'Too much Black history': Alabama educators bombarded with complaints

Right-wing activists are trying to crack down on the discussion of Black history in Alabama textbooks, reported AL.com on Thursday.

"Earlier this year, the State Board of Education approved English Language Arts textbooks for kindergarten through third grade after a public hearing where critics suggested the books had too much Black history and multicultural stories," reported Jemma Stephenson. "These books had already been delayed after they were originally meant to be adopted in 2022."

The report goes on to quote right-wing activist Melissa Gates, who is a self-identified member of Eagle Forum and who attacked schools for trying to "indoctrinate our children with DEI [Diversity Equity and Inclusion], SEL [Social Emotional Learning], woke agenda and grooming our little ones."

The report also quoted Mobile County resident Cathy Odom, who flat-out said that "I thought personally there was too much Black history."

READ MORE: Jim Jordan won't be able to 'dig out of his hole' after Durham report debacle: DC insider

The Eagle Forum is the brainchild of the late right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, who was instrumental in blocking the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified in the Constitution. Her son Andrew Schlafly is the founder of Conservapedia, a bizarre alternate-facts wiki site that reinvents all of world history, science, and a variety of other topics with far-right and fundamentalist Christian propaganda and even purports to debunk Einstein's theory of General Relativity.

All of this comes amid a movement around the country by right-wing activists to ban books mentioning race and sexuality from school libraries, spurred by the passage of new legislation in states like Florida that make these challenges easy.

Leading this charge is another far-right group, Moms for Liberty, which has sought to ban everything from mentions of the astronomer Galileo as unfair to the Church, to a picture book that supposedly has overly sexualized pictures of seahorses. In some cases, Moms for Liberty activists have worked hand in hand with the Proud Boys, the infamous street-brawling "Western Chauvinist" paramilitary group whose higher-ups were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the January 6 Capitol attack.