The head of Black history for Palm Beach County schools has decried parts of Florida's controversial new school curriculum as a "blatant distortion of Black history."
Brian Knowles, who oversees African, African American, Latino, Holocaust and Social Studies at the Palm Beach County school district, is the latest to criticize the Florida Board of Education's K-12 guidelines for instruction on Black history.
In the 216-page social studies curriculum, Florida educators are now advised to teach middle school students that enslaved Black Americans personally benefited from their forced labor, developing trade skills such as blacksmithing, carpentry and painting. The state’s curriculum also list “agricultural work” as part of the “various duties and trades performed by slaves.”
Knowles said the language makes light of the bondage and implies that trade skills were gained in exchange for atrocities endured by enslaved people.
“These were free people who had skills previously before they came to this country,” Knowles said. “So to say that would be an egregious statement, an egregious claim that would be so inaccurate to teach any of our children.”
Scholarly research, Knowles added, has shown that many enslaved Africans were skilled laborers from different regions in West Africa prior to being forced to use those skills in the Transatlantic slave trade. Many Africans arrived with skills such as blacksmithing, harvesting, boat building and irrigation techniques — skills that enslavers had specifically sought out.
READ MORE: Slavery Spin: Florida now leads the most insulting tradition in the Americas
Knowles' department selects and develops instruction materials for social studies — it provides professional development, teacher resources and apply standards and compliances. He believes that not placing Black history in its proper narrative framework distorts students' perception of Black people.
In the high school section of the state's curriculum, it groups massacres such as the 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and other racist attacks on Black communities as "acts of violence against and by African Americans."
Knowles, who's a long-time advocate for teaching accurate portrayals of Black history across the state, said the language — the "and by" — in the state’s curriculum, minimizes the brutality Black people faced and makes room for victim-blaming for infamous massacres against their communities.
“If you want to say that we learned skills, those skills weren't for our own benefit. It was always for the benefit of someone else," Knowles said. “And anytime that we have built up ourselves, there’s been systems, structures and literally domestic terrorism that has destroyed that." he added.
"This distorted view of teaching our history robs us of our power and agency.”
For Knowles, it's yet another challenge for Palm Beach County teachers who will find it difficult to teach the proper framing and context of American chattel slavery. To not put those facts at the forefront of teaching robs Black people of who they were before slavery, he said.
The fight for "accurate portrayal of Black history" has been an ongoing struggle for years because the state hasn’t done a good job “implementing and executing African history programs with fidelity in the first place.”
“[It] not only impacts our Black students and the way that they see themselves but all students in the way they see Black people,” Knowles said.
Teachings are "based on our political climate, people are using these very controversial topics as political leverage right now.”
Mixed response from Republicans, conservatives
Several prominent Black Republicans have issued public pushback against the state's new history standards.
In a statement on Twitter, Florida's Republican Congressman Byron Donalds, one of the most prominent Black conservatives in the country, called the curriculum "good, robust, & accurate" but he joined the protest condemning the messaging in the guidelines on African-American history: "That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong and needs to be adjusted. That obviously wasn't the goal and I have faith that FLDOE [Florida Department of Education] will correct this."
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina — the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate and rival in the presidential primary— reacted to DeSantis' Florida education standards. Scotttold reporters that “there is no silver lining in slavery. Any benefits people suggest they had during slavery, you would’ve had as a free person,” Scott said. “Slavery was about separating families, mutilating humans and even raping their wives.”
Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas and Rep. John James of Michigan, Black Republicans, have also offered criticisms, with James issuing a statement on Twitter saying, “nothing about that 400 years of evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors.”
But William Allen, a Black conservative professor emeritus of political science at Michigan State University who volunteered to help produce the guidelines, stands by the final result, calling the language "perfectly clear." And that he's "perfectly content" with the standards, during a recent interview with NPR. "The standards don't dictate them [teachers] what to say," Allen said.
He said "those who were held in slavery possess skills, whether they developed them before being held in slavery, while being held in slavery or subsequently to being held in slavery, from which they benefited when they applied themselves in the exertion of those skills," Allen added.
The curriculum sparked nationwide condemnation from organizations such as the NAACP and teachers union the Florida Education Association (FEA) which, in a press release, said the curriculum “confirmed many of the worst fears educators had when the Stop Woke Act was signed into law last year.”
The instruction guidelines reflect a broad effort to change history standards after Gov.Ron DeSantis, who’s running for president, signed the Stop WOKE Act. The state policy prohibits instructions that can cause personal guilt in students or demonstrate how Americans were "either privileged or oppressed.”
Earlier this year, DeSantis rejected parts of an AP Black history course that included queer studies, Black Lives Matter protests and reparations.
In a recent press conference, DeSantis said he wasn’t involved with the new curriculum but he believed it was "rooted in whatever was factual.”
"They're probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life," DeSantis said.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, echoed those sentiments, saying in a tweet that “Florida is focused on teaching true and accurate African American history.”
Teaching inaccuracies
To justify the changes, Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesperson for Diaz, released a statement in support of the curriculum by citing a response from members of the board, all of whom were appointed by Gov. DeSantis. William Allen and Frances Presley Rice listed 16 historic figures, such as John Chavis and Booker T. Washington, who they say learned skills while being enslaved.
But historians, according to reporting from the Tampa Bay Times, pointed out that “nearly half of the 16 historic figures highlighted by the state were never enslaved. Others, who did spend time in slavery, did not gain their skills from their servitude.” Chavis, for example, was born into a free family while Washington put himself through school and became an educator years later.
These are the types of inaccuracies that highlight some of the fears of revisionism from educators and the “flood of emails” from parents in Palm Beach County, Knowles said.
Despite the outrage, he said Palm Beach County teachers must comply with state law, while also stressing educators will have wiggle room to teach accurate framing and context. “We’ve always found ways through ingenuity and innovation to circumvent some things,” Knowles said.
