Jim Crow is rapidly returning in the South - Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, North/South Carolina, Texas, Alabama
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‘I thank God for slavery:’ Florida African American History Task Force appointments raise concerns
A member of Florida’s African American History Task Force claims the body was largely cut out of the development of the state’s new African American History standards.
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The standards have put the state in the national crosshairs, spurring Vice President Kamala Harris’ Jacksonville visit Friday, where she criticized the inclusion of instruction on, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”.
“Pushing propaganda on our children,” said Harris.
State Senator Geraldine Thompson (D-Orlando), an emeritus member of the state’s American History Task Force, argued the group had little say in the development of the new standards, despite state law providing for its input.
“This is exactly the kind of thing the task force was supposed to do,” said Thompson.
Instead, the development of the standards was delegated to an African American History Standards Work Group.
According to the Department of Education, the work group was comprised of 13 members.
Three were appointed by the African American History Task Force, but 10 were selected by the department.
“Ten to three, that’s a major hurdle,” said Thompson.
Dr. William Allen, one of the work group members, recently defended the state’s new standards on FOX News.
He argued assertions the new standards attempt to paint slavery in a positive light is a lie.
“The accomplishments of Black people post-slavery were the accomplishments, not just of Black Americans, but the accomplishments of American principles. And that is the truth people seek to deny by erasing the stories of the people who lived through the histories,” said Allen.
However, Thompson said the defense doesn’t resonate with her.
“Because I think overriding all of that was the trauma to enslaved people,” said Thompson.
Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz told Action News Jax last week the African American History Task Force will continue to meet, and could suggest changes to the standards moving forward.
“There’s nothing that says we wouldn’t go back and take recommendations next year to augment the standards or tweak the standards,” said Diaz.
But Thompson pointed out, six of the nine voting members on the African American History Task Force were appointed by the Commissioner of Education back in May.
Five of the six new appointees are either directly affiliated with the Republican Party or have previously been appointed to positions by Governor Ron DeSantis.
The sixth, State Representative Kimberly Daniels’ (D-Jacksonville), is facing renewed criticism over comments made during a sermon back in 2008.
“I thank God for slavery. I thank God for the crack house. If it weren’t for the crack house, God wouldn’t have never been able to use me how he can use me now and if it wasn’t for slavery, I might be somewhere in Africa worshiping a tree,” said Daniels during the sermon delivered at Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio.
Daniels previously defended her statements in an interview with Action News Jax during her run for office in 2011.
“If slavery wouldn’t have happened, it was an awful thing, I wouldn’t be living in the greatest country in the land today,” said Daniels in the 2011 interview.
Senator Thompson sees Daniels’ appointment as another flashpoint that makes her question the state’s seriousness about teaching African American history.
“I don’t see what her qualifications are that would motivate her appointment,” said Thompson.
Daniels, in a statement issued this week, again defended her past comments and separated herself from the state’s newly adopted standards.
“I was appointed to the African American History Taskforce by Florida Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz. Of the meetings I attended, I never participated in any conversation about the state’s Black History standards. In fact, I was never consulted about these standards. I disagree with and would have immediately challenged and resisted any notion that slavery was a benefit to African Americans. I am a Black woman who was born in the early 1960s. I understand the atrocities of racial oppression and Jim Crow. I lived it,” said Daniels. “The “Thank God for Slavery” political ploy was taken out of context from a message I preached 15 years ago. The message was not about slavery but about overcoming obstacles in life as a believer of Jesus Christ. Taking it out of that setting and putting it in any other context is simply slanderous.”
Daniels’ appointment to the task force came after the work group had already completed the new standards.
However, according to the Department of Education, task force members were offered an opportunity to be briefed on the standards a month after Daniels was appointed.
Another month passed before the standards were officially adopted by the Florida Board of Education.
Whether Daniels had a role in developing the standards or not, State Representative Angie Nixon (D-Jacksonville) argued Daniels’ past comments raise red flags.
“That’s not the type of leadership we need here in our state, in our city,” said Nixon.
And despite the new Republican-friendly makeup of the African American History Task Force, Thompson told Action News Jax she doesn’t plan to back down.
“I will continue to voice my opposition or my support if I feel there are things that can be supported,” said Thompson.
Opinion | Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die
The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were.
Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die
July 28, 2023
Signs reading “DeSantis for President” and “Don’t Mess With My Kids” lie on a hardwood floor near a knapsack and a small stuffed animal.
Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times
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Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was, along with his state’s Board of Education, embroiled in a controversy over a new curriculum for student instruction in African American history.
Most of the coverage, and much of the outrage, focused on a quote from the state’s guidelines for the history of slavery, in which students are expected to learn that “Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
DeSantis defended the curriculum language, telling reporters that teachers are “probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” In a statement, two members of Florida’s African American history standards work group defended the language in question, citing 16 individuals who, they say, developed valuable skills while in bondage.
Unfortunately for the Florida Department of Education, several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their “personal benefit” in slavery.
The good-faith explanation for this language, if you’re inclined to be generous, is that the authors wanted to emphasize the agency and skill of the enslaved, whose labor fueled large parts of the American economy in the decades before Emancipation. It’s an important point that you can also find in the College Board’s Advanced Placement class in African American studies. “In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians and healers in the North and South,” the A.P. guidelines state. “Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others.”
Similar points, yes, but the language isn’t quite the same. In addition to using the term “enslaved” rather than “slave” — a linguistic shift that continues to be a subject of real debate — the language for the A.P. curriculum emphasizes that Black Americans could use these skills only after Emancipation.
This is key. Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy. To say that any more than a fortunate few could “parlay” their skills into anything that might improve their lives is to spin a fiction. Just as important is the fact that a large majority of the Africans enslaved in North America, whether under the British Crown for the better part of two centuries or under the American Constitution for eight decades after the revolution, died in bondage. For them, there was no point after slavery where they could use their skills.
You might say that these are minor, semantic differences. But in history the same ideas can be used to very different effect. And it is exactly these questions of wording and emphasis that mark one of the differences between a modern, more truthful depiction of American slavery and an older, tendentious approach that either de-emphasized or ignored outright the basic injustice of human bondage in favor of a gloss that placed a more pleasant sheen on an otherwise horrific institution.
“Until the mid-1960s,” the historian Donald Yacovone writes in “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” “American history instruction from grammar school to the university relentlessly characterized slavery as a benevolent institution, an enjoyable time and a gift to those Africans who had been lucky enough to be brought to the United States.”
As Yacovone notes, an American student in 1903, reading a textbook written for pupils enrolled in secondary school, might learn of antebellum slavery, for example, that the “systematic training bestowed upon him during his period of servitude and his contact with higher intelligence have given to the Negro an impulse to civilization that neither his inherent inclinations nor his native environment would of themselves bestowed.”
A different student, flipping through his grammar school textbook in 1923, might read in a section on slavery that the typical plantation was a “self-supporting community” where “the great majority of Negroes remained quietly and faithfully at work” as laborers and artisans.
A student in 1943, reading a similar textbook, might learn that “the slaves loved the people of the plantation and stood by them even after slavery was ended.” And a student in 1963 would have read in his history book that slavery “made it possible for Negroes to come to America and to make contacts with civilized life.” Other authors emphasized, in Yacovone’s words, that “slaves learned valuable trades such as sewing, weaving, carpentry and nursing.”
This wasn’t just bad history and false information. It also served an ideological purpose. “As the history of textbooks reveal,” Yacovone writes, “Americans came to see a path to national reconciliation through their shared devotion to white supremacy.”
Or, as the historian David Blight observes in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”: “A segregated society demanded a segregated historical memory. The many myths and legends fashioned out of the reconciliationist vision provided the superstructure of Civil War memory, but its base was white supremacy in both its moderate and virulent forms.” The point of teaching fictions about slavery was both to inscribe racist ideologies into the nation’s identity and to justify the renewed subjugation of an entire class of Americans.
It is worth mentioning a few other elements of the new Florida history curriculum. Florida wants students to learn how “trading in slaves developed in African lands” and about the “practice of the Barbary pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries.” And in its guidelines on Black history after the Civil War, the state wants students to study “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Read together, these guidelines seem like an exercise in equivocation and blame shifting — an attempt to downplay the enormity of American slavery and its defining feature, hereditary racial bondage. This is bad enough. But then consider, as well, the political context of Florida under DeSantis.
Florida, says the Republican presidential hopeful, is where “woke goes to die.” It’s where state officials refused to offer students a class in African American studies on the grounds that it “significantly lacks educational value.” And it’s where DeSantis, as governor, has vetoed spending on Black history celebrations, actively worked to reduce the representation of Black voters in the state and promised, if elected president, to change back the name of an Army base in North Carolina from Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, as in the Confederate general Braxton Bragg.
It is possible (although, given their response to criticism, unlikely) that the Florida curriculum authors didn’t mean anything by their characterization of American slavery. But when the board that approved the language was handpicked by DeSantis — as part of his crusade against so-called wokeness — it’s hard not to see this new instruction on the history of slavery as yet another part of the Florida governor’s larger ideological project.
This is why the history of textbooks past is particularly relevant. The history we teach to students in the present is as much about the country we hope to be as it is a record of the country we once were. A curriculum that distorts the truth of past injustice is meant, ultimately, for a country that excludes in the present.
A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district
After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit
www.theguardian.com
A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district
After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit
Justin Glawe
‘It’s a way … to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.
‘It’s a way … to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.’ Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Since 1870, the Augusta judicial circuit has been home to the criminal justice system of a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. In that time, no African American has been elected district attorney of the circuit – until 2020, when a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50% of the vote.
But that historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years.
“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia county commission chair, Doug Duncan, in a text message.
Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support.
The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities.
Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy.
Voting advocates say the circuit split is an example of the type of minority rule that Republicans are accused of engaging in across the US.
“There was a time when as we started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”
Despite voting advocates’ opposition, the circuit split had bipartisan support and was welcomed by some Black Democrats in the legislature, who argued that a backlog of felony cases in Richmond county could be reduced if the circuit were smaller and didn’t include Columbia county.
Fleming and Duncan did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a public records request, Duncan’s office said it had no communications with Fleming related to the Augusta split.
The splitting of the Augusta judicial circuit and the resulting creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit is not the only split to have been proposed in recent years. Nor is it the only split to have involved Fleming, a hardline conservative lawyer who was the architect of Georgia’s 2021 sweeping voter suppression law.
Following the Augusta split, two Republican lawmakers in Georgia proposed a circuit split in Oconee county after the election of a progressive prosecutor who ran on a platform of addressing systemic racism. Since then, Republican legislators statewide created a prosecutor oversight commission that holds the power to remove prosecutors for misconduct. The commission has been heavily criticized by Democratic prosecutors such as Fani Willis, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis and others told lawmakers the commission was created so white Republicans could target minority prosecutors.
The splits come at a time when criticism of prosecutors like Williams – who refuse to toe the line of tough-on-crime conservative policies – abounds on the right. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has made punishment of so-called progressive prosecutors part of his presidential campaign, firing a prosecutor who signed a pledge criticizing the criminalization of transgender people. In Mississippi, white Republican leaders have created a judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city.
The Florida prosecutor who was removed by DeSantis has sued the governor, saying that by “challenging this illegal abuse of power, we make sure that no governor can toss out the results of an election because he doesn’t like the outcome”.
Tossing out the outcome of an election is exactly what happened in Georgia when Republicans pushed for the creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit, Williams and others said.
Before Fleming spearheaded the Augusta split, others had proposed breaking up the circuit. In 2018, state senator Harold Jones, who is Black, requested that the judicial council of Georgia conduct a workload study for courts in the three counties that comprise the old circuit – Columbia, Richmond and Burke. The study found that workloads were high for local judges, especially in the majority-Black county of Richmond, Jones said, so he argued that the 200,000 people there should have their own circuit. But he couldn’t make any headway.
“As a Democrat, to do something that monumental, it’s next to impossible,” Jones said.
It wasn’t until December 2020 that the study was used as rationale for a circuit split. Then, the Columbia county board of commissioners issued a resolution requesting that its local legislative delegation – which includes Fleming – introduce a law that would formalize the split. The resolution cited Jones’s 2018 study, but that was only part of the story.
Behind the scenes, Columbia county leaders were coordinating to separate the county in response to Williams’s historic election win. Among those working to institute the split was Fleming himself.
Fleming, an attorney who works on behalf of nearly 40 state and county governments throughout Georgia, is a full-throated Trump supporter. He has been heavily involved in election matters through his former role as chair of the special committee on election integrity. Fleming and Duncan were vocal opponents of Williams and supported his opponent, Natalie Paine.
PART 2:
Held in the midst of widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 race between Williams and Paine, who was appointed by Kemp in 2017 and ran unopposed in 2018, reflected national themes of conflict between so-called law-and-order conservatives and progressive reformers. Williams prevailed despite attacks calling him “soft on crime”.
His win set in motion the series of events to split Columbia county. After Fleming’s House bill, state senator Lee Anderson, who has ties to Fleming through their failed effort to annex land in Fleming’s home town away from Columbia county, introduced a senate bill officially calling for the creation of the Columbia judicial circuit.
Co-sponsoring the bill were a handful of conservative and well-connected legislators including Jeff Mullis, a Confederate monument defender; Butch Miller, a far-right election denier; and state senator Bill Cowsert, who is Kemp’s brother-in-law. The bill eventually passed the senate unanimously, with many Democrats including Jones voting in favor due to their desire for a smaller circuit that could better serve Richmond’s high Black population, Jones said.
Seven of the eight judges in the old Augusta circuit objected to the split, saying it would not address workload issues.
The Augusta split provided a roadmap for Republicans throughout Georgia to fight back against progressive prosecutors. In 2020, Deborah Gonzalez became the state’s first Latina district attorney for the Western judicial circuit, winning on a platform of ending prosecution of low-level marijuana possession. Two Republican state lawmakers quickly asked the judicial council of Georgia to perform a study that would justify the separation of Oconee County from the Western circuit. Oconee is 87% white while the other county in the circuit, Athens-Clark, has a much higher Black population of 27%.
One of the lawmakers, state representative Houston Gaines, was clear about the rationale behind the proposed split.
“Our district attorney is choosing which laws to prosecute and which laws not to, and that is not the role of the district attorney,” Gaines told the local press.
Then on 12 April, Meriwether county commissioners issued a resolution asking for itself and two other counties – Troup and Coweta – to have their own circuit, citing increasing populations and felony caseloads.
The public reason for the proposed split, according to the Coweta circuit district attorney, Herb Cranford, is the circuit’s per-judge caseload. But recommendations for splits traditionally come from the judicial council of Georgia, and Cranford has said that a council study isn’t necessary.
The Carroll county sheriff, Terry Langley – whose law enforcement agency oversees one of the five counties in Coweta’s judicial circuit – spoke in support of the split, saying the growing population of the area made it necessary.
Much of that population growth has come in the form of people moving from the Atlanta metro area, Langley noted in a recent interview. The Atlanta area is far more Black than Carroll county.
“I’m not big into growth … I like some of our small-town stuff that we have, much of it’s gone,” Langley said. “It’s managed growth. We’re gonna grow, but you gotta manage it to a way that you don’t lose the quality of life that we have.”
Officials in Coweta, Heard, Meriwether and Troup counties did not respond to requests for comment.
Fleming is also co-sponsor of a bill proposing to split Banks county from the Piedmont judicial circuit. All of the circuit’s judges, its public defender and its district attorney have spoken in opposition to the split.
The Piedmont circuit does not have an abnormally high caseload for judges, according to the two most recent judicial council of Georgia workload assessments, although the circuit has seen a steady increase in population in recent years.
The real reason for the desired split probably comes down to a disagreement over prosecutorial ideology. During testimony before lawmakers, Judge Joseph Booth said that the bill was a result of disagreements between Sheriff Carlton Speed, whose office has been accused of racially discriminating against a defendant in a prominent case involving a Black former Atlanta Hawks basketball player, and the district attorney, Brad Smith.
Another judge in the circuit, Currie Mingeldorff, also noted that the split was proposed after he engaged in a failed effort to institute a drug court in Banks county. Drug or specialty courts have been around for decades to prevent mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. But Speed opposed the program.
“I never considered it to be tough on crime or not tough on crime, I considered it to be a way to keep the community safe, rehabilitate a person and reduce recidivism,” Mingeldorff said.
The bill stalled in Georgia’s house of representatives but was replaced by a Senate bill that remains pending. Erwin, Speed, Smith and Booth did not respond to requests for comment.
James Woodall, a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of indigent defense, said circuit splitting allows lawmakers to hand-pick conservative prosecutors in a swing state.
“They’re trying to find ways to maintain power,” Woodall said. “And who’s going to choose those people? Not the voters.”
Held in the midst of widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 race between Williams and Paine, who was appointed by Kemp in 2017 and ran unopposed in 2018, reflected national themes of conflict between so-called law-and-order conservatives and progressive reformers. Williams prevailed despite attacks calling him “soft on crime”.
His win set in motion the series of events to split Columbia county. After Fleming’s House bill, state senator Lee Anderson, who has ties to Fleming through their failed effort to annex land in Fleming’s home town away from Columbia county, introduced a senate bill officially calling for the creation of the Columbia judicial circuit.
Co-sponsoring the bill were a handful of conservative and well-connected legislators including Jeff Mullis, a Confederate monument defender; Butch Miller, a far-right election denier; and state senator Bill Cowsert, who is Kemp’s brother-in-law. The bill eventually passed the senate unanimously, with many Democrats including Jones voting in favor due to their desire for a smaller circuit that could better serve Richmond’s high Black population, Jones said.
Seven of the eight judges in the old Augusta circuit objected to the split, saying it would not address workload issues.
The Augusta split provided a roadmap for Republicans throughout Georgia to fight back against progressive prosecutors. In 2020, Deborah Gonzalez became the state’s first Latina district attorney for the Western judicial circuit, winning on a platform of ending prosecution of low-level marijuana possession. Two Republican state lawmakers quickly asked the judicial council of Georgia to perform a study that would justify the separation of Oconee County from the Western circuit. Oconee is 87% white while the other county in the circuit, Athens-Clark, has a much higher Black population of 27%.
One of the lawmakers, state representative Houston Gaines, was clear about the rationale behind the proposed split.
“Our district attorney is choosing which laws to prosecute and which laws not to, and that is not the role of the district attorney,” Gaines told the local press.
Then on 12 April, Meriwether county commissioners issued a resolution asking for itself and two other counties – Troup and Coweta – to have their own circuit, citing increasing populations and felony caseloads.
The public reason for the proposed split, according to the Coweta circuit district attorney, Herb Cranford, is the circuit’s per-judge caseload. But recommendations for splits traditionally come from the judicial council of Georgia, and Cranford has said that a council study isn’t necessary.
The Carroll county sheriff, Terry Langley – whose law enforcement agency oversees one of the five counties in Coweta’s judicial circuit – spoke in support of the split, saying the growing population of the area made it necessary.
Much of that population growth has come in the form of people moving from the Atlanta metro area, Langley noted in a recent interview. The Atlanta area is far more Black than Carroll county.
“I’m not big into growth … I like some of our small-town stuff that we have, much of it’s gone,” Langley said. “It’s managed growth. We’re gonna grow, but you gotta manage it to a way that you don’t lose the quality of life that we have.”
Officials in Coweta, Heard, Meriwether and Troup counties did not respond to requests for comment.
Fleming is also co-sponsor of a bill proposing to split Banks county from the Piedmont judicial circuit. All of the circuit’s judges, its public defender and its district attorney have spoken in opposition to the split.
The Piedmont circuit does not have an abnormally high caseload for judges, according to the two most recent judicial council of Georgia workload assessments, although the circuit has seen a steady increase in population in recent years.
The real reason for the desired split probably comes down to a disagreement over prosecutorial ideology. During testimony before lawmakers, Judge Joseph Booth said that the bill was a result of disagreements between Sheriff Carlton Speed, whose office has been accused of racially discriminating against a defendant in a prominent case involving a Black former Atlanta Hawks basketball player, and the district attorney, Brad Smith.
Another judge in the circuit, Currie Mingeldorff, also noted that the split was proposed after he engaged in a failed effort to institute a drug court in Banks county. Drug or specialty courts have been around for decades to prevent mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. But Speed opposed the program.
“I never considered it to be tough on crime or not tough on crime, I considered it to be a way to keep the community safe, rehabilitate a person and reduce recidivism,” Mingeldorff said.
The bill stalled in Georgia’s house of representatives but was replaced by a Senate bill that remains pending. Erwin, Speed, Smith and Booth did not respond to requests for comment.
James Woodall, a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of indigent defense, said circuit splitting allows lawmakers to hand-pick conservative prosecutors in a swing state.
“They’re trying to find ways to maintain power,” Woodall said. “And who’s going to choose those people? Not the voters.”
Another Republican says racism didn't cause Tulsa Race Massacre
For the second time in a month, a prominent Oklahoma Republican is claiming racism may not be the root cause of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
theblackwallsttimes.com
Another Republican says racism didn’t cause Tulsa Race Massacre
If Oklahoma educators teach that the Race Massacre was perpetuated by racism, they could potentially violate Conley’s law, and face Walters’ wrath.
Oklahoma State Rep. Sherrie Conley is the second Oklahoma Republican to questions whether racism was involved in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
For the second time in a month, a prominent Oklahoma Republican is claiming racism may not be the root cause of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
In a groundbreaking reporting from The Frontier, state representative Sherrie Conley is quoted as saying she is ‘unsure’ whether those who carried out the massacre were racists.
Conley says she doesn’t know for sure if “it was actually racism that caused the thoughts of the people that started it.”
“We can try to speculate,” Conley said, “but to know for sure, I don’t think that we can.”
Conley’s comments come just weeks after State Superintendent Ryan Walters made global headlines for similar comments.
During a town hall, Walters said it was “critical race theory” to teach the massacre was connected to “skin color”.
“You be judgmental of the action, of the content of the character of the individual – absolutely,” Walters said. “But let’s not tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined it.”
republican racismOklahoma Republican State Superintendent Ryan Walters. (Associated Press)
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre occurred when White Klan members and vigilantes stormed the Black community of Greenwood. Over the course of two days, the city-sanctioned mob shot, looted and burned nearly 40 blocks of homes and businesses. In all, more than 300 were killed, 10,000 were left without shelter and millions of dollars in generational wealth was destroyed, according to the Tulsa Historical Society.
It is, of course, an undeniable fact that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was the result of racism, despite Republican denial. It is also an undeniable fact that those who carried out the massacre were racists.
But these comments from Conley, Walters and other come against the backdrop of national efforts to rewrite history.
Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has come under fire for a Florida curriculum teaching students that enslaved people “benefited” from slavery.
After facing backlash from both Democrats and Republicans, DeSantis and his supporters continue digging in. The Florida Governor even sent a letter to Vice President Harris asking her to debate him over the controversial education standards.
Harris responded at an event in Florida, saying she “will not be distracted” by DeSantis and other extremists.
“There is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate the undeniable fact,” Harris said. “There were no redeeming qualities to slavery.”
Oklahoma educators fearful of repercussions for accurately teaching about the 1921 Massacre
Following the passage of HB 1775 in Oklahoma, teachers have been struggling to find ways to teach about the Massacre or racism in general amid Republican efforts to control the classroom.
The bill, authored by Conley and others, threatens teachers’ licenses and district accreditation for teachings about race in ways that could make White students “uncomfortable”.
According to that same report from The Frontier, even lessons using acclaimed books on the massacre are called into question.
Lessons using Dreamland Burning were paused in Bixby after members of the extremist group Moms for Liberty filed a complaint.
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District leaders encouraged teachers to carefully review the lesson before teaching it, the Frontier Reported. Officials in Bixby wanted to ensure students learned about the Massacre. However, they warned they might be “unable to protect” teachers from state action, based on how elected officials like Conley and Walters interpret a particular lesson.
These recent statements justifiably add to the fear and frustration felt by educators across the state. If they teach that the Race Massacre was perpetuated by racism, they could violate Conley’s law, and face Walters’ wrath.
Some have begun to call for Walters’ impeachment, overturning of the law and a federal investigation.
This Man Has The Ear Of Billionaires — And A White Supremacist Past He Kept A Secret
Hanania is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator, but HuffPost found he used a pen name to become an important figure in the “alt-right.”
