African American History and State Standards in Florida and Beyond

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. The panelists and moderator discussed how these new standards relate to broad narratives of US history.

Read about the event in Perspectives on History.

Panelists:

• Moderator: Leslie M. Harris (professor, Northwestern Univ.)
• Edward Ayers (Tucker Boatwright professor of the humanities and president emeritus, Univ. of Richmond)
• Daina Ramey Berry (Michael Douglas dean of humanities and fine arts, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara)
• Marvin Dunn (professor emeritus, Florida International Univ.)