Florida must repeal racist school curricula and focus on researched history

Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die:

Opinion echo by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times.

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was, along with his state’s Board of Education, embroiled in a controversy over a new curriculum for student instruction in African American history.

Most of the coverage, and much of the outrage, focused on a quote from the state’s guidelines for the history of slavery, in which students are expected to learn that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

DeSantis defended the curriculum language, telling reporters that teachers are “probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” In a statement, two members of Florida’s African American history standards work group defended the language in question, citing 16 individuals who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage.

Unfortunately for the Florida Department of Education, several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their “personal benefit” in slavery.

The good-faith explanation for this language, if you’re inclined to be generous, is that the authors wanted to emphasize the agency and skill of the enslaved, whose labor fueled large parts of the American economy in the decades before Emancipation. 

It’s an important point that you can also find in the College Board’s Advanced Placement class in African American studies. “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians and healers in the North and South,” the A.P. guidelines state. “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”

Similar points, yes, but the language isn’t quite the same. In addition to using the term “enslaved” rather than “slave” — a linguistic shift that continues to be a subject of real debate — the language for the A.P. curriculum emphasizes that Black Americans could use these skills only after Emancipation.

This is key. Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy. To say that any more than a fortunate few could “parlay” their skills into anything that might improve their lives is to spin a fiction. Just as important is the fact that a large majority of the Africans enslaved in North America, whether under the British Crown for the better part of two centuries or under the American Constitution for eight decades after the revolution, died in bondage. For them, there was no point after slavery where they could use their skills.

You might say that these are minor, semantic differences. But in history the same ideas can be used to very different effect. And it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.

“Until the mid-1960s,” the historian Donald Yacovone writes in “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” “American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States.”

As Yacovone notes, an American student in 1903, reading a textbook written for pupils enrolled in secondary school, might learn of antebellum slavery, for example, that the “systematic training bestowed upon him during his period of servitude and his contact with higher intelligence have given to the Negro an impulse to civilization that neither his inherent inclinations nor his native environment would of themselves bestowed.”

A different student, flipping through his grammar school textbook in 1923, might read in a section on slavery that the typical plantation was a “self-supporting community” where “the great majority of Negroes remained quietly and faithfully at work” as laborers and artisans.

A student in 1943, reading a similar textbook, might learn that “the slaves loved the people of the plantation and stood by them even after slavery was ended.” 

And a student in 1963, would have read in his history book that slavery “made it possible for Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life.” 

Other authors emphasized, in Yacovone’s words, that “slaves learned valuable trades such as sewing, weaving, carpentry and nursing.”

This wasn’t just bad history and false information. It also served an ideological purpose. “As the history of textbooks reveal,” Yacovone writes, “Americans came to see a path to national reconciliation through their shared devotion to white supremacy.”

Or, as the historian David Blight observes in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”: “A segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory. The many myths and legends fashioned out of the reconciliationist vision provided the superstructure of Civil War memory, but its base was white supremacy in both its moderate and virulent forms.” The point of teaching fictions about slavery was both to inscribe racist ideologies into the nation’s identity and to justify the renewed subjugation of an entire class of Americans.

It is worth mentioning a few other elements of the new Florida history curriculum. Florida wants students to learn how “trading in slaves developed in African lands” and about the “practice of the Barbary pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries.” And in its guidelines on Black history after the Civil War, the state wants students to study “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Read together, these guidelines seem like an exercise in equivocation and blame shifting — an attempt to downplay the enormity of American slavery and its defining feature, hereditary racial bondage. This is bad enough. But then consider, as well, the political context of Florida under DeSantis.

Florida, says the Republican presidential hopeful, is where “woke goes to die.” It’s where state officials refused to offer students a class in African American studies on the grounds that it “significantly lacks educational value.” And it’s where DeSantis, as governor, has vetoed spending on Black history celebrations, actively worked to reduce the representation of Black voters in the state and promised, if elected president, to change back the name of an Army base in North Carolina from Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, as in the Confederate general Braxton Bragg.

It is possible (although, given their response to criticism, unlikely) that the Florida curriculum authors didn’t mean anything by their characterization of American slavery. But when the board that approved the language was handpicked by DeSantis — as part of his crusade against so-called wokeness — it’s hard not to see this new instruction on the history of slavery as yet another part of the Florida governor’s larger ideological project.

This is why the history of textbooks past is particularly relevant. The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.

Teaching American slavery with world class museums adds Charleston SC to this list

Edward Ball is the author of six nonfiction books, including “Slaves in the Family” and, most recently, “Life of a Klansman.”

Echo opinion essay published in The Washington Post by Edward Ball.

Back in 1999, Joseph P. Riley Jr*., the mayor of Charleston, S.C., had a disruptive idea. Charleston, a city over three centuries old that attracts millions of tourists every year searching for traces of the Old South, should have a museum about slavery.

After all, the city was the port where nearly half of the captive Africans dragged to this continent were first sold. Charleston was also where, in 1861, militant White people afraid that newly elected President Abraham Lincoln would end their right to enslave people launched the Civil War. For roughly 200 years, slavery was paramount to Charleston’s economy, politics and mental life — and yet its legacy had been trivialized or ignored.

Building a major Black history museum in the Deep South at first appeared to be a nearly impossible undertaking. Twenty-four years ago, few White people and not many Black people wanted to touch the slavery story, which evoked feelings ranging from shame to pain and rage. For two decades, Riley politely countered White hostility, recruited wary Black leaders to the cause and elicited money from foundations, state and local governments, citizens and a few corporations. In 2019, having retired after 40 years in office, he turned a shovelful of dirt that broke ground at a waterfront site. And last month, almost a quarter-century after his first subversive thought, Riley inaugurated the $125 million International African American Museum.

A modernist rectangle in golden brick, the museum seems to hover on pillars atop the former site of Gadsden’s Wharf, where a great many slave ships ended their passage. Beneath the museum is the muddy bank where tens of thousands of Africans set foot in the land of liberty, half-dead, terrified and starving. It is a kind of ground zero for Black America.

And it starts by blessing the dead. At the waterfront end of the building, in the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, created by landscape designer Walter Hood, hundreds of silhouetted human figures are etched into a ground made of oyster shells mixed with cement — a local material called “tabby” — representing the roughly 1 in 6 captives who died or were killed during the forced transports of the African slavery trade. Tidal water floods and ebbs over this field of bodies, a natural elegy to the nameless victims of America’s founding cruelty.

Within the museum, galleries tell the story of the African diaspora. The curators treat Charleston as the funnel for Black culture that the city, in fact, was showing how different peoples from West Africa were forced onto plantations, the steamy prison camps of the Southern colonies, how distinct cultures were amalgamated into a general Blackness and how Black life was carried north and west into every corner of the United States. 

About one-quarter of the gallery space is focused on the slavery trade, while another quarter tells stories about plantation life. Then it is upward and outward into all things Black and American — church life, Black food invention, Black music, Blackness in design. The diaspora becomes granular with stories of Buffalo Soldiers, rural midwifery, Pullman porters, the Mardi Gras Indians, the Black women’s club movement and lesser-known campaigners for civil rights. For reasons that are easy to infer, the museum possesses few artifacts. It uses photography, sculptural models, video interviews, CGI, audio recordings and archival footage to tell stories that include scores of subplots across a dozen generations. 

And there is a Center for Family History, aimed at helping visitors reconnect with their ancestors and construct a personal family narrative.

Historical literature today differs from that which prevailed when Riley first dreamed up a museum. The hero worship around the Founding Fathers, a cult that once drove national memory, is breaking like a fever. Stories that once packed every history bookshelf — flattering generals and politicians, businessmen and enslavers — are in rewrite, with old elites demoted and people they stood above and against lifted up in turn.

American history is also being rebuilt in bricks and mortar. Hundreds of monuments to clay-footed heroes are coming down, while new museums are going up. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (the “Blacksonian”), opened in 2016. Montgomery, Ala., has been home to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice since 2018, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration since 2021. Now, Charleston has the International African American Museum — which uses an acronym, IAAM, that seems to say, “I am.”

The opening of IAAM is corrective and inevitable, part of the generations-long rewrite of U.S. history. And it is necessary: Recently, the fight over the past has taken the strange form of gag orders crafted by politicians. 

Since 2021, dozens of states have introduced or passed laws restricting the teaching of the history of race and slavery. Nearly 80 similar measures are pending. The festival of censorship would be psychotic if it were not strategic, a scheme to arouse White fragility into a voting bloc ahead of the 2024, elections.

IAAM represents a breakthrough at the front of the history wars, as well as the seizure of new terrain. Facts are on the ground, and the infrastructure is going up. In 2021, the National Park Service began the acquisition of parcels of land in Natchez, Miss., at a place known as Forks of the Road. This was the site, during the 1800s, of one of the largest markets for enslaved people in the South. The Park Service plans interpretation and perhaps a memorial on this sacred ground. The good guys are kind of winning. But the fights go on.

On June 24, as I walked toward the dedication ceremony for IAAM, I passed through a security perimeter guarded by cops, metal scanners and men wearing insignia that read, “Explosive Devices Team.”

Once inside, however, I listened to the water as it washed over the tabby field of enslaved bodies. It was the sound of a paradigm shifting, and it brought to mind a line of James Baldwin’s: “The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

*Joseph Patrick Riley Jr. (born January 19, 1943) is an American politician who was the Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina. He was one of the longest serving mayors in the United States that is still living, having served 10 terms starting on December 15, 1975, and ending on January 11, 2016