Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has defended his state's new educational standards teaching that Black people learned valuable skills from slavery by saying that it was created by a work group of respectable Black scholars.
But according to Judd Legum's Popular Information investigative blog, at least one of those scholars has a bizarre past.
William B. Allen, a retired professor with a history of promoting far-right, anti-public school, and anti-LGBTQ causes, previously served as chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1989.
However, writes Legum, "during his time as chairman, Allen was also charged with kidnapping a 14-year-old girl from an indigenous reservation in Arizona. The girl was at the center of a custody battle between her birth mother and a white couple that wanted to adopt her. 'Allen contends that the girl wants to leave the reservation, though the mother has formal custody,' TIME reported in 1989."
Allen ultimately apologized but refused to step down from the commission.
Another controversial member of the work group is National Black Republican Association chair Francis Presley Rice, who has promoted propaganda falsely claiming Martin Luther King was a Republican, said former President Barack Obama was friends with terrorists, defended the racist GOP "Southern Strategy," and claimed in one of her magazine's articles that Democrats "embrace their child molesters."
Allen and Rice, who were reportedly the two main figures influencing the project, have put out statements defending the curriculum, and listing off a number of purported former slaves who went on to become successful through the skills they learned on plantations. However, as Legum noted, experts have pointed out almost half the people on their list were never enslaved. Other passages of the curriculum falsely claim George Washington, a slaveowner until his dying day, was a "key figure" in abolition, and instructing students that civil disobedience and nonviolent lawbreaking of the type Dr. King and other civil rights figures used is "irresponsible citizenship."
DeSantis himself says he was not directly involved in writing the standards, even as he continues to defend them. However, the standards were created as part of the Stop WOKE Act, a controversial law DeSantis signed that effectively prohibits any instruction in schools or workplaces that says anyone is privileged or oppressed due to their race, color, sex, or national origin, or anything that might theoretically make someone feel guilty about their own race — which required standards to be rewritten to avoid any allusions to this.
Federal judges have temporarily blocked enforcement of the Stop WOKE Act in workplace diversity training and in public colleges and universities.
