The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.
The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.
A Missouri school board that previously voted to rescind an anti-discrimination resolution has voted in favor of removing elective Black history and literature classes.
The seven-member Francis Howell School Board voted 5-2 Thursday night to stop offering Black History and Black Literature courses, which had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021, KSDK reported. All seven members of the board are white.
“Our students really wanted these electives,” Harry Harris, whose son is a student in the district, said during the board meeting. “Our families really wanted them and our teachers really wanted them. It’s important. It’s been great.”
In July, the conservative-led board revoked an anti-racism resolution that had been passed in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.
Growing up in Indiana, they didn't teach black history, and I turned out just fine except for not knowing about Jim Crow or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or redlining or the Tulsa race massacre or Ruby Bridges, or lynching, or Malcolm X or the Black Panther movement or the MOVE bombing or...
I grew up in Wyoming. We didn't get most of that well...
We did hear about lynching and Malcolm X. Not much in details about either, mind, but we were told that both had existed. They glossed over anything that Malcolm X stood for, or actually said, or did....
To be fair, I grew up in the north east and went to a very good public school and never learned about ANY of that until I went to college/uni and started taking real history courses.