All the ways Ron DeSantis is trying to rewrite Black history in Florida

It is increasingly difficult to say what Black history means in Florida.

A host of laws and policies enacted during the administration of controversial Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hem in teachers on all sides, requiring them to give - or stay away from - certain lessons, on penalty of possibly losing their jobs. A 2022 law mandates students may not be made to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” because they were forced to reflect on bad acts committed in the past by members of their race. And now, according to curriculum standards released last week, Florida students must learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit” - an assertion that immediately drew fire from historians.

Over the past three years, DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has led his state through a rapid-fire reevaluation of Black history education. In that time, Florida has adopted laws restricting the teaching of race; repudiated an Advanced Placement course that DeSantis blasted as “woke”; rejected a host of math and social studies textbooks partly for alleged references to critical race theory; and, in late July, approved a set of history standards emphasizing the benefits of slavery for the enslaved.

DeSantis’s initiatives have divided and riveted not only his state, but also the nation. Some warn of an erasure of the reality of Black lives. “They are whitewashing history and the African American experience in the United States,” said Andrew Spar, head of the Florida Education Association.

Yet others laud these measures as a needed corrective to liberal bias in education. “The governor and the Department of Education is teaching history in a balanced way, not from a one-sided point of view that the United States is an oppressive nation,” said Keith Flaugh, co-founder and CEO of conservative education advocacy group the Florida Citizens Alliance.

Each of the DeSantis administration’s actions on Black history has drawn harsh blowback from not only the political left, but also many educators and historians. Last week’s release of the standards was no exception. It earned bipartisan political condemnation, too, from figures such as Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and GOP presidential candidates Will Hurd, a former congressman from Texas, and Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey.

“Enslavement wasn’t a training ground for job placement. It was an institution that was horrific,” said LaGarrett King, a professor at the University at Buffalo and founding director of the school’s Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education.

Asked about the cascade of criticism and the administration’s track record on Black history more generally, DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern sent a link to tweets he posted quoting William B. Allen, a member of Florida’s African American History Standards working group, in support of the curriculum he helped develop. Contacted for comment, Allen, a Black professor emeritus at Michigan State University, wrote in an email that the goal of the standards is to tell the truth.

“It is correct that people held in slavery both arrived with and developed skills that inured to their personal benefit and accomplishment,” Allen wrote. “I stand behind the work of the group in its literal rendering.”

DeSantis has spoken out in recent days to back up the standards. He told a group of reporters and supporters Friday that enslavement sometimes led to job opportunities. “They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said, addressing an almost all-White crowd. He said the standards are “rooted in whatever is factual.”

The governor’s intervention into the teaching of Black history dates at least to summer 2021. That June, the state Board of Education banned “critical race theory,” a catchall term used on the right to denote various teachings about race, and the New York Times’s 1619 Project from classrooms. DeSantis spoke to the board before its meeting, telling the members that “some of this stuff is, I think, really toxic” and that “we will not let them bring nonsense ideology into Florida’s schools.”

The campaign has since shifted to state lawmakers. Between 2021 and 2023, the Republican-dominated legislature — with DeSantis’s guidance and encouragement — adopted a raft of laws restricting teaching about sex, gender, race and racism.

One such measure that took effect in July 2022, known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” prohibits teaching that an individual, by virtue of his or her race or color, “bears responsibility for . . . actions committed in the past by other members of the same race.” Signing this law in April 2022, DeSantis promised: “We are not going to use your tax dollars to teach our kids to hate this country or to hate each other.”

That same month, the Florida Department of Education also rejected 54 math textbooks, some for alleged references to critical race theory. The department conducted a similar review of social studies textbooks this spring, deeming more than 30 unacceptable, some because they conflict with state laws on race education.

In early 2023, the Education Department rejected a pilot version of the College Board’s long-planned AP African American studies course, contending it lacked “educational value.” DeSantis declared the class a form of “indoctrination.” DeSantis’s bashing of the AP course led at least four other states to launch reviews of the program, The Washington Post reported.

Most recently came the 216-page state academic standards, which encompass Black history. In addition to mandating that teachers detail the benefits of slavery for the enslaved, these standards — approved unanimously by the Florida Board of Education last week — specify that, when talking about mob violence against Black citizens, teachers must mention “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

The standards also say teachers must highlight positive contributions made by Black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and tell fifth graders about the “resiliency” of Black Americans, such as their efforts to help enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad. Florida is one of 12 states with a law requiring the teaching of Black history, per a tally by Education Week. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act” reiterated that teachers must discuss “the history of African Americans” — an element of the legislation touted by the governor’s supporters as proof he wants to teach accurate history.

DeSantis has based his White House bid on modeling a federal agenda that mimics how he has governed in Florida. He has emphasized using government power to shape corporate and academic positions on controversial social issues, especially diversity and sexuality.

The initial strength off DeSantis’s landslide reelection as governor has faded in early polls as Republicans have rallied around former president Donald Trump after his multiple indictments. The DeSantis campaign is now working to recalibrate its spending, events and media strategy, with a special focus on pulling off an upset in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

Teachers are already contacting Spar of the Florida Education Association about the standards, he said, sharing worry and frustration. If educators fail to teach to the standards, they could lose their teaching certificate, Spar said. He added that by attacking teachers’ certificates, Florida’s government could also make it very hard for erring teachers to get school jobs in other states.

For mother Stephana Ferrell, meanwhile, the standards added weight to fears that children in the state, including her elementary-schoolers, are not learning true, full history, with serious consequences for their and the nation’s future. Ferrell, who directs the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which advocates against book bans in schools, said people have advised her to supplement her children’s education with outside reading.

“But if my children decide they want to go to college out of Florida,” she asked, “will their application be viewed the same way as another student in another area of the country who did have a more robust education and an understanding of our shared history?”

To others, though, DeSantis is a hero.

Flaugh of the Florida Citizens Alliance said schoolteachers have become overly focused on the negative aspects of U.S. history in recent years, especially the wrongs and violence done to Black people. He said DeSantis is fighting against what he called a depressing, harmful and inaccurate trend.

“The balance was just not there,” he said, “in terms of teaching our kids what actually happened.”

Some historians take issue with this characterization.

Donald Ritchie, former historian of the U.S. Senate who has written history textbooks since the 1970s, said America has a long tradition of justifying slavery. He said the “moonlight and magnolia” school of thought held sway from the 1860s to the 1960s, asserting that plantations were lovely places in which slaveowners treated the enslaved like family.

Only in the 1960s through the 1990s did historians begin to reassess that rosy picture, relying on 1930s-era interviews with former enslaved people as well as runaway slave advertisements in newspapers and records documenting enslaved people’s rebellions. The consensus, Ritchie said, was overwhelming.

“They began to get a slave’s perspective, and it’s much darker,” Ritchie said. “The benefits of slavery were entirely to the slaveowners. Enslaved people did not benefit from slavery; that is a point of view that has been pretty much refuted.”

Still, over the weekend, Redfern, the DeSantis spokesperson, sent The Washington Post a message justifying the new state standards.

The message linked to an Encyclopedia.com entry titled “Crafts and Slave Handicrafts: An Overview.” The first sentence of the entry states, “There is ample evidence regarding the production of crafts by slaves in the American colonies and during the antebellum period in the Untied (sic) States.”

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The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Lori Rozsa contributed to this report.