Florida's new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery

[marmar]

Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery
A rival Advanced Placement curriculum is offering a dangerous view of the Constitution and America's founders

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published May 14, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.

Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world.

....(snip)....

The impact of Florida’s changes will be felt far beyond its borders. As Goldstein reported, the state has often set the pace for Republican education policy in the Trump era. Other red states will likely administer the new course, along with others in the program of accelerated courses the state has dubbed FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests), which will be, she wrote, “a sort of red-state competitor to the College Board,” which oversees the AP curricula.

Most of the new history course reflects a boilerplate conservative view of American history and society, where cheerleading too frequently substitutes for rigor and accuracy. But it also claims that the Constitution is an antislavery document — and that the nation’s founders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both owned enslaved people, were opposed to the institution. Such pronouncements are not merely wrong. They are insidious. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/14/floridas-new-history-course-whitewashes-the-founders-on-slavery/

[UpInArms]

1. I imagine they would like to cover up the Rosewood massacre

Rosewood Massacre 1923: The Brutal Destruction of a Black Community

In January 1923, the small Black community of Rosewood, Florida, was obliterated in a week-long spree of racial violence known as the Rosewood Massacre. Triggered by a white woman’s false claim of assault, a white mob, fueled by racial hatred and the Ku Klux Klan’s presence, murdered at least eight Black residents—possibly dozens more—burned the town to the ground, and displaced its entire population. This article in our Racial Crimes series uncovers the horrific events of the Rosewood Massacre, its causes, the gruesome violence inflicted, and the long fight for recognition as we reflect in 2025.

Rosewood, established in the mid-1800s, was a small rural town in Levy County, Florida, nine miles east of the Gulf of Mexico. Named for the pink-hued red cedar trees that once dotted the area, the town thrived on lumber in the late 19th century. White families settled there before the Civil War, with Black landowners arriving in the 1870s after emancipation. By 1886, Rosewood had a post office, a schoolhouse, three churches (one for white residents, two for Black), a general store, a sugar mill, a train station, and even a baseball team, fostering a tight-knit community of about 300 residents by the early 1900s.
The cedar industry’s collapse in the 1890s—after the trees were overharvested—led to economic decline, prompting many white residents to move to nearby Sumner, where a sawmill offered jobs. By 1900, Rosewood had become a majority-Black community, self-sufficient and resilient despite the era’s pervasive segregation. Jim Crow laws, enacted after Reconstruction, enforced racial separation across Florida, restricting Black access to education, jobs, and political power. The Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence after 1915 heightened racial tensions, with Florida chapters growing rapidly by the 1920s. This volatile climate, combined with economic disparities and systemic racism, set the stage for the violence that erupted in 1923.

… huge snip …

Carter’s murder marked the beginning of the massacre. Word of the manhunt spread, drawing white men from neighboring towns—Gainesville, Cedar Key, and beyond—some affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. By January 2, the posse had ballooned into a mob of 200 to 300 men, armed with rifles, shotguns, and torches, no longer focused solely on Hunter but intent on destroying Rosewood’s Black community.

Much more at link

[slightlv]

2. The Southern misery of unrecognized loss... and the reasons behind it.

The South always swore they'd rise again. With the failure of Reconstruction, I swear they never got the memo they lost the war.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. DeSatan wants to indoctrinate the Hitler Youth

May they end up the exact same.