This Is No Way to Teach History
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At the end of the week, the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for how American history should be taught to that state’s students in that state’s public school. This, of course, is a direct result of Governor Ron DeSantis’s “War On Woke,” on which he’s attempting to ride to the White House, but which the available evidence says won’t even get him to Cedar Rapids. However, the damage he can do to Florida is serious, deep, and ongoing. The new standards by which American history will be taught look as though they were devised by Strom Thurmond on some very good mushrooms. From CNN:
The new standards require instruction for middle school students to include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” a document listing the standards and posted in the Florida Department of Education website said. When high school students learn about events such as the 1920 Ocoee massacre, the new rules require that instruction include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” The massacre is considered the deadliest Election Day violence in US history and, according to several histories of the incident, it started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee, Florida, community, attempted to cast his ballot and was turned away by White poll workers. Similar standards are noted for lessons about other massacres, including the Atlanta race massacre, the Tulsa race massacre and the Rosewood race massacre.
I was particularly intrigued by the instruction that the curriculum include “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” Given that the list provided by the Board is composed entirely of violence by white mobs against Black citizens — Tulsa, Rosewood, and the turn of the century race riots in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. — this equivocation reeks of trying to apply the standards of Both Sides Do It to racial violence. Even if you count Nat Turner, and that’s very arguable, this is a preposterous way to teach history, but it’s a great way to teach profitable ignorance. I know that first-hand, about which more anon.
The only reason I can come up with for that curious “and by African Americans” equivocation is that it might distressingly be referring to attempts by the victims of those bloody episodes to fight back. For example, the Ocoee Massacre, which occurred on election day in 1920. Armed members of the Klan prevented Black citizens from voting. A man named Mose Norman was particularly insistent to the point that the Klan and its affiliates went looking for him at the home of July Perry, a influential man among Ocoee’s Black community. From the Florida History Blog:
The group’s leader, a military veteran and former police chief of Orlando named Sam Salisbury, knocked on the door of the wood-framed home. Perry knew they were cornered and reluctantly answered the door. The officer insisted that Perry must come with him, to which the 51-year-old replied, “Yes suh, boss, let me get my coat.” At that moment, Salisbury grabbed Perry by the arm and put him in a headlock, thinking he might run. Perry’s daughter Coretha responded by placing a rifle in the officer’s belly. Salisbury instinctively brushed the weapon aside. In that intense moment, the gun fired, shooting the officer in the right arm; he retreated out of the door and rolled on the ground to escape.
With only Perry’s family inside, a volley of gunfire erupted in both directions. Two of Salisbury’s men, Elmer McDaniels and Leo Borgard, were killed when they tried to storm the house by kicking in the backdoor. Coretha was also shot in the arm, possibly by a stray bullet from her father’s gun. Though the wound was not life-threatening, she had a scar for the rest of her life.
The story goes that the family so valiantly defended their home that some were convinced there was a large group inside. The mob retreated temporarily to get reinforcements and manpower from Klan members in surrounding cities.
The Perry family used the two or three-hour respite to escape the house. July had been seriously wounded during the incident and fled, with the help of his wife, into a nearby sugar cane patch. While her two young brothers hid in the barn, Coretha remained in the house to tend to her injuries alone.
By the time it was over, an estimated 58 Black citizens were dead, their community centers and churches were burned to the ground, and July Perry had been lynched on a telephone pole outside a country club. Now, this would be a helluva discussion topic in a history class — the role of violence in self-defense against oppressors. Was Coretha Perry right to draw down on the cops trying to haul her father away? Of course, to have that discussion, you would have to describe in some detail the oppression against which someone like Coretha Perry was defending herself. And that would be, I guess, “woke,” and we can’t have that.
Riding the "war on woke" straight to nowhere.
What’s really distressing to me is the knowledge that what DeSantis and his hirelings on the Board of Education are attempting to bring back is the truncated, bloodless American history that I was taught in elementary and in high school. I am the product of 11 years of Catholic education — seven with the Sisters of St. Joseph and four with the Xaverian Brothers. I treasure what I learned from all of them. (I still remember the day in sixth grade when Sr. Marie de Paul told me, “Charles, maybe you should be a writer when you grow up.” Made it, Sis! Top of the world!) But the history they taught left an awful lot out. All of the European history I learned was tangled up with an equally pale version of Church history.
(Why did I have to wait to be almost 40 to learn about the Cadaver Synod, perhaps my favorite historical event of all time?)
American history taught me that Manifest Destiny was largely an unusually clever land deal and that indigenous people were natural obstacles to it, like rivers or coyotes. The Civil War was about a clash of economic systems, and a dispute over states rights. Reconstruction was a matter of carpetbaggers and scalawags looting the defeated South. We skipped from the Industrial Revolution (America is on the move!) to World War I (A noble cause) to the Depression to World War II. And then everything went sideways while dealing with the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until I got to my senior year in high school, with the Vietnam debacle at high tide and some of the Xaverian Brothers having turned hippie on us in the wake of Vatican II, that it was intimated that the United States had lost quite a bit of its mind over Communism.
I’ve been filling in the gaps ever since, all the way through college and beyond. I have found American history to be richer and fuller and, God knows, more ambiguous in its morality than I was led to believe. (In college, I took a history course from a professor who taught the American Revolution from the British perspective. It was like a bucket of cold water in my face every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but I stood by my ancestors and refused to rise when he played God Save The Queen.) I now know as much about Denmark Vesey and Crazy Horse as I do about Paul Revere and Ulysses Grant. And I am so much the better for it.
The Carlise Indian School in 1901. Native American children were shipped off to boarding schools operating on the principle of, “Kill the Indian. Save the man,” and some of them never came back.
Woman, said I, I’ve heard that every fellow in this place is called Jams O’Donnell. If that’s the way it is, it’s a wonderful world we have and isn’t O’Donnell a wonderful man and the number of children he has.
— Flann O’Brien, The Poor Mouth (An Beal Bocht)
Bonaparte O’Coonassa, the hapless hero of the novel, is beaten with an oar on his first day of school by a schoolmaster who insists Bonaparte’s name is Jams O’Donnell. It turns out that he has insisted this was the case for every child in the benighted burg of Corkadoragha. Erasure of this sort is the first tool of colonial oppression. There are very few African Americans who know what their true family names are. Native American children were shipped off to boarding schools operating on the principle of, “Kill the Indian. Save the man,” and some of them never came back. Throughout my adult life, talented historians have worked to fill in the gaps in our common humanity that were torn by centuries of colonial oppression. It was an energizing process of simple validation through understanding and empathy. Plus, it was absolutely fascinating. And now it is under direct assault by the likes of Ron DeSantis and his pet Board of Education, who evidently want to take our future generation back to the amnesiac history that people of my generation were taught.
This is a threat to freedom, exactly the kind of “tyranny over the mind of man” that Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility “on the altar of God.” And, thanks to those historians — like, for example, the great Annette Gordon-Reed — that DeSantis wants to ignore, we have a better idea of TJ’s deeply flawed humanity and we are better for it. As the Irish playwright Brian Friel wrote in his masterful Translations, his play about colonial erasure of the Irish language and culture.
It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language…we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilize.
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