Should Florida’s middle school students be taught that some enslaved Black people personally benefited from slavery because they learned valuable skills?
The Florida Board of Education signed off on a new K-12 curriculum for social studies in the state last week and kicked off a firestorm. A single controversial line in a clarification about “personal benefits” has drawn the most fire, but educators, historians and Black community advocates have spoken out against several items in the new African American History section, including what some are calling victim-blaming in the teaching of historical anti-Black atrocities.
Here’s what you need to know.
Why did the Florida Board of Education write a new African American History curriculum?
Florida has been required to teach the history, culture, experiences, and contributions of African Americans in the state’s K-12 curriculum since 1994 when the Florida Legislature created the African History Task Force to write it.
But when Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running to be the Republican nominee for president, signed the “Stop WOKE Act” (CS/HB 7) last year, it prohibited any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility, guilt, anguish, or “other forms of psychological distress” for actions in the past committed by members of their own race, and blocked instruction that suggested anyone was “either privileged or oppressed” based on race or skin color.
It also requires discussions about race to be taught in an “objective manner” and bans any discussion “used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” And that meant the curriculum needed to be rewritten to fall in line with the new state-approved requirements.
The new 216-page social studies curriculum has been praised by the state Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz. “Florida is focused on teaching true and accurate African American history,” he tweeted.
“Everything is there,” said MaryLynn Magar, who was appointed to the board by Gov. Ron DeSantis this spring. “The darkest parts of our history are addressed, and I’m very proud of the task force. I can confidently say that the DOE and the task force believe that African American history is American history, and that’s represented in those standards.”
A group of 11 organizations, including the NAACP and the Florida Education Association (FEA), a statewide teachers union, criticized the state for omitting or rewriting “key historical facts about the Black experience.”
“The Florida State Board of Education today adopted new African American history standards. In doing so, they confirmed many of the worst fears educators had when the Stop Woke Act was signed into law last year,” the FEA said in a press release after the board’s vote. “These new standards are a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.
On the same day as the vote, one of the oldest and largest Black fraternal orders denounced the policies coming from the state and its governor, calling them “insensitive, discriminatory, and racist.”
Does Florida teach that slaves benefitted from being enslaved?
In the African American History section for grades 6-8, along with instruction on slave trading, revolts, African patriots, congressional actions, the cotton industry, the abolitionist movements, the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, teachers are now required to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“It’s inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish in our educational curriculum,” Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando said at the Board of Education meeting.
On Thursday, Alex Lanfranconi, spokesperson for Diaz, tweeted out a response from members of the Board of Education.
“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted,” wrote officials William Allen and Frances Presley Rice. “This is factual and well documented.” The release included a list of 16 such enslaved people who became blacksmiths, fishers, shoemakers, tailors, teachers and shipping industry workers.
However, historians pointed out that nearly half of those examples were never actually enslaved and many of the rest gained the skills for their later professions after gaining their freedom. The Tampa Bay Times pointed out multiple examples, including Booker T. Washington (listed as a teacher) who was actually illiterate until he taught himself to read after he was freed at age 9.
“They just threw out a bunch of names to make it seem like something good came of (slavery),” FEA president Andrew Spar told the Times. “The reality of it is, the facts don’t back up what they are saying.”
Backlash to this addition was fierce. The NAACP issued a release pointing out the skills lesson and calling the new standards a “sanitized and dishonest telling of the history of slavery in America.”
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Jacksonville to speak against the new curriculum and other recent Florida education laws. “They want to replace history with lies. Middle school students in Florida [are] to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” she said.
DeSantis responded by accusing Harris and other Democrats of lying to cover for “their agenda of indoctrinating students and pushing sexual topics onto children.” When asked about skills for enslaved people during a press conference Saturday, DeSantis first said he had nothing to do with writing the curriculum but that he believed it was “rooted in whatever was factual.
“They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into, into doing things later in life,” he said.
Does Florida teach that acts of violence by Black people contributed to the Ocoee Massacre?
In the high school section on the emergence, growth, destruction and rebuilding of Black communities during and after Reconstruction, instruction must include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.”
With a generous reading, it could be said that “acts of violence against and by African Americans” described may refer here to whichever one is appropriate for each historical event listed, and was not intended to suggest that Black violence was a contributor to all of them. But the conflation of violence by African Americans with the murderous racist attacks on Black communities and the suggestion that the victims of, for example, the 1920 Ocoee Massacre brought it on themselves has many opponents outraged.
“When you look at the history currently, it suggests that the massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans,” said Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere, which includes Ocoee. “That’s blaming the victim. When in fact, it was other individuals who came into the Black community and killed individuals, burned homes and schools and lodges.”
What is the Ocoee Massacre?
The Ocoee Massacre is considered the largest incidence of voting-day violence in United States history, according to the Orange County Regional History Center. In 1920, Mose Norman, a Black man, tried to vote but was turned away from the polls. Later that night, a white mob tried to find Norman and his friend’s house. His friend, July Perry, was lynched, and other Black community members were murdered and their houses burned. Most of the Black community subsequently fled Ocoee and never came back.
What other problems are critics finding in Florida’s new African American History curriculum?
Accusations against the new curriculum have included:
- No Black history is taught past Reconstruction for elementary and middle-school students. After that point, the African American curriculum is limited to “identifying various famous African Americans,” said Rep. Dianne Hart, D-Tampa.
- There is considerable mention of the study of slavery practices elsewhere including “how trading in slaves developed in African lands” and “the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries” along with studies of different forms of indentured servitude which could contextualize American slavery as just what everyone did, without a race-related element.
- Instruction includes the “various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” This may be misleading. While it is true that enslaved people were put to work in various fields, “agricultural work” — 10-15 hour days in the fields raising cotton, rice, corn, sugarcane and tobacco — was by far the most common.
- Names of famous abolitionists are included, names of prominent leaders fighting to keep slavery and, later, segregation alive are not.
- There is no mention of Florida seceding from the Union during the Civil War.
- The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education is mentioned but the Florida Legislature passing a resolution against it is not.
- The examples given for political figures who shaped the modern Civil Rights effort are mostly Republican, such as President Eisenhower, Arthur A. Fletcher, Senator Everett Dirksen, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, as historian Kevin Kruse pointed out.
- Aside from identification of notable Black pioneers such as President Barack Obama, there is no mention of recent history such as the shootings leading up to the Black Lives Matter movement.
- First-person language has been omitted and enslaved people are referred to as “slaves” throughout.
In general, Genesis Robinson, political director for the advocacy group Equal Ground, said the curriculum only identifies and recognizes racism and prejudice and does not go into depth about how or who promoted the violence and disenfranchisement of Black people in the United States.
While this is the outline for a curriculum and teachers may add supplemental material, many may be unwilling to stray into non-state-approved territory that could make white students uncomfortable and violate the Stay WOKE Act.
What is DeSantis’ educational agenda?
“We believe an important component of freedom in the state of Florida is the freedom from having oppressive ideologies imposed upon you without your consent,” DeSantis said when he signed the “Stop WOKE Act.” “Whether it be in the classroom or in the workplace. And we decided to do something about it.”
In 2021, the Florida Board of Education added a ban on “critical race theory,” an academic and legal study of intersectionalism and systemic racism that conservative politicians and commentators have used in recent years to describe any discussion at all of institutional racism, racial oppression or racial privilege in society. It also included a specific ban on any materials from “The 1619 Project,” a series of essays, poems and multimedia by Nikole Hannah-Jones, other New York Times writers, and historians first published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, examined the impact of slavery on American life, economics and culture through the current day.
The “Stop WOKE Act,” which DeSantis claimed was built on the 1619 Project ban, forbade any such teaching in schools or instruction by businesses to their employees. The ban on discussing race-related issues in workplace training was blocked by a district judge.
Initially, the act also extended to colleges and universities but a judge later blocked that portion as well, calling it “positively dystopian” its limits on discussion of race, gender and other topics in university classrooms.
In May 2022, the DeSantis administration rejected dozens of textbooks for their inclusion of “contested topics” such as the Black Lives Matter movement and why some people “take a knee” during the national anthem.
Florida passed a law requiring all books available to children to be approved by a “district employee holding a valid educational media specialist certificate.” Alarm spread quickly as books were removed entirely from campuses so they could be reviewed. Conservative activist group Moms For Liberty spearheaded the effort to remove books from school libraries that contained topics or even mentions of sexuality, gender, and race-related issues.
In January of this year, DeSantis made national news for banning a pilot course in Advanced Placement African American Studies, saying it violated state law with its references to intersectionality, “critical race theory,” reparations, abolishing prisons, and “queer theory,” which he said pushed an agenda. The College Board released a revised version, which they say was in the works for a year and was not in response to political pressure but did remove some of DeSantis’ problem areas. In late April, seemingly in response to the harsh criticism from the Black community, the College Board announced it would revisit the curriculum. Florida still has not approved the AP curriculum.
