Editorial | On slavery and race, DeSantis shows his true colors

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during the Family Leadership Summit, July 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

By ORLANDO SENTINEL AND SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL EDITORIAL BOARDS | insight@orlandosentinel.com |

PUBLISHED: July 26, 2023 at 1:25 p.m. | UPDATED: July 28, 2023 at 4:43 a.m.

Long before Moms for Liberty, there were the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Their passion and influence kept generations of Southern children ignorant of how slavery had caused the Civil War and how cruel it had been. The “war between the states” was rather over “states’ rights” and tariffs. Confederate soldiers were the heroes of a “Lost Cause.” Kindly masters had been considerate to contented slaves.

Reconstruction was bad. The Ku Klux Klan was a benevolent civic organization.

The Daughters didn’t have to pull the truth from shelves. Its influence with state boards kept offending books from ever being printed or bought. When a University of Florida professor wrote that the South had been more in the wrong in the Civil War, the Daughters of the Confederacy got him fired.

In Florida, more than a century later, Southern revisionism is at it again.

Slaves with skills

To nationwide scorn and well-deserved derision, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Board of Education has approved a required Black history curriculum with “clarifications” that trivialize slavery and distort the record on racial violence.

Here’s one of them: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Another is worse: “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to (the) 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C., Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre” (emphasis added).

And by?

In each of those massacres, Black residents were not the instigators. It is a fraud on history and a libel on them to imply that they were. There were cases where residents of African American communities took up arms to defend their homes, their families and themselves. But they were guarding against armed mobs, seething with racism, bent on arson and murder.

Feeding a fiction

From Donald Trump on down, contemporary Americans playing on race for political advantage have been trying to denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement by accusing it of responsibility for violence. The “and by” phrase, unnecessary and gratuitous and now officially part of the Florida social studies curriculum, feeds that fiction.

The mob that ravaged Ocoee in Orange County, where 25 homes burned and at least eight people died, was incited by two Black men attempting to vote. The massacre at Rosewood, which erased the settlement, was set off by a married white woman’s claim that a Black man had attacked her. The official state history cites Black survivors, who said the assailant was a white lover. (For a link to the Sentinel’s 100th-anniversary coverage of the Ocoee Massacre and images of our 1920s coverage, please visit our web site at orlandosentinel.com/opinion. We’re making that historic coverage, along with other fascinating local history, free for everyone this week.)

For Black history, Florida’s previous standards were extensive and objective, unlike Southern propaganda of the 1900s.

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These images reflect the contemporary coverage of the Ocoee massacre by the Orlando Sentinel.

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But one rotten apple can spoil a barrel, and this one has two. There was nothing beneficial about slavery, except to the masters. When slaves learned a trade, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, or caulking wooden ships, as Frederick Douglass did, it was not for their benefit but for the convenience and profit of their masters. And many of them arrived on these shores with those skills already mastered.

Vice President Kamala Harris accurately described slavery in her speech at Jacksonville, which was aimed at DeSantis without mentioning him.

“Adults know what slavery really involved,” Harris said. “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity … It involved subjecting to people the requirement that they would think of themselves and be thought as less than human… How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities … that there was some benefit?”

A defense from DeSantis

After DeSantis first said he “wasn’t involved” in writing the standards, he is now defending them.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality. https://t.co/LQwYSaqhPw

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 23, 2023

This would be a good time for him to begin admitting he was wrong. His critics are feasting on this one.

DeSantis owns this horrific mistake, even if he didn’t personally write the standards. It is his education department, run by his appointees.

Cues are obvious in the dog whistles he’s sent. He banned critical race theory in schools (where it wasn’t even being taught.) He signed a law meant to banish all talk of the relevance of past or present racism from Florida schools and workplaces. He’s made it easier to purge school library shelves of innocuous books some people found to be objectionable because they reflected other cultures or talked about the history of civil rights.

The Department of Education’s attempt to document the “personal benefit” issue backfired. Of the 16 historic Black people it cited, as many as half had never been enslaved, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Others, notably the educator Booker T. Washington, acquired their skills after they were freed.

Douglass’ master kept most of the money he earned caulking ships in the Baltimore yards. Fearful of being sold South, Douglass made his escape to become an eloquent, world-famous advocate for the millions in chains.

His memoir recalled how the master, Hugh Auld, rebuked his wife for teaching him the alphabet when he was 11.

Literacy would “forever unfit him for the duties of slave,” Auld said. He should “know nothing but the will of his master and learn to obey it.” This harsh reality, which viewed high-quality education for African Americans as a threat to Caucasian control of society, echoed for decades as Black students were forced into segregated schools. Even now, some schools in high-poverty areas with large minority populations can lack access to options such as advance placement or International Baccalaureate programs.

This is the hideous legacy DeSantis is trying to revive. And no matter how much he squirms and dodges, he can’t erase the stain his actions are leaving on Florida’s reputation.

Coming later this week

DeSantis’ attempts to weaponize racism are turning Florida into a laughingstock and, at long last, turning fellow Republicans and donors against him. Why did it take so long?

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.