At Jacksonville meeting, Black historians 'running to the fight' over state's school rules
Steve Patterson
Researchers filling a Jacksonville hotel for a national Black history conference are illuminating parts of Northeast Florida’s past while pushing back against controversial efforts to limit the history being shared.
Organizers bill the conference by the 108-year-old Association for the Study of African American Life and History as “running to the fight” to oppose recent changes to state standards for teaching Black history and the removal of some books from public schools.
“ASALH is coming to Florida to challenge the restrictions on the teaching of Black history and to assist Florida residents in resisting the ‘anti-woke’ policies of the state’s politicians,” explains a greeting from ASALH President W. Marvin Dulaney inside the 76-page guide to the gathering at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront.
Dulaney has elsewhere described Florida as “ground zero to roll back the gains of the 1960s as a model for other states to follow,” saying extremism and radical changes have rapidly become more common. The criticism echoes concerns Vice President Kamala Harris raised during a July appearance in Jackonville to challenge Black history standards embraced by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
More:DeSantis vs. Harris on Florida's African American history curriculum: What to know
More:Florida is the nation's book banning leader, according to national free speech group
The conference is expected to draw about 1,000 scholars, teachers, activists and spectators before it ends Sunday.
Subjects covered in more than 200 presentations range from the 19th century Underground Railroad and the legacy of Black-owned newspapers to preservation efforts in Jacksonville’s Eastside neighborhood and the Community Remembrance Project to document racial terror killings in Jacksonville.
Marquee guests include the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, and James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, the world’s largest organization for historians. Both are speaking at a luncheon Saturday.
Most of the conference has happened in quiet rooms on several floors of the hotel, but Thursday evening some participants moved to a stage at downtown’s James Weldon Johnson Park for a “Banned Book Readout” that underscored concerns about books being removed from school libraries under rules deeming titles divisive or inappropriate.
“You can try to ban books of our history and our story. But that is a battle you will not win,” Jacksonville native Johnnetta Betsch Cole, a retired college president and former director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, told a crowd of more than 100 before reading a passage from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Florida school districts during the last academic year removed 386 titles from school libraries, including a youth book co-authored by antiracism activist Ibram X. Kendi and a Kendi picture book for young children.
Jacksonville writer and Black civil rights activist Rodney Hurst told the crowd “the reason for banned books is white folks don’t want to feel guilty and uncomfortable,” adding later that whites who are uncomfortable “blame us for being divisive” if people talk about racism or historical discrimination.
Parts of the conference seem far removed from those controversies, however.
As new arrivals reached Jacksonville mid-week, people from four states filed into a conference room where the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission scheduled its quarterly inside ASALH’s block of hotel space.
The federally-designated corridor’s southern end is in St. Johns County now, but commissioners heard about hopes for someday extending it to connect communities south to connect others that, like them, are descended from former slaves who worked Southern coastal areas and developed a cultural bond that still endures.