The fight for African American studies in schools isn't getting easier, even after 50 years

In 1967, young people across Philadelphia took to the streets to protest the district's treatment of Black students. Among their demands: functioning classrooms, more Black educators and an end to a system that funneled them into menial jobs.

The youth also asked for something that remains controversial to this day: the inclusion of African American studies in school.

The protest ended violently. Hundreds of Philadelphia police officers wielding clubs attacked the student activists. Nearly two dozen people were seriously injured, and dozens more were arrested. Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when Philadelphia became the first major city to make African American studies a graduation requirement.

Today, efforts to bring ethnic studies into schools are nearly as fraught as they were more than half a century ago, seen by critics as a form of radical indoctrination and by proponents as a long-overdue lifeline that can significantly improve students' and society's outcomes.

The latest battle – Florida objecting to a new AP African American studies course and accusing the College Board of pushing a "woke" political agenda – is a reminder of how fiercely marginalized communities have fought to determine how they tell and learn about their own history. And of how intent others are on keeping those efforts in check.

“We still haven’t, after 50 years, gotten what we really deserve,” said Theresa Montaño, a Chicano and Chicana studies professor at California State University, Northridge. “Eventually our students are going to say, ‘We want the truth. We want our history by our people for all people.'”

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In fact, the very states whose governors are now leading the charge against race-related instruction were among the first two in the country to pass laws promoting African American history education.

Florida in 1994 became one of the first states to pass a law mandating the teaching of African American history in schools, according to a database from the Education Commission of the States.

Now, with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm, the state has been at the forefront of efforts to restrict lessons about race and racism in classrooms. It's one of roughly 18 states that in recent years passed bans on the teaching of critical race theory, a graduate-level concept that examines systemic racism.

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Several states also moved to ban teaching The New York Times' 1619 Project in K-12 schools and colleges, including Florida. The publication and related curriculum put slavery at the center of American history.

The debate over what students learn about race at school only grew after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Some parents and students demanded clearer lessons on racism, slavery and their deep legacy; others pushed against teaching that they argued would besmirch America's Founding Fathers or pit students of different races against one another.

When the College Board’s new AP African American Studies course debuted at 60 high schools this school year, however, there was relatively little outcry.

Then, ahead of an expansion of schools piloting the course for the 2023-24 school year, DeSantis attacked the course, saying it violated Florida law and included inappropriate topics, including the study of “queer theory” and political movements that advocated for “abolishing prisons.” He went on to suggest that the state might cut ties with the nonprofit that oversees the SAT and PSAT as well as a huge suite of AP classes.

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He has cited Florida's 1994 law as evidence students already learn Black history, though advocates and some lawmakers say it has never been enforced or financed. Nor has a newer law requiring teaching about a 1920 Election Day massacre targeting Black voters, spearheaded by the KKK, which DeSantis signed into law in 2020.

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A few states over, in Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a critical race theory-related executive order on her first day of office in January that similarly threatens to prevent the AP course from being offered to students. In response to the order, the state's Division of Elementary and Secondary Education has asked the College Board for more information about the course.

This development comes after Arkansas in 1997 passed a law related to the teaching of African American history. The law requires the state to provide instructional materials and training for instruction on such history in K-12 public schools, as well as "in racial and ethnic awareness and sensitivity" for educators.

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What is ethnic studies?

Ethnic studies examine the histories, experiences, cultures and issues of different groups. African American studies is one discipline within the ethnic studies umbrella; programs focusing on Latino, Native American and Native American communities are also common.

The concept emerged around the same time student protests were breaking out in Philadelphia. Across the country, in the San Francisco Bay Area, college students belonging to an ethnic coalition known as the Third World Liberation Front went on strike in the late 1960s demanding Black and ethnic studies.

By 1993, there were more than 700 ethnic studies programs in the United States, according to research published by UCLA, primarily at the higher education level.

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“Ethnic studies is the exposure of historical and contemporary and social trajectories that have been hidden for so many years,” said Montaño, who helped draft original versions of a curriculum now used in California's K-12 schools. It’s comprised of “stories that we tell within our own communities … stories of injustice, trauma or death but also stories of justice.”

A critical element of ethnic studies, Montaño says, “is the right to determine our own curriculum and our own story.”

How to teach this history in K-12 schools, whether in a separate required course, an elective or woven into other lessons, is another subject of debate.

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States, districts with ethnic studies requirements

In 2021, California became the first state to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. According to Education Commission of the States data, nearly a dozen states, both blue and red, have since 2021 passed legislation promoting the teaching of ethnic studies generally or of lessons about a particular group. They include:

• Delaware: In 2021, the governor signed into law a bill making African American history a required part of K-12 educational programming.

• Hawaii: In 2022, the state's Legislature passed a resolution asking the education department to create a course on Filipino history and culture.

• Illinois: In 2021, the governor signed into law legislation requiring that Asian American history be taught in public schools.

• New Mexico: A law passed in 2021 requires the creation of a Black education liaison and advisory council to in part recommend learning materials about the history and culture of Black people.

• North Dakota: The state passed a law in 2021 requiring schools to teach Native American history.

• Utah: In 2022, the state's Legislature passed a law requiring ethnic studies to be included in core standards for K-12 students.

'Not about teaching kids to hate' their country

Advocates for history courses that teach about people of color argue that doing so helps many children feel seen and can improve their achievement. Roughly 54% of all public school students are non-white. 

In 2018, Texas historians, educators and community members were gathering regularly to figure out how to teach an underrepresented part of American history.

That February, a backhoe operator found a bone on property owned by the Fort Bend school district southwest of Houston. By summer, the remains would be determined to comprise 95 people. They'd been Black convicts leased by the state, forced into work on sugar plantations as punishment for their crimes – slavery that was allowed even after the passage of the 13th Amendment.

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Now, lessons about the Sugar Land 95, as those 94 men and one woman have become known, are part of a Texas African American Studies course.

Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the elected state board who helped develop the course, said the discovery of the bodies “was sad, but it was exciting at the same time: This was history unfolding."

Davis said several thousand students have taken the elective course. “It’s students of all backgrounds – Black students, white students, Latino students – engaged in conversation,” Davis said. “It’s not about teaching kids to hate (their) country.”

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'Making a compromise to satisfy a few'

In the late 1990s, Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District adopted a Mexican American Studies program. The initiative, while it lasted, was promising, with Latino students boasting higher graduation rates and test scores, according to POLITICO.

But in the mid-2000s, it became political, after a lawmaker disseminated a recording of a local activist in an auditorium telling a group of Tucson teens that “Republicans hate Latinos.”

In 2010, Arizona’s governor signed into law a bill banning Mexican American studies. Despite massive student and community protests, as well as a court ruling that determined the law to be unconstitutional, the course in its original form has never returned.

“When people of color and native communities want to expose the injustice and the trauma and the marginalization, there are always calls for a power shift and for acknowledging that we have to make some changes to society,” Montaño said. “These changes will inevitably improve the lives of everyone in America, but some see them as a threat.”

Montaño in 2021 removed her endorsement of California's model ethnic studies curriculum after deciding too many perspectives and voices were being left out. Over different iterations of the framework, it was accused by some of promoting leftist indoctrination and others of antisemitism.

Efforts to dilute the curriculum, she said, went too far.

Students lead the fight for African American, ethnic studies

Critics say something similar has transpired with the AP African American studies course, which excludes as required material certain topics deemed un-American by those on the right, such as the Black Lives Matter social justice movement and reparations for slavery.

In Florida, Arkansas and beyond, students can be among the most powerful voices, demanding their schools provide opportunities for them to learn about their own histories and cultures.

They're following in the footsteps of students in Philadelphia, Tucson San Francisco and Denver, where students walked out of classrooms in 2014 in protest of proposed changes to history courses to better promote citizenship and patriotism. The changes weren't made after that.

“Students have made a difference in these controversies over time,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. “Will they again?"

Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.

Reach Nirvi Shah at nshah@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @NirviShah.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DeSantis vs. College Board: Part of larger battle over ethnic studies