History Behind the Headlines: African American History and State Standards in Florida

AHA Online | August 25, 2023
Moderator: Leslie Harris, Northwestern Univ.
Edward Ayers, Univ. of Richmond
Daina Ramey Berry, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Marvin Dunn, Florida International Univ.
Note: This video contains descriptions of hate crimes.
This hour-long AHA Online event brought together four scholars of African American history to provide context for Florida's new state standards for K-12 history/social studies education. These standards indicate that the state’s public school students will not see a mention of slavery until they reach the fifth grade. The standards additionally indicate that it is possible to learn about slavery, sharecropping, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement and ongoing systems and practices of racial discrimination without confronting the concept of racism, a word that does not appear in the standards until high school, where it comes up once in 14 pages. Edward Ayers (Univ. of Richmond), Daina Ramey Berry (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), Marvin Dunn (Florida International Univ.), and moderator Leslie Harris (Northwestern Univ.) discussed how these new standards relate to broad narratives of US history.