Kamala Harris returning to Florida amid controversy over Black history education

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to bring the fight over the teaching of Black history back to Florida on Tuesday, continuing her ongoing attacks against Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s new and controversial education standards.

Harris will travel to Orlando to address the African Methodist Episcopal Church Women’s Missionary Society Quadrennial Convention — her second visit to Florida in less than two weeks.

“She will talk about the concerted efforts across the country to attack hard-earned freedoms, including the need to ensure that folks have the ability to learn their country’s full and true history,” a White House official said.

The vice president’s trip has been planned since mid-July. But the stakes were raised for her latest visit to Florida after her last trip, to Jacksonville on July 21, sparked a public feud with DeSantis over the state’s new educational standards — a fight the vice president’s office believes that she is winning.

Harris has been personally involved in crafting the messaging response to Florida’s new standards, which include a highly controversial line stating that Blacks learned skills while in slavery that could be used for their “personal benefit.”

“She’s going to be referencing, specifically, the Florida curriculum standards,” the official said. “It’ll definitely be a part of it.”

READ MORE: Indoctrination in Florida schools? PragerU’s conservative content aims to change minds

Harris will also address the country’s battles over voting rights, abortion and gun violence, highlighting the role that faith has played “in critical moments in American history, including the civil rights movement,” the official said.

Florida’s new Black history curriculum has been at the center of an ongoing political battle for nearly two weeks, with Democrats and civil rights groups leading a campaign against the new standards. Some Republicans — including four of the five Black Republicans in Congress — have also criticized the decision to teach that some enslaved people benefited from being kept in bondage.

DeSantis and his team have pushed back aggressively against the wave of criticism, even accusing GOP detractors of echoing Harris’ talking points.

DeSantis has defended the curriculum, arguing that it was put forward by a working group of experts and has nothing to do with politics. He’s also ramped up his criticism of Harris in recent weeks, warning that a vote for President Joe Biden is effectively the same as a vote for Harris, given the incumbent president’s age.

“I think it’s very clear that these guys did a good job with those standards,” DeSantis told reporters during a campaign stop in Iowa last week. “It wasn’t anything that was politically motivated. These are serious scholars.”

DeSantis sent a letter to Harris ahead of her Tuesday trip to Orlando, touting his state’s education standards and accusing the Biden administration of unfairly attacking the curriculum. In the letter, he invited Harris to meet with him and William Allen, who helped author the new Black history standards, in Tallahassee to discuss the new standards.

“Over the past several weeks, the Biden Administration has repeatedly disparaged our state and misinformed Americans about our education system,” DeSantis wrote. “Our state pushed forward nation-leading standalone African American History standards — one of the only states in the nation to require this level of learning about such an important subject.”