Florida Mandates Black History In Schools, But Many Doubt Accuracy

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has faced criticism for actions seen as limiting the teaching of Black history in school.

Although Florida announced it will require that Black history be taught in public schools–and pointed out it has for the past 30 years–some groups and organizations, like the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum, are genuinely concerned that the lessons greenlighted by the state’s Board of Education won’t be historically accurate.

According to Inkl, programming like the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum’s is often supported by Black churches and is designed to fill in the gaps in Florida’s public school education as it pertains to Black history.

Furthermore, even teachers in some districts have expressed concern that the state’s rules regarding how race and history can be discussed in classrooms place constraints on what they can teach.

According to Brian Knowles, who oversees African American, Holocaust and Latino studies for the Palm Beach County school district, “There’s so many other districts and so many kids that we’re missing because we’re tiptoeing around what is essentially American history.”

As Sulaya Williams, a Florida parent who launched her own community-based organization focusing on Black history in 2016, told The Associated Press, distrust of the state’s rules concerning Black history was a motivating factor.

“We wanted to make sure that our children knew our stories, to be able to pass down to their children,” Williams said.

Williams, who now has a contract to teach Saturday school at a public library in Fort Lauderdale, has influenced her 12-year-old daughter Addah Gordon to invite her classmates to learn at the library.

“It feels like I’m really learning my culture. Like I’m learning what my ancestors did,” Gordon explained. “And most people don’t know what they did.”

The beginnings of Florida’s mandate that public schools participate in teaching Black history came about as the result of the publication of an official report on the Rosewood race massacre in 1994, the experiences of the town’s Black residents would later be dramatized in John Singleton’s 1997 film “Rosewood.”

According to Marvin Dunn, a public educator who conducts tours of historic places in Florida connected to history, the moment of enlightenment did not last, similar to the DEI pledges in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020.

“There was a moment of enlightenment in Florida, those decades ago. There really was,” Dunn told the AP. “But that was short-lived.”

As BLACK ENTERPRISE previously reported, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has faced criticism for actions seen as limiting the teaching of Black history in schools, including blocking an Advanced Placement African American Studies course, which he claimed violated state laws and was historically inaccurate.

Tameka Bradley Hobbs, a manager of Broward County’s African American Research Library and Cultural Center, told the AP that these developments have made it clear that the State of Florida cannot be trusted to teach Black history.

“People who are interested in advancing African diaspora history can’t rely on schools to do that,” Bradley Hobbs said. “I think it’s even more clear now that there needs to be a level of self-reliance and self-determination when it comes to passing on the history and heritage of our ancestors.”