The Southern Poverty Law Center is considering suing the State of Florida over recently approved standards on teaching Black history in a way that allegedly redefines the realities of African American enslavement.
“We are certainly looking into what actions we can take there,” SPLC staff attorney Sam Boyd said. “We do have really serious concerns about the history standards, the African American history course and the classroom library censorship that's been going on.”
Boyd was responding to reports that several hundred teachers, students, community members and teamsters marched for two hours to the Miami Dade County School Board Administration Building last week to defend black history.
Dunn
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“In the guise of fighting indoctrination, the state has been promoting its own form of indoctrination, whether that's saying the enslaved benefited from slavery or by minimizing the uniqueness and horror of American chattel slavery, in those history standards,” Boyd told the Florida Record.
The African American history standards were approved by the Florida Board of Education last month and require teaching middle school students that enslaved people developed skills that were personally beneficial, according to media reports.
“They have instituted standards that claim slavery provided ‘personal benefit’ to enslaved people, that Blacks initiated racial violence, and that American slavery was no different from slavery in many other nations,” said historian Dr. Marvin Dunn and professor emeritus of psychology at Florida International University. “Any attempt to frame genocide and enslavement as a benefit is a justification of genocide and enslavement. As a community we must take our responsibility as stewards of our history very seriously.”
The 'Teach No Lies' march was organized by Dunn who is president of the Miami Center for Racial Justice, which was formed after George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.
“We had hundreds of people out there protesting these standards so if public demonstrations make a difference, and I think they do, then we were heard and I do believe that the school board will offer some resistance to just implementing these standards whole hog," Dunn told the Florida Record. "I think our protests made a difference, at least potentially in having that happen."
On Aug. 16, protestors began walking from Booker T. Washington Senior High School at 1200 NW 6th Avenue at 11a.m. and stopped at 1 p.m. on NE 2nd Ave.
"One of the problems is that the state standards are not articulated with any particular courses so the system doesn't really know how to match these standards with particular courses," Dunn added. "There's a lot of confusion about what fits which course and that could lead to a chilling effect so that nothing is taught at all about slavery."