Standard Issue

With everyone talking about the Florida Department of Education’s new standards on African American history — focusing on its bizarre and inaccurate claims on slavery — I thought I’d take a look at the full document to see how representative that part is of the larger quality.

Some of the standards are actually quite good! The parts on cultural and social movements in the early 20th century seems solid, for instance, and the general approach to civil rights leaders works fine.

But in several parts, you can see the clumsy influence of partisan politics.

Take this section on “political developments of and for African Americans” between the world wars:

Studying landmark court cases? Terrific. Might want to address the NAACP legal campaign in there, too, noting how they shaped those cases, but that’s a fine start.

Addressing African Americans’ response to the New Deal seems important, as they readily embraced the economic support and welfare state measures of the New Deal and flocked to the Democratic Party as a result. That shift set in motion the larger party realignment over civil rights, so it’s hugely important! But, uh, framing this story as one of “the ramifications” that the New Deal had on African Americans suggests that’s not the positive interpretation or larger conclusion they’re stressing.

And then we get to the election of African Americans to national office, and the only name provided is … Oscar DePriest, the last black Republican to serve in the House for a half century or so. But no mention of Arthur Mitchell, the first black Democrat in the House who beat him in 1934? Teaching those two politicians’ careers together would be a nice way to discuss the larger partisan switch of African Americans, but, again, that doesn’t seem to be their goal here.

Here’s another example from the postwar era:

The inclusion of all these presidents is … fine, though it’s a bit of a top-down “great man” history. But if you’re including presidents in this honor roll, you should probably add Truman, who embraced civil rights as a major political cause and did more than Eisenhower ever did. (For all his pandering to segregationists, Nixon does deserve some credit for overseeing the final stages of court-ordered desegregation.)

The other people listed are Arthur A. Fletcher, a black conservative who served in the Nixon administration; Senator Everett Dirksen, a white Republican who provided junior-partner support for the Civil Rights Act; Mary McLeod Bethune, a leader of FDR’s “Black Cabinet” (which we skipped past earlier?); Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, two black conservative intellectuals who later criticized the civil rights movement and affirmative action but … didn’t remotely … “shape” it at the time; and then, finally, John Lewis, who actually did.

No matter where you stand politically, you have to admit that’s a very ideologically slanted list. If you rounded up a thousand historians of the civil rights era and asked them, to name “the politicians and political figures who advanced American democracy and representative democracy” none of them would have given you that odd collection of names.

Also, um … there was no such thing as the “Civil Rights Act of 1967.”

There are great historians in the state of Florida, though their numbers are dwindling fast. It’d be a great idea if the Department of Education sought their input, rather than using people who seem to have little background in History but great credentials on conservatism.