Many claim there is an urgency to teach Black history due to “a movement” spreading to “suppress the teaching of Black history.”
Book banning and Black History
NAACP warned of a growing list of book bans and people who “deliberately censor what literary works kids can and cannot read — and in many cases, having not read the books themselves before voting to ban them.” NAACP continued, “What is more violent, as evidenced by the books they are banning, they choose to censor the teaching of the factually accurate history of Black people.”
Lawmakers, educators, and pastors came together
USA Today reported that a 91-year-old pastor contacted a South Carolina expert to help him set up Black history lessons in his church. Black members of Congress hosted a Black history panel, and it is just the beginning.
Suppressing Black History
Marvin Dulaney, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said, “There’s a movement across the country to suppress the teaching of Black history. We have to meet that challenge head-on.”
Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma changed the game
Specific rules and even laws made many realize the urgency to protect Black history. Florida’s new standards on Black history were met with disapproval and outrage. DeSantis defended the curriculum as “factual,” telling a CNN reporter, “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.”
History under assault
Bobby Donaldson, an associate history professor at the University of South Carolina, shared, “There’s urgency because these histories are under assault,” adding, “The battles in Florida and elsewhere remind us that it’s urgent that we do this work now.”
Readings in the park
Dulaney and other historians read passages from banned books in a Jacksonville park named after James Weldon Johnson, a composer, and a civil rights activist. Those gathered listened to excerpts from “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison and “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver.
Being proactive
Dulaney, who is deputy director of the African American Museum of Dallas, explained, “We’re sort of being proactive this year because of what we’re confronting here as well as in other places in the country.”
Part of the American history
“Teachings and studying and promoting Black history is not about trying to make white people and white children feel bad,” Dulaney said. “It’s just a part of American history. It’s also telling the truth that has been hidden for so long.”
Some conservatives are against these teachings
DeSantis is not the only prominent figure who got called out over his stance toward Black history. Jonathan Butcher, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said, “I don’t believe the United States has institutional racism any longer.” He added, “I’m not arguing that we omit important topics. I think it should be done in age-appropriate ways.”
The March on Washington Film Festival
MOWFF focuses on illuminating the untold events and unacknowledged heroes of the American civil rights movement. The festival is a decade old, and Robert Raben, the founder of the festival, said that recent pushes against Black history only made people push back harder.
The push back
“I’m immensely sorry that forces who consciously don’t want us to know our history are back in force,” Raben said. “But the unintended consequence is a huge number of people and an increasingly diverse number of people stand up and say, ‘You can’t have democracy with that kind of fascist restrictions on our past.'”
Underground Railroad
“We’ll rely on our own educational Underground Railroad, or in those states where we’ve got access to the curriculum in the classroom, we’ll just double down,” Raben said, and concluded, “People cannot be afraid of teaching the past. I’ve been Jewish for 6,000 years. It is in our DNA that you have to know your history to know where you’re going.”
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