational issues and being more responsible and more accountable for teaching our history, we’re no longer contingent on systems to be able to teach the truth and history in the United States. 

From the bans on AP African American History courses to the pushback against DEI policies in schools nationwide, how have you navigated this climate as an educator in Florida?

Florida is one of the most prominent hotspots for controversy in education and arguably an epicenter of these debates. We’ve seen significant pushback against inclusive and truthful historical narratives, and it forces educators in schools to sanitize history and continue to perpetuate a fairytale traditional narrative of American history. This sort of censorship disproportionately impacts social studies instruction, which creates a sense of frustration and a disconnect, which leads to a disengagement with students.   

Throughout my work in public education, I have continued to push back and resist by looking at some of our state standards and benchmarks when it comes specifically to social studies and ensuring that I can tie in our stories and tie in those things that people label “controversial” or “political.” I have weaponized the language itself and weaponized some of the state standards so we can continue to tell our stories unredacted. 

Why is it important that Black parents, teachers and administrators are well represented in the decision-making process for schools?

One of the aspects of American history I don’t think that we unpack enough as a community is just some of the deleterious impacts that integration had within the Black community. A lot of the institutions, specifically the educational institution after integration, was absorbed by the dominant, more prevalent society. 

It is important, even within the current state of the system we’re in, that our voices are heard, our perspectives are heard especially when it comes to policies, processes, practices and procedures in education. Those who live in the community can have better, more viable solutions to some of the issues that we contend with within a community. I’ve seen processes within education when people outside of our community are making decisions, and those decisions are not necessarily meeting or accommodating the needs of the community. 

It is beyond critical that Black educators and educational leaders are given space to represent the issues and also the authentic, lived experiences and even some of the cultural norms that exist within those communities so they can be in a position to represent and also advocate for the things that are needed within the Black community.

In your years as an educator and advocate, what surprises you the most about trends and interests among Black students now versus when you were a kid in America? Do Black students and educators come into school — and specifically social studies classes — thinking, “What’s the point?”

Many children, especially those who are informed, are becoming activists around current events tied to identity. Students who are becoming outspoken, specifically a lot of our student-led organizations such as like Black Student Unions, for example, are able to take charge against the racism and bigotry here in Florida and amplify their voices around some of the injustice that is taking place in curriculum, which essentially violates our First Amendment.

You just a new workbook for students, “BOLDLY BLACK: Science and Mathematics in Ancient Africa.” What do you hope to achieve by releasing this series?

Information is widely more available than it was during my high school era in the 1990s simply due to the digital age we live in today. Sometimes we look at technology as being a destructive force, but it influences me to maintain a working knowledge of it in order to effectively show students how to access the information that we couldn’t when we were their ages.

Part of my activism and my solution-based approaches to things we’re dealing with within the Black community, specifically regarding American history that focuses on our experiences, is creating [this] Afro-centric workbook series that is geared towards students from grades three through 12. My third grade title is “Mathematics and Science in Ancient Africa,” and my goal is creating a curriculum that is concise and also digestible within the hands of parents and also community members.

In states where legislation is trying to restrict what we can say and do within the classroom, communities — and specifically Black communities — need to start building their own infrastructures and using some of the space within the Black communities. For example, community centers and also churches are safe, liberating spaces that can be found in Black communities that teach our history. 

Community members and those who may not be experts in pedagogy and pedagogical approaches can pick this up and share this information with their children. Some of those gaps and things that may be missing within the public educational system are now within the hands of the community to be able to educate and affirm all our children.

Thinking about classrooms and curriculums across the country — what keeps you up at night, and what are you most hopeful for?

In this current climate, I have such hope and optimism. I understand that Black communities have gone through far worse. Our whole experience within just the United States even before it became the United States and colonial America has been turmoil. 

But us as Black people have had agency and power to resist the oppression and repression of our voices and our experiences as well as our humanity in this country in the most profound ways. We’ve found ways to resist, push back and also provide for ourselves in order to achieve self-sufficiency in many points within our history. 

I feel hopeful moving forward that even if a public educational space is under attack, we will start to create those liberating spaces in solidarity like we’ve done throughout history in order to rebuild those institutions and infrastructures that were either destabilized or lost through integration. 

Considering all of those variables, there is very little pessimism within me around the things that have taken place and very little fear because, as Kendrick Lamar , “we gon’ be alright.”

Editor’s note: This story, and a draft report linked to in the story, include references to racist, Islamophobic language and bigoted views that are violent in nature.

Newark Public Schools leaders failed to “quickly and consistently” respond to racist and bigoted incidents against Black students and teachers at a city school designed to embrace world cultures, according to a draft of a scathing report that district officials have sought to keep private.

A , obtained by Chalkbeat Newark, details harrowing examples of how Black students and teachers at the Newark School of Global Studies were “subjected to acts of anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism.” The review also highlighted how the school’s response failed to address the problems, and in some cases, magnified racial issues.

The May 2023 draft of the report written by the consulting firm Creed Strategies is the public’s first look into the firm’s review of the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at Global Studies that pushed some Black students to transfer and teachers to resign. The draft obtained by Chalkbeat is not the latest version of the report. But the district has fought to keep all versions of the report private, nearly two years after Newark school board leaders commissioned it.

Attorneys for the district have argued in court filings that the report is a “predecisional draft document” and therefore exempt from the state’s public records law. If portions of the report were disclosed, “it would have a chilling effect” on the district’s ongoing efforts “to improve dialogue and sensitivity practices” at Global Studies and other schools, according to a court record outlining the district’s opposition to the Newark Teachers Union lawsuit seeking the release of the report.

In 2023, the Newark Teachers Union filed two lawsuits against the district over the release of the report, but the union agreed to  without its release.

The draft report paints a picture of a campus where Black students and teachers reported being called racial slurs by Latino students, the N-word was commonly used among non-Black students, and where complaints by Black students were often dismissed or minimized by administrators and non-Black staff. A male student was repeatedly called an anti-gay slur in class while a teacher was present, and other students made threats to “take off” and “stomp on” the hijabs of Black and Arab Muslim female teachers, according to the review.

Read takeaways from .

Many of the allegations in the draft report have  substantiated in , and are mentioned in lawsuits against the district. The issues also caught the attention of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who hosted a town hall to discuss unity among Black and brown communities months after students spoke publicly about their experiences.

Former Global Studies teachers filed a lawsuit against the district alleging that school and district leaders created a hostile work environment where they experienced racial discrimination and retaliation, according to the lawsuit filed in Essex County Superior Court last spring. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The former teachers also filed claims with the U.S. ​​Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The department opened an investigation into the claim on Dec. 21, 2023, and it is ongoing.

Paul Brubaker, the district’s communications director, did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request to provide a copy of the full Global Studies report. Instead, in an emailed response, he reiterated the district’s stance that the report is “privileged and confidential.” Brubaker said the school board “reserves the right to take any and all appropriate action to prevent or redress injury to itself,” district staff, school or students.

Brubaker did not respond to questions about the district’s efforts to fix the problems at the high school, how it changed its policies to address racial problems, and the professional support it has provided teachers with since the incidents at the school surfaced.

Superintendent Roger LeĂłn promised to fix the problems

Staff, parents, and students were interviewed by Creed Strategies’ six-member review team about their experiences at the high school and were anonymously quoted throughout the draft report. The research team was made up of professors and education experts with experience in school leadership and representative of the demographics at Global Studies.

In interviews with Creed researchers, Black students described a “sense of betrayal” when their peers and adults used racial slurs, according to the draft report. Most Black students “felt stunned, at a loss for words, or angry” when the incidents occurred, the report read.

When asked by researchers about the reported incidents, some of the staff responded defensively, while others said they did not know about the issues until students spoke publicly in 2022, the review found. Teachers reported that the lack of transparency about the issues at Global Studies limited their ability to understand what was happening and eroded morale, the report read. Other staff said the aftermath of the issues becoming public caused “some upheaval” at Global Studies with “very few” attributing the chaos to the racist incidents Black students and teachers had described in 2022, the draft report stated.

But  revealed that school administrators had known about the issues before they became public, and a parent begged state and district officials for an end to the harassment against her son. School leaders missed an opportunity “to address the professional learning needs” of teachers to be responsive to the incidents and create “culturally responsive” learning, according to the draft.

Some interviewees cited in the report also framed “Black women and girls” as “easily triggered and angry” when discussing the incidents at the school, the review notes. “Instead of focusing on the systemic racism that Black women and girls are speaking up against, there was a sense of defensiveness,” the draft report says. In claims filed by former , they alleged they “suffered harassment and racial hostility by students and supervisors” and felt their “worth as a teacher and human being has been diminished.”

Newark school board leaders commissioned the review of Global Studies at the start of 2023 in response to Black students speaking publicly about a pattern of racist harassment on campus. The May 2023 draft provided the district with three recommendations, which were released publicly, and meant to be “proactively implemented” to tackle anti-Blackness and build Global Studies’ understanding of diversity, the draft read.

A mix of Global Studies parents, students, teachers, some board members, and community advocates have been calling on Superintendent Roger  the full report on the high school and address the problems. LeĂłn promised students he would fix the problems at the school but he has not said what changes or efforts have been made at Global Studies, one of the district’s top magnet schools. Deborah Smith Gregory, president of NAACP Newark, is one of the advocates who has called on LeĂłn to release the Global Studies report but has been ignored, she said during a school board .

“It seems that the rule of the superintendent is being sanctioned by the board with little oversight and question,” said Smith Gregory in December.

Despite calls for transparency, the Newark school board last month quietly  to remove one of its longest-serving members after her daughter filed a legal claim against the district alleging racial harassment and discrimination during her time as a student at Global Studies. A New Jersey judge denied the petition but the state’s commissioner of education will issue a final decision by February.

School leaders did not communicate seriousness of harassment

Students reported racist incidents at the high school since  during remote learning in 2020, while the number of Black students has decreased steadily since then, according to the draft.

According to the draft report, Global Studies’ leaders had a “limited response” to the harassment reported by students and “centered impact rather than intent” of the incidents. Interviews found that some school staff learned about the incidents through their relationships with students and the teachers involved. A “very small group” said “they had no knowledge of the incidents before the students’ public comments” in November 2022, the report read.

Staff interviewees also said “the effect of the public reports and media” on the school environment led to “chaos” and “ill feelings,” the draft states. Some suggested that the feelings were “intensified by the lack of clear communication about why students were complaining and leaving the school,” the report read.

“I think that has made some students more like, upset, angry 
 Unraveled things a little bit. So that’s like an unfortunate thing that it’s like kind of causing some upheaval,” said one interviewee in the report.

As part of the review, teachers and administrators told researchers about 11 reported incidents. Discipline for those incidents ranged from written apologies and cultural sensitivity training to mediation and suspensions, according to the draft. Of the consequences, 22 students had in-school detention, seven received out-of-school suspensions, seven had a parent conference, six received mediation, four participated in out-of-school counseling, three received after-school detention, and three more had a conflict resolution session, according to the draft.

With one exception, Black adult interviewees expressed their belief that Black students experienced racial harm at the high school, while six out of the seven non-Black, non-Latino adults interviewed said “they believed the students and expressed concern about their well-being,” according to the report.

Some said they were also aware of racist incidents against Black and Asian American teachers in the building, the report found. The former teachers who filed a lawsuit against the district claimed they also suffered “severe emotional problems” leading them to seek “psychological counseling” after experiencing racial harassment at the high school. But nine interviewees also suggested the reports of Black students and media coverage “were exaggerated and wanted to set the record straight,” according to the report.

Others lamented the school’s approaches to addressing the incidents and “lack of communication about them were eroding teacher morale,” according to the draft. One teacher specifically suggested that because of the public scrutiny, “administrators started to backtrack reports stated about one of the formally reported incidents,” the report read.

“I want to say that when I hear these recordings about what people are saying and including the students that are in the school, to me, it feels like they’re talking about another school. Because I do not see that. You know, I have not heard that,” an interviewee told researchers.

Missed opportunity to support staff, teachers at Global Studies

One of the main draws of Global Studies was that it promised students would “develop a global perspective” through second-language immersion, exploration of different cultures and career pathways that emphasized international relations in business and diplomacy.

But the overall environment at the school – and the way it was run – led to administrators “missing the opportunity to represent the diversity of its students’ lived experiences and aspirations within the environment and their learning,” according to the report.

When Global Studies opened its doors in 2021 following remote learning, the school was newly renovated and well maintained with college-related signs throughout hallways. But researchers found that the overall tone of the school lacked “the spirit and vitality typical of a high school,” with much of it resembling an elementary and middle school, according to the report.

Most classroom walls were decorated with word walls and inspirational posters or pictures, the report found. Wall displays “rarely demonstrated” how students grappled with topics like geographical and linguistic diversity and global political institutions, the report found. The main theme of the school, which highlights students as global citizens, was often tied by staff to specific celebrations such as Hispanic Heritage and Black History months and notable figures, according to the report.

Additionally, most teachers lacked previous high school teaching experience, according to the report. Students spent “extended periods of time sitting silently” and had a lack of dialogue in classrooms, the report found.

Early on, the school and district administration had not cultivated an environment that encouraged staff to examine and challenge their assumptions of implicit bias and other forms of racism, according to the report.

When Black students spoke about their experiences of racial harassment, school administrators hosted a staff discussion of a book called “Courageous Conversations About Race,” according to the report. But staff members weren’t clear about why they were attending the discussions and told Creed researchers the conversations felt “surface-level” and “lacked transparency and support, and limited their capacity to understand and address the issues” that were happening, the report read.

“There was a missed opportunity to address the professional learning needs of instructional staff to be responsive to these issues as a part of student learning,” the report said.

Response did more damage, leading to transfers, resignations

After Black students spoke out publicly, district leaders held assemblies largely viewed “as insufficient and ineffective” by others, according to the report.

During the 2022-23 school year, Global Studies principal Nelson Ruiz held an assembly for the entire school where he told all students not to use the N-word or they would be suspended, according to the report. The school’s zero-tolerance for the N-word was “not only viewed as harming victims, but it also policed the language and speaking practices of Black students,” the report read.

Interviewees also discussed a pizza party for Black students that some students felt “was an attempt to drive their attention away from the issue,” according to the report. During the , a former Global Studies student said school administrators called members of the Black Student Union “and gave us pizza, candy and even soda,” in what she felt was an attempt to silence students. Ruiz did not respond to calls, a text, or emailed questions from Chalkbeat about his response to the incidents.

León also held an assembly during the 2022-23 school year, specifically for the junior class, where students were told, “If they don’t feel comfortable [at NSGS], basically they can leave,” a student interviewee said. Students interpreted León’s comment as “If you don’t like it, you can leave,” according to the report. Student interviewees also felt as if school staff were not facilitating their transfer requests because of a lack of communication between León and the school, while others said it was because the school “did not want to lose high-achieving Black students,” the draft report stated.

Those findings echo what students had told Newark school board members. During the January 2023 board meeting,  they were being told by guidance counselors that they couldn’t transfer. One student told board members that Leon’s speech “didn’t feel like it had any empathy and it gave very much, ‘if you don’t like it, then go home.” Another student said “a vast amount of students” lined up outside of the guidance counselors’ offices the day after LeĂłn’s assembly. A third student said guidance counselors told her multiple times that she couldn’t transfer and if she left “how would that make us feel.”

Staff interviewees also said high-performing Black students were the first students to try to transfer out and some considered how that would impact the school’s image, according to the draft report.

The transfer rates of Black students have “significantly increased” each year at Global Studies in comparison to all other student groups, according to data included in the draft report. Black students have been less likely to complete an academic year at the school than their peers at Newark School of Data Science and Information Technology, Newark Fashion and Design, and Newark Vocational, the report stated.

At the end of the 2021-22 school year, six Black students transferred out of Global Studies and in the following school year, another seven Black students had transferred as of March 15, 2023, according to the report. During the 2022-23 school year, three Black female teachers resigned, all from the same department, and two Latino students were transferred out, the report notes.

Throughout the report, researchers also found that the school’s restorative approach to the issues did not adequately address “the persistence or saliency” of racist comments by students. To address the incidents, administrators called for parent conferences and time of reflection with students that led Black students to feel emotionally unsafe about being forced to work with students who used racist language toward them and were allowed to remain in classes, according to the report.

The practices also “created an atmosphere where some Latino students felt they could use racist language toward Black students and teachers without consequence,” the draft reads.

Staff members who were interviewed said they were following district policy and “employing a restorative approach” to discipline students while others acknowledged they had an “educative role” to address the use of racial language by non-Black students, the report found.

One teacher acknowledged that education “on the background of why some of the things [students] say to each other are so hurtful” would be useful.

“I think especially for recent immigrants, they come here, and they hear that kind of dialogue, and they adopt it thinking like they’re gonna be proud and part of American culture and have no background for it, and don’t realize that for them, it’s not appropriate to talk that way,” according to the teacher.

The report  build school staff’s capacity to identify cultural gaps, create a racially conscious and inclusive environment, foster conversations about race, and assess the effects of anti-Blackness on the school system.

Researchers also noted that “the courage and resilience” of Black students at Global Studies who assumed leadership positions in school organizations, participated in extracurricular activities, and are high achievers demonstrated a level “of social awareness and activism” by challenging racial discrimination.

Their efforts were aligned with the Global Studies theme, the report found.

This was originally published on .

‘On Juneteenth’

Combining history and memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s “” offers a moving history of African American life and culture through the prism of Juneteenth. The award-winning presents an intimate portrait of the experiences of her family and her memories of life as an African American girl growing up in segregated Texas. The essays in her book invite readers to enter a world shaped by the forces of freedom and slavery.

Reed’s exploration of the history and legacy of Juneteenth is a poignant reminder of the hard history all Americans face.

‘O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations’

William H. Wiggins Jr.’s “” is the historical standard for African American emancipation celebrations. It offers an accessible and well-researched account of the emergence and evolution of Juneteenth.

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Wiggins brings together oral history with archival research to share the stories of how African Americans celebrated emancipation. It explains how Juneteenth is part of the tapestry of emancipation celebrations. These celebrations included such dates as , in North Carolina, , in Richmond, Virginia, and , in Washington, D.C.

What began as a local holiday has evolved into a national celebration.

Juneteenth celebrations are known for the variety of programs and events that highlight African American history and culture. In the 1960s, students at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, informed faculty that classes would not be held on Juneteenth. In Milwaukee, the local Juneteenth parade includes a group known as the riding their horses along Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Juneteenth celebrations also feature cultural fairs and exhibitions, artistic performances and historical reenactments. Lectures and public conversations, community feasts and religious services are also part of the celebrations.

‘JłÜČÔ±đłÙ±đ±đČÔłÙłó’

Ralph Ellison, perhaps best known for his novel “Invisible Man,” offers multiple meanings of Juneteenth in African American and American life in his posthumously published novel “.”

The ambivalence of Juneteenth is of a freedom delayed but not denied. Ellison’s spiraling novel captures this in the entangled and tragic lives of the racist Senator Sunraider – previously known as Bliss – and the minister who raised him, the Reverend A. Z. Hickman. For Ellison, Juneteenth represents more than just a celebration of emancipation. It also represents the shared fate of white Americans and African Americans in the quest to create a just and equal society. The promise and peril of Juneteenth is elegantly captured in Hickman’s words, “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free!”

‘Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915’

Mitch Kachun’s book, “Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915,” of emancipation celebrations and their influence on African American identity and community. Juneteenth joined a longer tradition of emancipation celebrations. Those celebrations included ones at the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States on Jan. 1, 1808. They also included the that marked the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire on Aug. 1, 1834.

With an eye for historical detail, Kachun narrates a complex history of how Juneteenth and other freedom festivals shaped African American identity and political culture. The celebrations also displayed competing meanings of African American identity. In Washington, D.C. in the late 19th century, different groups of African Americans held distinct celebrations. These variations underscored tensions around political ideals, status and identity. Kachun’s book reminds us that Juneteenth served as a crucible for forging a collective and contested sense of African American community.

‘Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World’

Similar to Kachun’s book, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s “” reminds readers of a broader history and geography of emancipation celebrations.

Kerr-Ritchie focuses on how various African American communities adopted and adapted West India Day celebrations. He also explores how they created meaning and culture in celebrating the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Kerr-Ritchie’s book details how these celebrations moved across political borders and boundaries.

‘Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration’

Contemporary invocations of Juneteenth often overlook its military history.

Edward T. Cotham, Jr.’s “” fills the void by exploring the Civil War origins of Juneteenth.

Cotham renders explicit the military context leading up to the events on June 19, 1865, in Galveston. This is when enslaved Black people there finally got word that they had been freed more than two years prior. Cotham reminds readers that the history of Juneteenth involves ordinary actions of many individual people whose names may not be widely known.

Collectively, these books about Juneteenth offer fresh perspectives on the history and culture of African Americans on a quest to fully express their freedom. Juneteenth is also an invitation for all Americans to continue to learn about and strive for freedom for all people.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

In 1969, Debra Matthews was almost 9 years old and looking forward to fourth grade with her friends at Rowen Elementary when her mother told her she would be going to a different school five miles away from her West Oak Lane home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Matthews recalled. Rowen had just built a brand new annex building that Matthews had been excited to explore. “I thought I would be going there. I was looking forward to that.”

Instead, until she graduated, Matthews, who is Black, rode a bus every morning, about a half hour each way, to predominantly white Northeast Philadelphia. First in a school bus to J. Hampton Moore elementary, then via SEPTA to Woodrow Wilson Junior High, now Castor Gardens Middle School, and then to Northeast High School.

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All in the name of school desegregation.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of what is perhaps the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed Jim Crow laws in 17 states that required Black and white children to be educated in separate schools.

As the nation commemorates Brown, Philadelphians are reflecting on their own long and complicated history with school segregation.

Philadelphia was a city where segregation was not de jure, or imposed not by the laws that Brown struck down, but instead de facto — the result of personal choices, such as where people choose to live, that led to massive white flight.

For some civil rights leaders of the time, Philadelphia was a perfect . While a federal case was never filed, the district experienced more than 40 years of litigation and oversight from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission aimed at integrating schools. This resulted in generations of students like Matthews, almost all of them Black, bused to schools outside of their neighborhoods and decades of court pressure to implement other policies designed to end segregation.

But, today, the city’s students are still largely attending some of the most segregated and under resourced schools in the country. is 50% Black and 14% white, while the are nearly 40% Black and 34% white, reflecting a longstanding pattern of most white families attending private schools. Although the city is home to a few of the most racially-mixed schools in the state, found Philadelphia’s schools overall remain nearly as segregated as they were 30 years ago. White students are concentrated in a little over a dozen mostly special-admissions schools and comprise just a tiny percentage in the vast majority of neighborhood schools, the study found.

In the 70 years since Brown, “Segregation in the North has gotten worse, and the Philadelphia area is no exception to that,” said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, a legal advocacy group.

Advocates like Churchill haven’t given up on desegregation as an ideal, but they have shifted focus to the new frontier in educational equity — school funding

“The schools that have the most minority children also have the least funding,” said Churchill, who has represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking fair and adequate school funding in Pennsylvania. “And as difficult as it may be to fix the physical segregation of students, there is absolutely no excuse why there should be such funding disparities.”

The Brown anniversary comes at a time when Pennsylvania’s governor and state legislature are grappling with reforming the state’s funding system in the wake of Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s February 2023 decision declaring it unconstitutional. She said Pennsylvania overly relies on property taxes to fund education, depriving students in poorer areas of a “thorough and efficient” education. And she , drawing on and testimony, that Black and Latino students are disproportionately located in districts with inadequate funding.

While Philadelphia is surrounded by overwhelmingly white, better-funded suburban districts, the lead plaintiff in the school funding case is the William Penn School district on the city’s southwest edge, itself an example of : after more Black families moved into the district, white families once again left, perpetuating the largely separate and unequal system. Property values went down, tax rates went up, and those who could afford to move did.

And that unequal system has been proven to , Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds by and educating them in and often plagued with lead and , among other challenges.

“There is an anti-big city, anti-urban attitude,” said Roseann Liu, a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, at an event for her recently published book Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve,” which is a case study of the issue in Pennsylvania.

“What that really means is anti-Black. 
 I don’t think that state legislators are racists, but there is something to be said about people in power holding ideas about the value of different kinds of children.”

The history of desegregation efforts in Philadelphia

For decades until the 1970s, the school district clearly designed to segregate its schools.

In the early and mid-twentieth century as they built new schools to accommodate the city’s growing population – including many Black families moving from the South – officials drew school catchment area boundaries to segregate students as much as possible.

And well into the 1950â€Čs, the district maintained segregated elementary schools to employ a growing cadre of Black teachers and principals. The white power structure of the day was steadfast in opposition to allowing Black teachers to teach white students and to having Black principals supervise white teachers.

While some practices had eased by then – there were a handful of Black teachers and principals in high schools – discrimination was still very much in evidence in 1970, when the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which had begun monitoring city schools several years before, filed a complaint against the district. The commission, which at the time had the power to enforce anti-discrimination laws, wanted mandatory busing to remedy segregation.

School officials fought any effort to forcibly bus students out of their neighborhoods, especially white students, but they did agree to a voluntary plan in which students like Matthews took part. They also agreed, in the 1970s, to create several new, specialized schools such as George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science in the hopes of attracting a diverse student body.

When Constance Clayton became the city’s first Black (and first female) superintendent in 1982, she and her chief of staff, Penn law professor Ralph Smith, devised a more sweeping plan to satisfy the commission.

Clayton’s plan had two major components. One was to provide extra resources, including free extended day activities and art, music, and technology programming, to mostly Black schools in racially integrated areas as an incentive for white students to attend. Such a school was considered successfully desegregated if it reached 25% white population.

The second component was aimed at the significant number of neighborhood schools that remained virtually all-white, most in Northeast Philadelphia. Under this initiative, the district vastly expanded the voluntary busing program, with the goal of reaching 40% Black enrollment in as many of these schools as possible. Many more thousands of students than was the case in Matthews’ time were bused starting in the Clayton era.

While the voluntary busing did change the demographics of many schools, the commission, which continued to advocate for mandatory busing, took the district to court again in the 1990s. By that time, with more desegregation becoming virtually unattainable, the case evolved to focus on the adequacy and equity of funding.

Commonwealth Court Judge ordered the district to invest more resources in the district’s poorest, “racially-isolated” Black schools. But when she also ordered Harrisburg to send Philadelphia more money to help pay for this, the state Supreme Court summarily took her off the case and the state legislature largely ignored her directive.

Around that time, when Superintendent David Hornbeck called the state’s education funding system “racist,” Gov. Tom Ridge took umbrage at the comment, an incident that helped precipitate the state takeover of the Philadelphia school district in 2002. The state controlled the district until 2018, an era that saw the rise of charter schools as the primary reform effort to improve the education of low-income, Black, and Hispanic students.

The busing continued until 2009, when the district’s second Black superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, , citing the expense of busing and a waning commitment to desegregation itself for its own sake.

‘Integration 2.0â€Č

As the nation reflects on the Brown anniversary, Philadelphia educators and policymakers have been pondering what next steps should be.

“The other legacy of Brown, is when desegregation did happen it was done at the expense of Black communities,” said Erica Frankenberg, who studies the subject at Pennsylvania State University. “It was done inequitably in that it made some communities question the importance of it.”

She said she has been “thinking about this idea of what would integration 2.0 look like, integration in a multi racial way, with equitable sharing who has to travel, making sure what is reflected in the curriculum and history classes, integrated teachers. All of that is done in some places, but it is not widespread.”

Sharif El-Mekki, a former school district and charter school principal who now runs the , said Brown was invaluable in that it invalidated what he described as an “apartheid” system. At the same time, he said, quoting activist Stokely Carmichael, it is not segregation per se, “but white supremacy we should be fighting against. What’s important is that we don’t have government-sanctioned forms of segregation.”

El-Mekki, who is working hard to recruit more Black teachers at a time when their attrition rate is greater than that for white teachers, said while the government and institutions should be vigilant about discrimination, they should also be doing more to support “all-Black spaces that are holistic and affirming.”

To mark the anniversary, Desireé Chang, the Director of Education and Outreach at the state Human Relations Commission that pursued the Philadelphia case for so long, said there is still work to be done.

“Students living in lower income communities are deprived of the same resources provided to students in higher income communities,” she said. “This underfunding has led to crowded classrooms, fewer teachers and outdated schools, textbooks, and an overall unequal education.”

In in Black community where Debra Matthews grew up, and still lives, and in others like it, there was long the assumption that schools with white students would be better than the one in the neighborhood. The students taking the opportunity to travel from Rowen to the Northeast filled the school bus.

Matthews, now 63, can’t say for sure how or whether she benefited from her experience traveling far from her home to attend school, having nothing to compare it to. She noted that at J. Hampton Moore, the building was more modern, the gym had more equipment, and the schoolyard was bigger than at Rowen. She recalls that she made new friends and enjoyed “a rainbow of classes.”

She remembers that at Rowen she had been on an accelerated track, whereas in her new school she was not. After her mother complained, however, she was switched.

And she recalls that when she arrived, as a nine-year-old, several of the girls in the class had letters from their parents saying that they were not to sit next to any Black students. And the teacher complied.

But, she said, over time, she made friends, even with some of the girls who had the letters. In an era when many students went home for lunch, something the bused-in students couldn’t do, she was invited to go home with a classmate.

“I did that one time, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said, laughing, recalling that the only difference between her Philadelphia rowhouse and theirs — down to the plastic covers on the furniture — was that her friend’s mother didn’t toast their bread.

“I thought I was going to see something with more splendor, grandeur. But they were just an average family. And I was missing pizza day.”

There were occasional conflicts and awkward incidents, but by fifth and sixth grade she and her girlfriends were sitting around together cutting out pictures from magazines of their favorite idols, which included both the Osmonds and the Jackson 5.

“We got along,” she said. “Sometimes, if adults just let children be children and stop trying to spread beliefs onto them, it will work out.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

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Since January 2021, states have introduced bills and at least 18 have passed laws restricting or banning the teaching of supposed critical race theory. Just states (Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington) have Black history mandates for K-12 public schools. In addition,  , , and have legislated Black history courses or electives during the last two years. But several of the 12 states have new laws on the books that limit their curriculum. 

The Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo has been tracking which states have Black history mandates. The director of the center, LaGarrett King, said it’s important for him and his team to hold teachers and school districts accountable by tracking which states are not only implementing Black history curriculum but actually teaching the lessons.

“If we look at the history of Black history education, whenever there is some form of social or racial strife within society, there’s always this connection to increasing Black history in public schools,” King said. “You saw that right after the Civil War and after Reconstruction, during the late 19th century. You saw that as well during the lynching era in the early 20th century. You saw that in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently, you saw that during the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Even so, King says that in nearly half of the 12 (Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and South Carolina), the mandates just seem symbolic, using Florida as an example of a state that has a Black history requirement but new policies that contradict it. Its “Stop W.O.K.E. law” restricts how race and gender are discussed in public schools and prohibits teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex or national origin.” 

A prominent component of teaching Black history “is the concept of questioning systematic power and oppression, because that’s part of the Black experience in the United States,” King said. “And if you have laws that say, ‘Hey, you can’t talk about systemic racism, whiteness or concepts that say racism is permanent in our society,’ then I think you’re doing the actual concept of Black history wrong
 If your Black history is simply about celebrating heroes, well, here’s the thing: Why are these particular people considered heroes?”

In August, the Florida legislature came under fire after a right-wing nonprofit organization called PragerU created a depicting an animated Frederick Douglass referring to slavery as a “compromise” between the Founding Fathers and Southern states. The video was meant to be shown in K-12 schools and was paid for with state funds.

In Delaware, a for K-12 districts and charter schools to teach Black history went into effect this school year, but educators may not be ready. Deangello Eley, assistant principal of Appoquinimink High School, told that many teachers are “concerned they don’t yet have the tools for these conversations.” Eley believes it will take closer to five years for Black history lessons to be fully implemented.

Some places, though, are doing it right, King said. He pointed to New Jersey and to cities such as Philadelphia and Buffalo as examples of school systems that are working to protect and expand their coverage of Black history.

Though Pennsylvania doesn’t have a K-12 Black history mandate, Philadelphia does, and King said he views it as exemplary both in policy and practice. One of Philadelphia’s biggest priorities is ensuring that teachers have adequate training and resources. The district also prioritizes exposing students to Black history lessons that aren’t typically covered in schools and making sure they can apply these concepts to modern issues.

In 2005, Philadelphia became the first city in the United States to require every high schooler to take an African American history class to graduate. Part of the law included integrating African-American history into all K-12 curricula. 

Ismael Jimenez is the district’s first director of social studies curriculum in nine years. Since stepping into his role last year, he has led a team of three in developing best practices and guidelines for teachers. Though Philadelphia did away with its mandated annual teacher training in social studies a few years ago, Jimenez has instituted a special training just for African-American history teachers called the Africana Studies Lecture and Workshop Series. Teachers are paid to attend these workshops several weekends throughout the year. Scholars and community activists are invited. The district also works with educational departments at cultural heritage museums to offer additional professional development for teachers.

Jimenez and his team have been revitalizing the curriculum, which hasn’t been significantly updated in a decade. They aim to step away from relying on textbooks and are building the curriculum from the ground up themselves. 

Kindergartners begin learning basic social studies concepts like what is a community. Starting in first grade, students are introduced to Black history topics such as the meaning of flags, Marcus Garvey and the creation and purpose of the Pan-African flag. Throughout second and third grade, students are taught about other prominent Black figures throughout world history. In fourth grade, topics include enslavement and the riches that it brought Europeans in the Americas. Those lessons continue through fifth grade.

For the first two years of middle school, the focus is Black history outside the U.S. Sixth graders learn about civilizations in Asia and Africa, such as the Kemet in ancient Egypt, and seventh graders study the role of the Spanish in slave trades in the Western world. Jimenez said the goal is to take the emphasis off Europeans in Western studies, spending only a quarter of the year on ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome and focusing instead on North America and Latin America for half of the year. In eighth grade, the curriculum returns to United States history and includes colonialism and the Civil War.

Students are encouraged to focus less on essay writing and multiple-choice tests and more on what the district calls authentic performance tasks to show their knowledge of course material in creative ways, such as conducting mock trials, writing letters to museums inquiring how they obtained certain African artifacts and contacting school districts and companies that make maps to ask about biases and racism in their creation.

“There’s a short video in ninth-grade American U.S. history talking about redlining, and there’s another one about talking about the riots in Miami in the 1980s,” Jimenez said. “These little clips allow students to kind of access [curriculum] visually.” Ninth graders also learn about the creation of the interstate highway system and suburbanization. “We go over how this identity of middle class was tied to whiteness at the exclusion of black people in America.”

In 10th grade, students complete the required African-American history course needed to graduate. The following school year, the curriculum centers on world history, with a large focus on the transatlantic slave trade. In 12th grade, students learn civics and economics, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and current politics.

“If we’re not engaging in these conversations related to multi-prospectivity and dialectical thinking involving marginalized and historically excluded voices into the conversation, then by default, the teacher is indoctrinating the students because the teacher isn’t allowing them the ability to challenge what they’re being taught,” Jimenez said.

“That’s one thing here that we’re going out of our way to try to make sure is not happening. We’re going to bring up these things that you’ve never heard of that we find interesting and other folks find interesting, but then we’re going to bring in the multiple perspectives related to interpreting it and have dialogue and structured activities around it to really go into the depths.”

Outraged at the new Black history standards in Florida, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday blasted what she called revisionist history promoted in the state’s African American history standards approved this week by top education officials.

Just two days after the the standards, Harris told the crowd in Jacksonville at the Ritz Theater and Museum that Florida’s book bans, LGBTQ+ rights restrictions, and Black history revisions are part of a national right-wing agenda.

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape; it involved torture; it involved taking a baby from their mother; it involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world; it involved subjecting people to think of themselves and be thought of as less than humans,” Harris said.

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“So, in the context of that, how is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”

Harris continued: “And so, let us be clear: Teachers want to teach the truth. Teachers want to teach facts. And teachers dedicate themselves to some of the most noble work any human being could take on: to teach other people’s children — for the sake of the future of our nation.

“And so, they should not then be told by politicians that they should be teaching revisionist history in order to keep their jobs. What is going on?”

Critics of the first stand-alone say they largely limit elementary school instruction to identifying famous Black people. At the middle school level, the standards describes slavery as personally beneficial in instances where the enslaved learned skills. High schoolers will learn that the 1920 Ocoee Massacre involved violence against and by African Americans.

Extremist leaders

While Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t address any of the specific criticisms against the standards, he took to his campaign Twitter account to ahead of her arrival.

“Democrats like Kamala Harris have to lie about Florida’s educational standards to cover for their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children,” the governor wrote. “Florida stands in their way and we will continue to expose their agenda and their lies. The Harris-Biden administration is obsessed with Florida 
 yet they ignore the chaos at the border, crime-infested cities, economic malaise, and the military recruitment crisis.”

Aside from criticizing the standards, the vice president called out the state government’s lack of action against gun violence. Instead of wanting to arm teachers, leaders should be promoting gun safety, she said.

Ultimately, Harris characterized extremist leaders as figures fomenting culture wars meant to divide Americans.

“Let’s not fall in that trap,” she said. “We will stand united as a country. We know our collective history; it is our shared history. We are all in this together.

“We know that we will rise and fall together as a nation. We will not allow them to suggest anything other than what we know: The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”

The whole story

For now, members of the work group that developed the African American history standards are focused on explaining how they concluded that Black people benefitted from slavery because they learned skills. A spokesperson from the Florida Department of Education published a statement on Thursday from two members of the work group, citing people like John Chavis and Booker T. Washington as examples of slaves who developed trades from which they benefitted.

“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage, and resiliency during a difficult time in American history,” according to a statement by William Allen and Frances Presley Rice who helped develop the standards. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”

Allen and Rice added: “It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context.”

Even so, the work group’s statement didn’t tackle the backlash against other aspects of the standards.

Black lawmakers speak out

This teaching of the 1920 Ocoee Massacre is more personal for Orange County State Sen. Geraldine Thompson. In 2020, she helped champion a bill to add the massacre to Florida’s K-12 education curriculum. She spoke out against the standards during the Wednesday meeting.

“When you look at the history, currently it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans,” she wrote in a statement on Friday. “That’s blaming the victim, when in fact it was other individuals who came into the Black Community cand killed individuals and burned homes, schools, lodges, etc. So we want to tell the whole story.”

Other politicians such as State Rep. Dianne Hart from Hillsborough County commended Harris for her visit. Hart is the chair of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus.

“It is unfortunate that Florida has become the leader in all the wrong areas, and this new attempt to continue to diminish the importance of African-American history, and to present our students with a lack-luster version of the truth is evidence to that fact,” she wrote in a statement. “As chair of the Black Caucus, we have made this a priority issue and we will continue to advocate for truth, for facts, and for age-appropriate curriculum.”

There has been no shortage of criticism toward the standards, but no concrete actions have been announced. Though, State Sen. Bobby Powell of West Palm Beach said the “so-called” standards needed to be thrown out.

“When the dogs and the water cannons, the police batons, and the lynching mobs were let loose on these former African American slaves, was that for their ‘personal benefit’ as well? He wrote. “These so-called standards need to be thrown out immediately, and a full and honest examination of what’s really driving this one-sided agenda needs to begin.”

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Students at Florida public schools will now learn that Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them skills. This change is part of the African American history standards the State Board of Education approved at a Wednesday meeting.

The description of slavery as beneficial is not the only grievance parents, teachers, education advocates and politicians had with the new . People speaking at the Wednesday meeting generally called out the diluting and omissions of history. For example, instruction at the elementary school level is largely limited to identifying famous Black people, and high school teachers will talk about the “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans” at the , in which a white mob killed at least 30 Black people.

“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” said Kevin Parker, a community member.

Though the public testimony period lasted over an hour, most of the people objected to the adoption of the standard, with supporters of it waving from their seats. Paul Burns, the chancellor of K-12 public schools, defended the standards, denying that they referred to slavery as beneficial.

“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said.

Board member Kelly Garcia upheld the standards and said that none of the backlash she read about them before the meeting pointed to specific concerns. A coalition of Black leaders and community groups — Florida Education Association, FL’s NAACP and The Black History Project, Inc. and Equal Ground — sent a letter to the board on Monday in opposition to the standards.

Whitewashing history

State Sen. Geraldine Thompson, representing part of Orange County, and state House Democrat Anna Eskamani of Orlando showed up to speak out against the standards.

“When I see the standards, I’m very concerned,” Thompson said. “If I were still a professor, I would do what I did very infrequently; I’d have to give this a grade of ‘I’ for incomplete. It recognizes that we have made an effort, we’ve taken a step. However, this history needs to be comprehensive. It needs to be authentic, and it needs additional work.”

A 1994 Florida statute requires schools to teach African American history, but Gov. DeSantis has been chipping away at the legacy of the law. Last year, the Legislature passed HB 7, which restricted certain and gender in schools and workplaces. Regarding race-related discussions in schools, the law says that students must not feel guilt over past actions of people of the same race.

At the beginning of the year, the governor’s rejection of the New York-based College Board’s pilot course amassed nationwide backlash for trying to whitewash history.

“To be discussing African American history in this moment, with no one present who has felt the pain of the infliction of harm on African Americans. It’s overtly problematic,” said former state politician Dwight Bullard, pointing at the non-Black members of the board.

“Part of the reason the ’94 statute exists is because the state tried to cover up the Rosewood massacre. So, by the very admission of the state, the reason that we need a stronger statute that covers African American history, a broader statute is because of the necessity or the failures of your predecessors. So, I simply ask that you table this amendment until those closest to the pain have access to the power.”

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That was in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, when educators and policymakers were pledging to address longstanding racial inequities. Businesses created equity statements, books about race and racism were flying off the shelves and schools couldn’t get enough cultural sensitivity training. As a former teacher and district administrator now working with schools and organizations on diversity and equity issues, I felt like the wind was at my back. 

How times have changed. 

In 2023, at least — 36! — have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism. The nation marked Black History Month this year by , in classrooms and even by in a school cafeteria. 

The country went from seeking to understand to re-creating fear, isolation and willful ignorance.

Some politicians believe they’ve a in using how race and identity are taught as the wedge issue. Just see how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently exploited the College Board’s African-American Studies course as a . 

Educators and their allies must push back. Teachers must not be allowed of teaching Black history, especially when students experience Black culture every single day in mainstream music, fashion and media. As people who believe in public schools and in this country, we cannot allow students to be ignorant of what happened in American history and how that impacts present realities. We cannot reduce Black people’s experiences and humanity to a single story of oppression, nor can we dilute Black identity to a history of enslavement, trauma and crime.

Despite the current landscape, I still have hope. At home, parents can talk about the hard stuff  and bring relevant news headlines about Black book bans to the dinner table. With tough conversations, parents and educators can help young people recognize the importance of building new perspectives through literature and having multiple viewpoints about some of the world’s most vexing issues and how to solve them.

At school, there is still widespread interest among educators in finding ways to incorporate relevant Black experiences into the curriculum, not to stir up shame and blame but to value the ingenuity, beauty and resilience of Black culture. I hear from teachers and principals all the time, and they know that teaching about race — with transparency — is more about cultivating a new vision for the future than it is about staying stuck in the past.

One of schools’ most fundamental responsibilities is to respectfully incorporate different cultures into their learning environments. In my years in schools and districts, I emphasized the importance of teachers understanding students’ cultural differences, bringing those cultures into the classroom and dissolving any disconnect between home and school so every student felt seen, respected and comfortable.

In my work as a coach, I have helped schools take on this subject and shared my own leadership mistakes as examples of how to social justice issues can further marginalize students. I have helped districts clarify what a more equitable impact looks like in their district versus what it may look like in others, emphasizing that educators cannot, yet again, apply a one-size-fits-all solution to integrating Black culture into their school systems. I have also partnered with individual school teams to prove that it’s possible to at the same time — and that schools don’t need to pretend to be colorblind to do it. 

Public schools can put in the work to make their learning environments more welcoming to their students of color. They can engage in ongoing professional development to learn how to recognize their biases, incorporate lessons all year round on race and culture, and hire a more diverse staff. School district leadership can support their teachers’ attempts to integrate culturally relevant experiences in their classrooms and prevent the voices of the few from dictating the experiences of the many. Politicians can stop regulating what and how subjects can be taught in schools to the point that teachers are afraid to teach anything. 

Two years later, despite — and because of — everything that has happened since, I will say it again: Black History Month ended, and it shouldn’t. The old visions that students of color should assimilate into white culture must be left in the past, and Black and Brown communities should experience a new vision, where they can bring their full selves to school.

Even as elected officials turn into fearmongers, educators must stand up for students, band together and insist on teaching the fullness of our country, a country that proudly and persistently includes Black people as foundational to America’s greatness — yesterday, today and tomorrow.

After his administration prohibited the adoption of a newly developed AP course on African American studies, the Republican governor last week, openly musing about dropping all AP classes throughout the state. Even with many Florida students and families protesting the decision, governors in four other states that they would also review the content of the new course, warning that it could introduce political content into classrooms. 

Daryl Scott, a professor at Baltimore’s Morgan State University and self-described “anti-public intellectual,” sees enough blame to go around. While lacerating the College Board for acquiescing to DeSantis’s criticism and revising its product, he sees the rising GOP star as an opportunist exploiting white anxieties to build his political brand. 

Scott spent much of his career at Howard University before departing to chair Morgan State’s history department last year. He previously served as the president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1915 by the pioneering Black thinker and academic Carter G. Woodson. Along the way, he has become a kind of historian of Black studies, acquiring an insider’s view of the field’s leading figures and intellectual tendencies: multiculturalists and Afrocentrics, social scientists and humanists.

His commentary on national affairs and Black historiography bleeds over from to a lively social media presence. In neither venue is Scott known for pulling punches, sometimes excoriating writers and educators for yoking their scholarship to political causes. Over the last few years, one of his most frequent targets has been the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which as “an exercise in African American exceptionalism that elides the question of class.” 

In a conversation with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Kevin Mahnken, Scott turned his focus to the political clash in Florida, where he said conservative backlash is endangering the study of Black history. But he added that historians and teachers alike should be leery of wading into cultural wars that they aren’t equipped to win — and potentially alienating families in the bargain.

“We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up,” he said. “If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: Let’s talk about the content of this AP course. The is that the curriculum, and particularly the sections that focus on more recent history, privileges radical voices and leftist critiques of American society. Do you think there’s substance to that complaint?

Daryl Scott: I’m pretty much a gadfly when it comes to that final curriculum. It’s not so much that I take issue with it. I just want to point out to the people who participated in it that it could have been a much different curriculum.

First and foremost, it’s a college course that’s taught in high schools. This is where some folks on the Right get lost, but again: This is a college course, taught in high schools, potentially for college credit. And it becomes the basis for admission into the better colleges in this country. 

I happen to have been part of the redesign of AP U.S. History, which recognized a whole lot of things that the Right now calls problematic. So maybe we should just stop for a second to see what they’re calling problematic. Half of critical race theory has to do with optimism versus pessimism about the present and future of race in America. The pessimism started in the 1950s, with saying that things weren’t going fast enough: “These obstacles are here! We thought we were going to dismantle the structure of white supremacy and usher in equality, and it didn’t happen. Will it ever happen? Maybe not.”

When did pessimism become something you can legislate against? We’re legislating against pessimism now, and legislating for American exceptionalism? And as I’ve said elsewhere about the 1619 Project, when did racial progress become a pet idea of conservatives? I’m old enough to remember — and we should still have to teach — that it was conservatives who believed Black people couldn’t assimilate; now they’re saying they’re optimistic that Black people should assimilate, and you can’t teach otherwise.

The big point is that academic freedom in a college-level course dictates that we can debate all these things. This is why they’re fundamentally wrong, no matter what’s in the College Board’s curriculum. And this is why the College Board itself was fundamentally wrong when it allowed itself, whether through external pressure or otherwise, to be put in what I used to call “self-check.” If they weren’t being expressly censored by the state of Florida, they self-censored. And they did this for the same reason textbook publishers do it all the time: so they could get their products through state departments of education. That has a negative impact on what is being taught. 

We’re saying that we’re going to create a college course for high school students, and we’re going to limit inquiry? Can we get more backwards and un-American than that? My belief system has always been one of racial pessimism, and here’s what I mean: I’ve been of the belief that the best we could do as a society was to hold racism in check. And we could reach a set of fairly equal opportunities, and likely equal outcomes, if we could hold racism in abeyance. That marks me as a pessimist; in Black studies, there are lots of people who call themselves , and there are critics of Afropessimism, like Cornel West, who now has to defend pessimism [against censorship]. I don’t want to speak for him, but West that the problem with racial pessimism was that it didn’t believe in the Christian notion of human progress and redemption. 

Some people say, “Well, you can’t teach about Black Lives Matter,” but at this point, something that happened between 2013 and 2020 is pretty much a historical topic. If you can’t even teach about the facts of that movement, you’re doing something that used to be done in the Soviet Union — erasing history, saying, “That is not a valid topic of inquiry.” Black studies includes debates around reparations, and anyone who knows I don’t think reparations are going anywhere. But in a democracy, reparations can be debated.

One of the problems with the whole course is that it attempts to be a history course. But Black studies, and many studies, tend to be fairly contemporary. The content of most of these courses, if you were to ask me, should be 21st-century topics. We should be trying to figure out the consequences of assault weapons through these courses, the consequences of a society in which quality healthcare is not widespread. In other words, the need for a studies program at the college level is to be robust in debating the issues before society. What we’re being told in Black studies now is that we can’t debate things because it’s indoctrination, and yet, the people claiming this say that we should be teaching American exceptionalism. That’s an indoctrination program.

The concern of everyone in a democracy should be how we debate matters, not what we debate. Some people on the Right have reached the foregone conclusion that we’re not going to have a debate and that teachers will, of necessity, indoctrinate. They’re pretending that we’ve got madrassas out here. But nobody’s sending their kids to madrassas, and anybody who understands the teaching profession knows that they try their best not to indoctrinate. So no matter what critique I have of the content of the College Board course — and I do have a critique — the bigger issue in a democracy is academic freedom and holding teachers responsible for teaching responsibly. If they’re indoctrinating, it should be dealt with in schools, not at the state level.

You mention a few times that the AP African American Studies course is effectively a college seminar. But it’s still being taught to high schoolers, and academic freedom is strictly limited, if not nonexistent, in K–12 settings. If 16- and 17-year-olds are being taught a curriculum that Florida voters don’t agree with, doesn’t the governor have the authority to intervene?

I hear what you’re saying. But let’s put brackets around the College Board, because we know that the origins of Florida’s law [the Stop WOKE Act, passed in 2022] don’t lie with the College Board. The origins lie in the broader assault that comes in the wake of, and as a consequence of, the New York Times’s 1619 Project. 

Some genius of political persuasion put three words together that are very volatile: critical race theory. It never gets taught like that in K–12 settings, but I’m a good enough intellectual historian to know that nothing stays within its box. So elements of it have been taught in K–12, and the power of this critique is right in the name. By labeling everything “critical race theory,” it brings out three things conservatives don’t like to hear: They don’t like “critical,” they don’t like “race,” and they don’t like “theory.” Critical race theory has become the perfect foil to go after everything you don’t like in a history culture war. So it’s brilliant on their part.

The problem is that they’re effectively telling parents — Black parents, white parents, any parents — that their children cannot be taught Black history if it’s not a good-time story. To survive under this repressive regime, Black history has to shoot for [a tone] somewhere between the old-school, “We all happy negroes here,” and this other idea, “Ain’t we done great lately?” That’s the content they’re allowing to be taught, and anything else is said to be something that makes whites feel guilty. 

Now, I do hear what you’re saying, and I keep telling people to stop acting like we’re talking exclusively about college courses. We should pause and ask the question, “Are white kids being made to feel bad about America? Are white kids being made to feel bad about being white? Are they being made to feel individually guilty for slavery or any other form of racial oppression?” To the extent that is the case, white parents have a point, and they have cause for concern — in the same way that Black parents, historically, had cause for concern that their children were being taught that slaves were happy and didn’t really want their civil rights, or were being told that they were racially inferior. 

Everybody in a multicultural, multiracial democracy has a vested interest in their kids not being taught to have negative feelings about themselves. That should never be the goal of K–12 education. I’m not going to be flippant, like some of my colleagues can be, and say that white kids should just toughen up. No, we’re talking about kids! Everybody’s got ’em, and I don’t want to accept that an eight-year-old boy, or even a 15-year-old girl, should have to “toughen up.” The teacher is supposed to take care that generalizations are not visited upon individuals in a way that makes them responsible for what someone else has done. Children cannot bear the weight of all of society’s ills. We believe that self-image should not be damaged through the educational process. So to the extent that white parents have this concern, we all need to address it.

But that does not make it legitimate to go wholesale into violating what should be free inquiry. You should not reduce the curriculum to something resembling a right-wing madrassa. That is the problem with DeSantis: Rather than just saying that educators have the burden of delivering curriculum that leaves intact the self-image of all students — and most teachers do this — he is creating a fairytale effect for white folks at the expense of all students learning. And race is only one side of the [Stop WOKE] law. The real focus of that law is LGBTQ rights, because there’s a live debate about when these discussions enter education. We need to have that debate in a sane and civil way as well, but not by outlawing things at the state level and exploiting the politics to get elected.

It’s notable that this clash between Florida and the College Board just seems to keep growing. Gov. DeSantis that he’s open to the state just dropping the whole range of AP courses. 

It’s been suggested that the College Board should have told Florida, “Take ’em all or take none!” I’m not a political prognosticator, but it’s also been said that DeSantis stakes out hard positions that he later reverses when no one is looking. For example, he went after Disney, but then later of all the measures he was supporting. So this seems like a feint of some sort, because there would be hell to pay in Florida [if AP courses weren’t offered]. There are so many kids in Florida who need the AP courses to get to the best schools in the country. 

You don’t just get college credit from the AP exams. Some schools use AP scores as a proxy to determine who’s qualified to attend. And politically, it’s not like Florida is Mississippi. People would be up in arms, whether it’s the well-heeled people or the striving people, about the prospect of their kids not having access to AP classes. 

So the College Board might get the better of DeSantis on this, but to me, the College Board should have stood on principle rather than self-censoring. Or they should have had the guts to take a look at this stuff earlier on. In other words, they brought people together, and they were trying to legitimize a class that was going in a direction they were willing to go. If they felt it was going too far, they should have had the guts to stop it before that point. Sometimes, you can feel the College Board giving you the sense of how far they’re willing to go. Having sat on a board, I know that the board is sometimes going to protect the institution. If they were disposed to doing that, the College Board should have been protecting the institution before they ultimately did. 

But once they went down this road, I really believe their decision to cave in to censorship was wrong, because it was a massive cave-in. I’ve kept telling people, “Don’t believe any of the spin they’re putting out.” You could see their spin about this, and the next thing you know, Florida between them and the College Board. There was no smoking gun, but they had a clear sense all along. When the law passed, they didn’t need anybody to tell them. Between the first version of the curriculum and the second, there was that Stop WOKE law, and they must have known which way the wind was blowing.

Is it necessary that there be a widely available course for high schoolers on African American studies? And, if so, should the College Board be the ones to develop it?

Everybody is free to do what they want. I believe in an open market of education.

By the same token, another track for all of this could have been pursued by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It could have been pursued as well by the National Council of Black Studies. But especially when we’re talking about red states and the CRT debate, one of the issues has been finding consensus about the content for any of these courses. Whoever first took the initiative would have to fight for some kind of market share; schools would probably only adopt your particular version if, and only if, they felt it would be widely adopted. So it was likely that the College Board would be the most successful at this.

But if you know how the College Board functions, you’d know that their process was going to preserve the hierarchy of the academy. They were going to the most elite echelons of the academy and select participants from a cross-section of the discipline. It’s a multicultural strain of African American studies that I tie to the rise of [Harvard professor] Henry Louis Gates; , as a department, as opposed to various programs that had a menagerie of people from different disciplines. 

Something else has happened since then, which I call “Black Studies 4.0,” and which goes beyond what Gates and his generation of scholars signed onto. It’s a development out of the same camp, but it’s a more forthrightly race-conscious group. So it’s not surprising to me that elements of the AP course are different from what most of Gates’s generation would have created. Even though the College Board selected people like [Harvard historian] and Gates himself to be figureheads of sorts, the content looks more like that of a younger generation. They’re in the same multicultural tradition, but this new generation is more race-conscious, more committed to tangible goals like reparations and LGBTQ rights and things like that. 

This was always going to be an issue. For instance, in the College Board’s original curriculum guide, which was leaked, Afrocentric thinkers were just a marginal part of that. You’re not old enough to remember the ’90s, right?

Not really.

Well, this is where it gets interesting. People say that there’s been one continuous war against Black studies. But they’re kind of glossing over the 1990s and pretending that the political configuration is the same as it was then. 

Here was the situation in the ’90s: Afrocentric scholars were placing an emphasis on changing the K–12 curriculum in many places across the country. They had great influence in the Black community and had some success in changing the curriculum to fit their goals. They got close to having great success in New York in changing the statewide curriculum and, in doing so, between political liberals about and about Afrocentrism. It was a fight about education, but it didn’t involve true conservatives; we’re talking about a fight between Afrocentrics — who often said that only Black people could study Black people — and mainstream academics, most often education policy people like Diane Ravitch. The way it played out, on the academic level, was as a debate over the claims of progressive and Afrocentric scholars that the Western tradition came “out of Africa.” I’m probably misrepresenting that clash somewhat because it was never my central concern in life. [Laughs.]

Can you provide a little flavor of how this debate came to be?

When Black studies came to higher education in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was led by Black Power-ites, who tended to be social scientists and very political. They wanted policy changes, but they never succeeded in winning the mainstream of the academy. In fact, their affiliation with Black Power turned out to mean that Black studies only functioned well at the second and third tiers of the academy. In the elite schools, Black studies was pretty much a set of programs where people really stayed in their original disciplines. No one even conceptualized any notion of Black studies as having any kind of uniform mission. The Black Power-ites at the second- and third-tier institutions did. 

They got slaughtered at the elite colleges, and most of the leading Black scholars wanted nothing to do with a departmental status for Black studies. The big-time Black scholars at elite schools were big-time within their own disciplines, not Black studies. I say all of this because Skip Gates finally moved from that programmatic style of Black studies at Yale to the creation of a proper Black studies department at Harvard, and how he got there was important: He got there by critiquing Afrocentrics. And he made the mainstream academy safe for a new brand of Black studies.

The point I’m making is that this fight in Florida isn’t just a new front in the same war. If you want to say this is the same war, you’re fooling yourself about who was fighting it all this time. 

The conservatives weren’t in that fight! You can point to people like Allan Bloom and , or to [Arthur] Schlesinger’s book, . But remember that Schlesinger was an old-line liberal. Where we are now is a completely different place. Nobody back then was passing laws to invalidate the teaching of certain kinds of Black history. It’s a full-on assault on academic freedom, and it’s quite a different thing from last time.

It sounds as though you’re saying that the debate over how to teach African American history essentially has essentially broken through, from the academy to society at large, with predictable political effects. On the one hand, that’s potentially destructive, but on the other, it’s a marker of the success of the discipline, right?

It’s the success of a certain strand of Black studies, exactly. But there’s a related point: Before anybody ever talks about Black studies, and before it pops up as a field in the 1960s, there had been a Black history movement . Over the years between 1915 and the 1970s and ’80s, what had effectively happened is that the study of Black history made it into the school systems. People like me never felt that it was enough, and I know the criticisms that said, “We only talk about the same five people every February,” but that was an exaggeration. It wasn’t a true assessment of the progress that was made in bringing the study of Black history into the curriculum.

started during the 1960s. They included Black history. You saw textbooks changing to include Black subject matter and Black imagery. Hell, I’ve even seen books out of Bob Jones University Press that had multicultural images in them. In the ’60s, we were fighting a war for rights; but with that war came a notion that, now that Black people were in schools, they were going to be taught something about themselves. That’s how the rights war led to the culture war.

In the United States Army, I had officers who could stand up during Black History Month and lead pretty good Black history conversations. They knew the cast of characters. There was some kind of presence of it anywhere you went in society, even if you were talking about fairly conservative schools. In fact, I could take you to former segregation academies where they’re teaching Black history. The ones that survived did so because they were pretty upscale, and they ended up being integrated and hiring Black folks who would teach Black topics in courses. So let’s not pretend there was no progress being made, and let’s not pretend that conservatives were trying to purge it. Because they weren’t.

Given the existence of these laws about instruction on race and sexuality, what is the responsibility of organizations like the College Board when it comes to creating these curricula? I realize that they disappointed a lot of people by revising this course, but the legal reality in a large number of states meant that they were always likely to cave, right?

The College Board was always going to cave here, because they cannot afford to lose states like Florida and Texas. Even if they wanted to give up the “heartland,” they can’t lose those states. 

Gates was attempting to create a multicultural democracy, and so he was more attuned to people’s feelings. This younger generation of scholars believe that you’ve got to power your way through. There is this sense that the ultimate victory is theirs, and sometimes, they don’t deal with the political realities of what won’t fly in the heartland, or off of college campuses generally. Quietly, there are people in the Black community who don’t want to hear that, and they’re not too interested in that kind of compromise. 

I would have been much more open to debate within the confines of the College Board. But I become a hardcore advocate of academic freedom, particularly with a college course, once it’s been developed. And particularly when it’s supposed to represent the best knowledge we have, however we got to this position.  

But I take the meaning of your question to be: If the College Board was going to cave, should they have been the vehicle for this project in the first place? I would flip it and ask, would anyone have adopted a Black history course from the Association of African American Life and History? Would it have been the gold standard at elite institutions?.

It’s like I said: Everybody is free to do what they want. Me trying to say what the College Board should or shouldn’t do would be akin to saying that McGraw-Hill shouldn’t have a Black history textbook. That violates the liberal principle, which I share with someone like Henry Louis Gates, that inquiry and the presentation of knowledge should be universal. In a democracy, you don’t have a monopoly on studying yourself and your own group; everybody gets a chance to put forward their version. So I support the College Board and its right to create this course. But as big a giant as it is, the fact that it caved is a bad thing for all of us. 

Even with the disappointment you feel over the College Board’s reversal, I’m wondering how you feel about the development of a widely available course on African American studies. You may have designed it differently, but how do you feel about the end result?

Well, that is the shame of it all. There is no legitimacy to any course in African American studies that cannot grapple with the historic reality of the Black Lives Matter movement. Think about what it would be like if you said, “9/11 didn’t happen! Don’t talk about 9/11!” We can feel however we want about Black Lives Matter, but we can’t pretend that that movement — which has lasted for almost a decade — didn’t happen. Would you like for someone to say, “The ’60s didn’t happen”? 

It’s beyond ahistorical. It’s erasing history and saying it didn’t happen. DeSantis wants us to say, so to speak, that Black Lives Matter did not happen. But Black Lives Matter has shaped much of the second and third decades of the 21st century. How do you pretend it didn’t happen, for good, bad, or ugly? Is the next thing to say that the LGBTQ rights movement didn’t happen? You can’t talk about it, so we can’t even study the historical phenomenon now? 

The College Board will tell you, “You can do it, it’s an optional module.” But we know that optional modules aren’t tested and are rarely taught. Could you imagine a course on Western civilization where you can’t teach the French Revolution? [Laughs.]

What do you think of complaints that DeSantis’s win here was only partial — that the course still contains elements of left-wing orthodoxy that need to be expunged?

Here’s what I keep telling my friends when it comes to any of these related issues: We cannot write off the carnage that is already taking place, among both teachers and students, in places that aren’t just red states. There are where teachers are being told they can’t teach Black history in predominantly Black schools, because they’re supposedly teaching it wrong. There was where CRT was used as a pretext to get rid of a principal.

So there is real carnage out here. The big losers are teachers and students. Now, the Left likes to say — and this is a lot of my colleagues — “Hey, we’re selling more books than ever!” Yeah, and that represents a fraction of the children who aren’t learning anything about topics that they were learning the day before yesterday. The impact of the anti-CRT, anti-critical analysis movement is profound. The National Review can pretend that every school district in any liberal state is teaching critical race theory, but you can get fired anywhere in Oklahoma because someone spies on your classes. So it becomes a way of going after people and purging Black history from schools in ways we’ve never really seen before. 

This hearkens back, as some have said, to the Jim Crow era, when Woodson’s disciples used to teach with his book under their desk at the risk of being fired. We won that war. It was a rights war that had cultural consequences. We win rights wars, conservatives win culture wars. But we’ve been fighting this thing as a culture war, and we’ve been so dumb and blind to not care about white kids as students. That’s the biggest mistake we’ve made.

When [Gov. Glenn] Youngkin won in Virginia, this issue of what kids were being taught was a big part of it. The notion that white kids were being made to feel bad was what flipped some people from Democrat to Republican. We need to take seriously that white mothers do not want their kids to have their psyches toyed with in K–12, and we can’t tell those mothers to just have their kids toughen up. If we’re going to counter this onslaught, we need to take that opposition seriously and find ways to take away their criticisms. It’s unethical for teachers to go after kids, and teachers typically don’t do it.

I saw a documentary last fall about how the Civil War is taught around the country. A teacher in a Boston school had a conservative kid in class. Even though he’s a conservative, I can identify a little with him: They went after him, and he held his ground. But the job of the teacher was to make sure that he had a chance to express his decidedly conservative point of view. The job of the teacher is to prevent the conversation from devolving into ad hominem attacks. 

And when we go to even younger levels, teachers have an even greater burden. You don’t let kids gang up on anybody in those settings. That’s teaching, and that’s how we should discuss it — but to outlaw things is political demagoguery. And that’s where we find ourselves now, because we served up this culture war.

If you had a high school-aged child, would you let him or her take this AP class?

I would talk to my kid and let them make the decision. 

My whole idea of parenting is to empower my kid to know how to make decisions, and then live with the consequences of what they decided. My kids are both grown now, but I don’t walk into a room and say, “Intellectually, you can’t do this for such-and-such a reason.” People have to be free, and this is part of it when we’re talking about high school-aged kids.

On the other hand, if I really thought my kids were being taught to hate themselves, or that they were guilty of something — oh hell, I’m getting into the school. Like I’ve said, we need to pay more attention to these parents. I think they’re being sold a bill of goods, but we shouldn’t just dismiss this with a sweep of the hand. “Toughen up?” You’re talking about kids who might be six or eight or 12 years old.

Hundreds of Floridians, civil rights activists and religious leaders from across the state marched Wednesday from Tallahassee’s Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to the Florida Capitol building complex in protest of efforts to “whitewash” Black history by rejecting an Advanced Placement course in high school on African American studies.

The large crowd also included students and older folks and many Black activists and advocates — including civil rights leader Al Sharpton — who rallied against the DeSantis administration over what students can learn in school regarding Black history and other topics.

At the historic church, Ben Frazier, with the advocacy group Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, said that the DeSantis administration is attacking the rights to tell the truth about slavery, racism and white supremacy.

“Folks, the policies and the practices of this racist DeSantis regime, are in fact a vile and poisonous form of indoctrination. Simple and sweet: it’s political propaganda. I call it ‘hogwash,’” Frazier told the crowd gathered inside the church. The pews were nearly filled.

“By his efforts to whitewash American history, this governor is trying to turn back the sands of time,” Frazier added. He led the crowd in a chant: “Allow teachers to teach the truth.”

The crowd later left the church to start the march to the Florida Capitol building. There were signs and chants along the road, which led up to the Florida Senate side of the complex outside.

Metaphorically addressing Gov. DeSantis, Bishop Rudolph W. McKissack Jr., a senior pastor of the Bethel Church in Jacksonville, said that:

“We are not saying you don’t want Black history, but what we’re saying is we won’t let you have it your way. We will not let you tell our story from your perspective.

“We will not let you redact our history so that your children are comfortable. The reality is your children, and other generations can be comfortable now, because our ancestors were uncomfortable,” McKissack continued.

The rally gathered largely in response to an ongoing battle between the DeSantis administration and the century-old nonprofit College Board, which created a new AP African American studies course for high schoolers who can earn college credit.

The Florida Department of Education rejected the then-pilot course, according to a letter sent to the College Board in mid-January, causing a nationwide outcry and concerns that the move diminishes the importance of Black history and Black culture.

But the scope of the march and rally Wednesday spanned far beyond the AP African American studies course. The comments from faith leaders and Florida lawmakers touched on policies impacting the LGBTQ+ community, women, and immigrants.

The Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the potential of Gov. Ron DeSantis running for president. Sharpton called DeSantis “baby Trump.”

“Black, Latino, women, LGBTQ — we beat Big Trump. We’ll beat Baby Trump,” he said.

“After Disney one day, after Blacks the next day — he’s like a baby,” Sharpton said. “Give him a pacifier and let some grown folks run the state of Florida.”

After his dig at DeSantis, Sharpton brought it back to teaching Black history to young Floridians.

“You ought to tell the whole story
 Our children need to know the whole story. Not to know how bad you were, but how strong they are. We come from a people who fought from the back of a bus to the front of the White House. Tell the whole story,” Sharpton said.

He warned: “If we can’t protect education in Florida, it will jump to Alabama, it will jump to Texas — this is a national crime.”

Sen. Shevrin Jones, a Democrat who represents part of Miami-Dade County, said Wednesday, also spoke to teaching history centered around minority communities.

“Black history is American history. Queer history is American History. Black immigrant history is American history,” Jones said.

He added: “What we are dealing with here in this moment — the structure of a system that continues to perpetuate racism across this country, not just in the state of Florida,” Jones said at the Capitol. “The fight is never just about AP history. The fight is against this strong uprising of racism from people who are seeing the shifting of America.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

As students enter classrooms in the days after a widely publicized , experts say educators have a responsibility to acknowledge their anger, grief and sadness — particularly as more than ever before experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

Nichols, who grew up in Sacramento enmeshed in and with a love for , was father to a 4-year-old son. On Jan. 7, he was pulled over in a traffic stop and severely beaten for three minutes by five police officers on since-released body camera footage. The officers were part of a since-disbanded special unit that policed his Memphis neighborhood. Nichols was unarmed and minutes from home. Three days later, he died in the hospital at age 29. The officers will appear for an arraignment on Feb. 17, charged with second-degree murder.

But Dimitry Anselme, executive program director with the global nonprofit , said it is now critical to explore Nichols’s life and humanity with young people.

“We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help [young people] think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice?” said Anselme, who oversees workshops and training with educators and staff internationally, guiding constructive and psychologically safe ways to discuss violence and injustice with young learners. 

Paramount in this immediate aftermath, according to Anselme, is to offer ways for students to reflect on their emotions like journaling, and emphasize the message: It’s OK not to watch. 

While graphic images, including photos of Emmett Till’s open casket and Nichols’s hospital bed shared by family, have forced Americans to contend with extreme anti-Black violence, exposure to such imagery can trigger psychological and physical reactions, such as disrupted eating, sleeping and bed-wetting in children. This is particularly for Black children who may identify with Tyre, experts . 

In conversation with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Anselme explains how Nichols’s life can be explored alongside critical moments in American history, why inviting young people to reflect is critical in this political moment and best practices gleaned from teaching violent history and genocide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: What have you been hearing from educators and students in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s death and the recent release of body camera footage? 

Anselme: Emotions. A lot of students and teachers are sad. They are frustrated. For many of them, this will not be the first time that they have to have a conversation in the classroom around an episode of police violence or police brutality, particularly targeted toward the loss of a life of a young Black man. So there is a sense of dĂ©jĂ  vu and people are really exhausted. Episodes like this contribute to the sense of sadness and powerlessness, like, ‘Oh my God, how many more lessons can I possibly do on gun violence, or the loss of life of a young black man, or another police brutality incident?’ It feels like it is nonstop. 

The other thing we’re hearing is, ‘I don’t want to keep my young people mired in grief, anger.’ It’s not that they’re looking for ‘give me something positive’, but it’s what can I give to young people that does not keep them in a sense of powerlessness, especially in the moment? The kind of national dialogue that’s going on in the country, the incessant fights around racial justice, give young people a sense of change does not happen. 

Teachers are looking for ways — I call it teaching for democracy. That is to say, democracies are not perfect. They require that we remain vigilant, that we don’t tire out, that we don’t lose hope, optimism and a sense of engagement. So a lot of our resources are around how do you bring students back to core democratic values? We always select a moment of fracture, usually brought on by violence, with examples of how to repair, rebuild, and what we call choosing to participate. So you don’t just stay in that moment of history that is sad, but you are looking at ways that ordinary people repair. That’s how we teach the civil rights movement, the Reconstruction period, the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide. Here’s the moment of fracture, here are the range of responses that human beings have taken on, look at all the ways by which accountability happens, attempts to have national conversation about memory and legacies, and how to rebuild.

I think a lot of teachers at Facing History know that the work is really around inspiring young people. To say, channel your grief, your sadness, into participation. It’s not to minimize the loss of Tyre. But, increasingly, our sense is we need to provide resources so young people can think about themselves, their rights and responsibilities when they live in a democracy and how they can sustain civic agency.

How might educators foster discussion in a way that it doesn’t feel, as you said, like another moment of hopelessness?

First, you move to history. So let’s use a moment that is not in the here and now, because it’s going to give us emotional distance. You don’t necessarily need to use a police brutality moment — I might say, let’s talk about the murder of Emmett Till. It’s an act of injustice, and it raises all the conversations that we want to have about the value of Black life, around the way that violence is being used to circumvent or to prevent coexistence, our ability to live. It keeps them focused on the larger themes: democracy, civic engagement, civic participation. 

One of the things that we get from looking at Emmett Till is the way that his mother responds to his death, the way that she will inspire a civil rights movement that was already taking place. That’s the lesson you want kids to take. We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help them think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice? 

On Wednesday, we witnessed Tyre being laid to rest in Memphis. How can educators today, tomorrow next week, acknowledge that grief?

We train a lot around the use of journals so that young people can capture, ‘what do I think before I speak?’ These are moments where I would call educators to look at our or a because I would be inviting kids to be writing, journaling, reflecting on the emotions they are feeling. What’s in their mind? Reflect on the multiple identities of Tyre Nichols that we’ve learned about him: a young Black man who was also a skater, a young father. I would be inviting young people to think about him and reflect on his humanity. Rather than again, focusing on the pain, honor him. Recognize him as a human, and let’s celebrate the loss of the human life that we’ve lost.

What I’m telling you is also the way we’ve learned to teach around genocide. We use survivor testimonies to give you a sense of the individual. Who was this person? Where do they live? What kind of relationships do they have? I keep you centered on the human person that is lost. So it’s not just a number, 6 million. No, it’s about the story of Greta. It’s the story of Rena. It’s a story of this one person living in just one moment in time. I would honor Tyre in that way. Write about his identities, his multiple ones. Do you have friends who are skaters? 

Could we spend a moment reflecting on the technology aspect of this? The images of his killing can be somewhat unescapable. You might be at a restaurant with your family as CNN plays the footage on loop. How has your guidance adapted to that reality?

It’s really, really difficult. I went on a news blackout last Friday. I’m raising two young Black men and I said to all my colleagues and friends: news blackout. I definitely don’t want to see the video. I don’t want to overwhelm ourselves with images just because of the media environment we all live in. At Facing History, in all of our work for the last 47 years, when we teach about genocide, we always invite teachers not to overfocus on the images of death camps, of dead bodies. We don’t encourage that kind of teaching. Usually there’s a desire like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna show them these awful images and bang it on the head so they can understand what happened.’ We say it’s not going to be effective. And the reason why we don’t think that’s effective is because that really traumatizes kids and it leaves them in a space in the space of pain.

In this current social media environment, we would encourage teachers to encourage students not to be watching those videos, to avoid them or empower yourself. You can write a statement on your Instagram or your Facebook: tell your friends and colleagues that you’ve chosen not to watch the video, that you would love it if they could avoid sharing it with you or putting it up themselves. Give them tools where they themselves can be empowered to sort of communicate that. It’s OK not to watch the video to relive the images. It’s OK to change the channel, shut the TV off. It’s not like you’re minimizing or you’re running away from what happened. No, you’re fully aware of what happened. What you’re doing is self-care. Protect yourself. 

We cannot use the classroom and materials to cheapen, to use violence and death to get students’ engagement or attention. As an educator, I would say you should feel free never to utilize those videos and images. A lot of entertainment is centered on abuse and violence of Black bodies. We have it in sports, music, movies, law, literature or history. I like to think we have a responsibility as educators not to participate in this. 

Students and educators, particularly Black families, have felt this kind of vicarious trauma many times in recent history. Why does the conversation have to be continued, not a one-off lesson, particularly as we are amid a youth mental health crisis?

We are social beings, but we also have emotional lives that need to be recognized, realized and affirmed. I don’t think one does an educational service if you’re working with people of color, in particular Black students, to not acknowledge the emotional toll, the trauma that the content that we look at in classrooms will bring. It has to be something that’s perpetual, but you don’t want to do this in a way that is re-traumatizing or deepening the trauma. 

You want to end lessons by bringing attention to issues of identity, to collective identity, group membership, legacies and then the civic participation piece. You are trying to balance giving space for the emotion to be recognized, but also engage a larger conversation about human behavior. As young Black men, they are human beings, they have empathy for the struggle and emotion and injustice of other groups. So that moment when they are engaging with their own trauma and frustration, it is also a moment to help them see: you have experienced this, other groups have experienced this. So what kind of human societies do we want to create? What does coexistence mean? When you do that, you provide them with the vocabulary and mitigate the pain — I’m not alone, there’s something larger about the way human societies operate. There are larger dynamics. 

We have a lot of this conversation on staff at Facing History. I do not think it is fair for us as educators to teach young Black kids, you were victimized in 1619 and you are victimized today in 2023. If that is the only way we teach American history to Black kids, we’re doing them a disservice. Because if you teach it that way, you don’t teach them Fannie Lou Hamer. You don’t teach them Frederick Douglass. You don’t teach Harriet Tubman. 

Because in fact, throughout the history of violent oppression and marginalization, many Black folks chose to respond to the pain they were having by engaging. Harriet Tubman comes up with a way to help free other enslaved people; Frederick Douglass plays a key role in the key constitutional amendment that everyone in America today enjoys. That’s the amendment that gives you immigration laws that we have today that a variety of other people are using and enjoying. So I want African American kids to know the America that we have today comes directly out of the Black experience, pain and trauma. We’ve created this society of democracy and freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other groups. That’s where you help balance the pain and fracture. I don’t think it’s fair to just keep Black students in this idea of perpetual victimhood because in fact, the history tells something else. We do not do a good job in history education of helping kids see that.

We could think for a moment about the challenge and changes to the AP African American Studies curriculum, book bans removing Toni Morrison and other historic Black authors’ work. How does that context impact your recommendations and how you speak with educators? 

The reality is teachers are already finding ways to resist this on a daily basis. What I would say to educators is to continue to focus on the work that they’re doing, identifying resources and moments that are important for students. We have some shared democratic values, I think if we hold on to these, we will survive this particular political movement. There have been efforts at other moments where, for example, you couldn’t teach about LGBT experiences in the classroom. With the work of activism, we were able to create the space. We created the Black Studies movement, an ethnic studies movement, an Asian Studies movement in the country.

It’s very scary what’s happening. I used to be a teacher and a principal. I feel so much for folks who are in the classroom today, or for school principals who are just overwhelmed. I’m hearing things in Florida about doing a book review at every school. You can imagine the amount of human time and labor it’s going to take to do this. I was born in Haiti and I grew up in the Congo. My formative years were in two societies shaped by dictatorship. This is not democratic behavior. I’m very comfortable saying that; I have lived in non-democratic societies. 

This comes back to the civic agency piece. If we lose hope if we think somehow, oh, well, that’s it, this political movement doing all this book banning has won. No, they have not won and are in violation of the American spirit and democratic values. So what does that mean? We redouble our effort and our commitment to democratic values to believe that we have a freedom of conscience, that young people have freedom of conscience, they should have access to a wide range of ideas, that we are all as educators going to defend a marketplace of ideas. The idea of a marketplace of ideas is as American as apple pie. Use that as an inspiration to students. None of these bills prevent me from teaching about the Declaration of Independence; use those moments to highlight key American values. How do we preserve them today?

In the face of centuries of anti-Black violence in America, it has become easy to dismiss the Holocaust as Europeans killing other Europeans, as “white-on-white” violence. This notion completely misses the Black history of the Holocaust, the details of which are lost because educators rarely teach it. 

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews, and the centrality of Jewish identity to the perpetration of the Holocaust must not be forgotten. But from a diverse array of communities — including persons with disabilities, LGBTQ people and members of other religious minorities — were also targeted by Nazi ideology. This included Black Germans.

While anti-semitic remarks from celebrities draw headlines and outrage, they are ultimately a symptom of a deeper problem: the failure of educators to teach about the Holocaust in ways that relate it to other marginalized communities’ experiences.

I teach courses on political violence at Virginia Commonwealth University, a minority-serving institution in Richmond — the former capital of the Confederacy. The students in my classroom have the same blind spot about Holocaust history as those celebrities. Yet, I’ve connected with my students in profound ways by studying the Holocaust and allowing them to forge their own personal connections to the victims and survivors of Hitler’s attempt to wipe out Jews and other minorities.

Sadly, the anti-semitism that motivated Nazi ideology has been in American culture and political discourse. Still, when tasked with rooting it out, students are readily able to identify anti-semitism. One student highlighted an circulated by a politician running for county office. One drew a connection between South Park’s and . Another supplied far too many quotes from . Young people from diverse backgrounds are able to recognize anti-semitism when they see it, but they struggle to understand where it comes from and why it affects them. 

That’s why I teach the Holocaust through an intersectional lens that reveals the relevance of religious, racial, gender and sexual identities. While the deep roots of Nazi ideology are found in , the forerunners of Nazi policy can be found in the colonization of Africa. Germany’s colonial genocides that began in 1904 in contemporary Namibia were only in 2021. The annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples by German forces, through tactics such as forced starvation, deportation to concentration camps and medical experimentation, provided a blueprint for the Holocaust. But that isn’t the only connection. 

Nazi racial policy was built around the concept of eugenics, which held that mental illness, poverty and criminality were biological traits passed down from one generation to another. Popular in the United States as well as Western Europe, eugenicists sought to control who could have children as a way of addressing social problems. Virginia enacted eugenic laws in 1924, the same year it banned interracial marriage, and allowed state institutions to sterilize individuals to prevent the conception of so-called genetically inferior children. Virginia’s law became a model for the country after it was upheld by the in in 1927. Twenty-two percent of the sterilized in Virginia alone were African Americans, and two-thirds were women. 

Similarly, Nazi eugenics focused on the elimination of Afro-Germans — Germans of African descent. Hitler wrote about Afro-Germans in Mein Kampf, arguing that they defiled Aryans’ racial purity. Black and mixed-race people in Nazi Germany were subject to similar to that inflicted on Jews. Ye may like Hitler, but if he and his family had lived in Nazi Germany, they would have been socially and economically marginalized and potentially . The history of Nazi-era discrimination against Afro-Germans continues to affect Black people living in Germany today, with many reporting that .

Teaching Black history alongside Jewish and other histories of the Holocaust helps connect it with students’ own experiences with discrimination, violence and hate. It can also help educators better understand their students. As one of my students wrote while reflecting on an image of Germans mocking their Jewish neighbors as they were to a Nazi concentration camp, “I know the fear of deportation, of being taken away from your home and all you know, and just imagining people I’ve known all my life enjoying me losing everything, I can’t even explain how horrible that feels.” The experiences of the Holocaust still have meaning for marginalized students today.  

By forging connections between Black history and Jewish history, between the exploitation and murder of colonized peoples and the Holocaust, between marginalized communities, educators can help students of all backgrounds make important emotional and intellectual connections between the Holocaust and the bigotry and discrimination experienced by marginalized communities. Teaching the Black history of the Holocaust demonstrates to students how events that seemingly affect only one community ultimately affect us all.

Donning child-sized toques — the tall, white, pleated hats worn by chefs — Winter, 9, DeVonte, 8, and Stormy, 7, took charge of the kitchen, perfecting their knife skills by slicing bell peppers and stirring the roux until it reached a golden brown.

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By the end of the course, they’d made traditional Southern greens, black-eyed peas, smothered chicken and other dishes that trace back to African culture. “They’re already talking about making the cornbread for Thanksgiving,” said Foster.

The culinary-themed Black history lesson, called Soul Food Summer Camp, was a local twist on one of the popular courses available from Reconstruction — an online enrichment platform celebrating Black Americans’ contributions and heritage.

In a year when classroom discussions about race and discrimination have bitterly divided school boards and statehouses, topics such as the essential role of corn in the diet of Black slaves may seem conspicuously noncontroversial. But fostering Black children’s “positive identity development” in the way Hebrew and Chinese schools do for children in other communities is exactly what Kaya Henderson had in mind when she launched Reconstruction a year ago. As former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, she wants to counter a narrative that Black families don’t value education.

Roughly 15,000 students are expected to sign up this fall for Reconstruction, a for-profit company that delivers live enrichment classes on Black history and culture over Zoom to students across the country. Black parents browsing its offerings find courses “unapologetically” designed for them and their children. “Shorties” (4- to 11-year-olds), “Youngins” (12- to 14-year-olds) and “Gen Z” youth cover Black entrepreneurship and cultural knowledge. Students can design apps for nonprofits working to support the Black community or study speeches and sermons of famous Black orators. Parents began asking for their own courses, so there’s a Read and Rap Book Club for “grown folks.”

Henderson’s decision to market directly to families and nonprofit organizations has allowed Reconstruction to bypass school district politics.

“I didn’t want to be at the whim of state legislators,” said Henderson, who credits the program’s more celebratory approach to Black history for keeping it under the radar. “We’re not out here talking about white people being awful. We’re giving young people positive examples, and that keeps us a little bit out of the fray.”

But that doesn’t mean the curriculum ignores America’s painful racial history. For example, several courses include lessons on the once-thriving commercial district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, and the 1921 massacre in which a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses there.

‘A place of belonging’

The mission to give students a more comprehensive story begins with the program’s name: Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when Confederate states rejoined the Union and former slaves got their first taste of freedom. It’s “a lesser known part of American history when African Americans were thriving politically, economically, educationally,” Henderson said. “We wanted to challenge folks who don’t know that part of our history to explore it. And we wanted to remind our students that they come from a rich tradition of Black excellence in America that they have a responsibility to uphold.”

A former Teach for America executive director in D.C., Henderson served under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who was for closing low-performing schools and instituting a tough teacher evaluation system. With mayoral control of schools, Henderson continued those reforms during her some critics argued her strategies didn’t do enough to close racial achievement gaps. after she resigned, the city’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability her for granting the requests of colleagues to place their children in preferred schools rather than submitting them to the district’s competitive lottery system.

When it came to designing Reconstruction, her experience helming the 51,000 student district was instructional. It helped fuel a desire to sidestep a K-12 bureaucracy that hasn’t always done right by African-Americans.

Black students, she said, often have negative experiences in school, and Henderson wanted Reconstruction to be “a place of belonging, joy and love.” She also didn’t want to conform to 50 different sets of state standards — particularly in light of on lessons or materials that could make students feel uncomfortable or guilty because of their race or gender. Reconstruction launched about five months before states began considering legislation to outlaw so-called critical race theory — a loose umbrella of topics from Black history to culturally responsive teaching.

Reconstruction courses have no more than 10 students, and there aren’t any end-of-course tests. That doesn’t mean the lessons go easy on academics, Henderson said. The reading and math courses can add up to a full year’s curriculum.

“To me, the rigor is paramount, but I’m not trying to replace school,” said Henderson.

Reconstruction’s business model also gives Henderson control over who she hires as “reconstructors”— the team of young educators who teach the courses.

“There have been enough hot mic episodes over the years to show that everyone who’s teaching children doesn’t always believe in Black children,” Henderson said.

In March, for instance, a resigned after making comments on a Zoom call about Black parents teaching their children to make excuses for their behavior. A mother recorded the teacher, who was apparently unaware the call was ongoing.

Henderson and co-founder Roland Fryer, a Harvard economics professor, initially discussed whether Reconstruction should be a school curriculum or offered outside the traditional system. Fryer, Henderson said, leaned toward integrating the concept into schools.

“I don’t want [children] to be taught that there’s slavery, Jim Crow and then you. I want for the history to be full and for them to be empowered,” Fryer said during a recent two-part interview on the Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Those episodes aired the same week that Fryer at Harvard after completing a two-year probation and training on “appropriate boundaries.” In 2019, the university placed him on administrative leave after an investigation showed he had violated sexual harassment policies and engaged in “unwelcome” conduct, such as talking about sex and telling sexual jokes in the Education Innovation Lab he ran. He denied accusations of harassment and retaliation, but later apologized in into whether Fryer retaliated against an accuser closed when a female employee withdrew her complaint.

The university shut down the lab, where Fryer — who, at 30, became the youngest Black professor to earn tenure at Harvard — led notable research on the effectiveness of charter schools and racial disparities in education and policing.

As he faced disciplinary action at Harvard, Fryer co-founded Equal Opportunity Ventures in 2019 to support Reconstruction and other startups that focus on closing racial disparities and expanding economic opportunity. He serves as chair of Reconstruction’s board of directors, but Henderson said he is not involved in daily operations. She added that she’s never received any questions or concerns from parents or organizations about his involvement.

In an email to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Fryer declined to comment on the probation or his work developing Reconstruction during that time. But he said, “I am delighted to be back teaching at Harvard, and currently have a class of nearly 200 students eager to learn about how companies like Reconstruction can both change the world around us and be a sustainable business.”

‘Culturally relevant perspectives’

That business model is primarily aimed at parents, who pay $100 for each 10-session course. But nonprofits, such as the Grable Foundation in Pittsburgh, are making the program available to students for free.

The traditional education system has also taken notice.

In the Baltimore City Public Schools last year, 140 students from 17 schools took an afterschool program featuring Reconstruction’s course on the movement of Africans into the Americas and the Caribbean during the slave trade.

David Anderson, a junior in an advanced STEM program at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, said he learned about Manhattan’s Seneca Village, a pre-Civil War African American settlement that got pushed out to develop Central Park. The life of abolitionist Sojourner Truth also stuck with him.

“She was more under the radar than Harriet Tubman, but her job was just as important,” Anderson said.

David’s mother, Annette Campbell Anderson, an educator and professor at Johns Hopkins University, was initially skeptical about the program, having been underwhelmed by the district’s previous afterschool offerings. But she was impressed by her son’s commitment to the course.

“I found myself needing to change our family dinner schedule on Tuesdays when he had class because he refused to leave the sessions early,” she said. “And if I served dinner early, he raced upstairs to be on time — for a Zoom session.”

Reconstruction has won praise from those on opposite sides of the debate over critical race theory.

Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, said it’s important for Black children to have a space designed for them, even if it’s virtual.

“Out-of-school-time has always been one of the most-effective and least invested-in levers for achievement for Black children,” said El-Mekki, whose daughters, Zaynab and Zakiyyah, participated in Reconstruction’s pilot and then took the cooking class.

The program provides Black children with a “holistic, centering and respectful curriculum,” he said, adding that students who participate in the program could become “powerful advocates” for more culturally responsive teaching in their own schools.

Like other Black educators, El-Mekki has said the debates over critical race theory misrepresent what schools actually teach students but also ignore the persistent educational inequalities affecting Black and Hispanic students.

At a time when some states, such as California, Connecticut and , are expanding ethnic studies in the curriculum, he thinks Reconstruction is one way to re-engage Black students and others “that have been perpetually let down by the educational ecosystem.”

‘All kids of all races’

At the National Charter School Conference in June, El-Mekki and Rowe, from the American Enterprise Institute, strongly disagreed about the furor over critical race theory, but joined in their praise for Henderson’s program.

In a “shout-out” for Reconstruction, Rowe said: “I think it’s good that we’re having more discussions about what should be the complete [story] — warts and all, oppression and resilience — that we’re teaching all kids of all races about what has transpired with African Americans in the United States.”

The process isn’t always easy. White parents are among Reconstruction’s customers, Henderson said, but some have requested that their child not be the only non-Black student in a class. Others have even asked for all-white classes, a request that would have raised the spectre of segregation in the public school world she left behind.

Those requests don’t bother her.

Though there hasn’t yet been enough demand for an all-white class, Henderson said she’d “absolutely consider it.” Some parents tell her their kids don’t have a lot of experience interacting with Black children and worry they might say the wrong thing. The goal, she said, is to get the message out to as wide an audience as possible.

“This stuff is hard and we’re all going to make mistakes,” she said. “We are designed for and by African Americans, but we need everyone to learn this history.”

Lead Image: Winter Herbert (L-R), Stormy Foster and DeVonte Foster prepare a meal as part of Soul Food Summer Camp, a week-long virtual cooking course for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, students participating in Reconstruction. (Catapult Greater Pittsburgh)