“His story is his story. He went through racism. It’s something that can’t be changed,” Clemente’s son, Roberto Clemente Jr., told NBC News.
Roberto Clemente, pictured here in 1966, often denounced racism and spoke publicly about his experiences as a Black Latino climbing the baseball ranks during the civil rights movement.Bettmann Archive
A book about late Afro-Puerto Rican MLB legend Roberto Clemente can’t be found in the shelves of public school libraries in Florida’s Duval County these days.
“Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter and Raúl Colón — and other books about Latino figures such as the late Afro-Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz and Justice Sonia Sotomayor — are among the more than 1 million titles that have been “covered or stored and paused for student use” at the Duval County Public Schools District, according to Chief Academic Officer Paula Renfro.
School officials are in the process of determining if such books comply with state laws and can be included in school libraries.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed laws last year that require schools to rely on certified media specialists to approve which books can be integrated into classrooms. Guidance on how that would be implemented was provided to schools in December.
In January, 52 certified media specialists for Duval started reviewing about 1.5 million book titles, Sonya Duke-Bolden, a spokesperson with the public schools district told NBC News Friday. Close to 2,800 books have been approved by media specialists so far. Duke-Bolden did not say if more books were reviewed but not approved.
PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, said in December that 176 elementary school books from their Essential Voices collection were among the titles removed from Duval County public school libraries.
The organization said the books removed included some substituted titles and more than 100 deemed to have “content too mature for the grade level for which they were included in that collection.”
Duke-Bolden said that 47 substituted titles, which were swapped in for books in the Essential Voices collection that were unavailable,were sent back. Of the more than 170 books, “106 were deemed to be useful for our reading goals and have been distributed to classrooms” while 26 others remain under review.
“Note that even though a title may appear to be appropriate, we must evaluate each book’s full content for its age-level appropriateness and full compliance with Florida law,” Duke-Bolden added.
Of the books removed from Duval County, more than 30 were by Latino authors and illustrators or centered Latino characters and narratives. Among these were “Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa” by Veronica Chambers and Julie Maren, “Sonia Sotomayor (Women Who Broke the Rules Series)” by Kathleen Krull and Angela Dominguez, and Winter’s Clemente book.
“Robert Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Raúl Colón.Atheneum Books for Young Readers via Simon and Schuster
The son of the Pittsburgh Pirates player, Roberto Clemente Jr., told NBC News he owns the book, which was written for children K-3.
“His story is his story. He went through racism. It’s something that can’t be changed,” Clemente Jr. said. “But obviously, for the younger students, if it’s something that they feel is too much for them, they might be able to utilize a different book with the same story, but it’s framed differently for them, for that for that age group.”
Clemente Jr. added that he expects his father’s life story and legacy to empower people of all ages.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a Latino civil rights organization based in New York, blasted the school district in Duval for removing the Clemente book over its “references to racism and discrimination.”
“Learning about Clemente’s achievements, his pride in his Afro-Boricua identity and his struggles with racism and discrimination would provide needed insight on historical conditions in the U.S., and inspiration for the majority Black and Latino student population in Duval County schools,” Lourdes Rosado, president and general counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said in a statement.
“We urge the school district to restore this book and others that shine a light on the experiences of exemplary people in our country who have contributed greatly to our society and culture,” Rosado said. “Our children deserve to understand the full scope of our society’s flaws and strengths.”
Clemente died in 1972, when his plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico as he was delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was 38.
His humanitarian efforts are perhaps his greatest legacy in addition to his professional baseball career. Clemente became a posthumous Baseball Hall of Famer, with exactly 3,000 hits, four National League batting titles, 12 Gold Gloves, an MVP award, two World Series championships and 15 All-Star appearances.
Clemente often denounced racism and discrimination in his native Spanish language, and he spoke publicly about his experiences as a Black Latino climbing the baseball ranks during the civil rights movement. He even spoke about political and social issues alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
“The book on Roberto Clemente is pending review,” Duke-Bolden said. She couldn’t immediately share the review status on the books about Cruz and Sotomayor.
Clemente Jr. and his family are waiting to see what happens with the book about the baseball great and plan on reaching out to the school district some time next week.
“We need to continue to figure out how to continue that conversation and unifying our cultures and nationalities,” he said.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a Latino civil rights organization based in New York, blasted the school district in Duval for removing the Clemente book over its “references to racism and discrimination.”
“Learning about Clemente’s achievements, his pride in his Afro-Boricua identity and his struggles with racism and discrimination would provide needed insight on historical conditions in the U.S., and inspiration for the majority Black and Latino student population in Duval County schools,” Lourdes Rosado, president and general counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said in a statement.
“We urge the school district to restore this book and others that shine a light on the experiences of exemplary people in our country who have contributed greatly to our society and culture,” Rosado said. “Our children deserve to understand the full scope of our society’s flaws and strengths.”
Clemente died in 1972, when his plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico as he was delivering relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He was 38.
His humanitarian efforts are perhaps his greatest legacy in addition to his professional baseball career. Clemente became a posthumous Baseball Hall of Famer, with exactly 3,000 hits, four National League batting titles, 12 Gold Gloves, an MVP award, two World Series championships and 15 All-Star appearances.
Clemente often denounced racism and discrimination in his native Spanish language, and he spoke publicly about his experiences as a Black Latino climbing the baseball ranks during the civil rights movement. He even spoke about political and social issues alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
“The book on Roberto Clemente is pending review,” Duke-Bolden said. She couldn’t immediately share the review status on the books about Cruz and Sotomayor.
Clemente Jr. and his family are waiting to see what happens with the book about the baseball great and plan on reaching out to the school district some time next week.
“We need to continue to figure out how to continue that conversation and unifying our cultures and nationalities,” he said.
Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates before the opening game of the National League playoffs, October 1971. Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images
A school district in Florida has removed a children’s book on Latino baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente to see if it complies with a new state law limiting discussions about race, Axios has confirmed.
Why it matters: The pulling of “Roberto Clemente: The Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” is part of a larger purge of books happening nationally amid laws forcing schools and libraries to remove literature about people of color or with LGBTQ themes.
Details: Duval County Public Schools, which includes Jacksonville, Florida, announced late last month that it was “taking further steps to comply with Florida laws on library books.”
Those steps include a “formal review of classroom libraries,” the district said. The 2005 illustrated children’s book on Clemente is one of those under review.
The district said state officials trained district staff on how to use a “certified media specialist” to approve books.
The restrictions have forced schools to remove conventional books on civil rights, even if they have nothing to do with graduate-level critical race theory conceptions.
Reality check:Critical race theory — which holds that racism is baked into the formation of the nation and ingrained in our legal, financial and education systems — was developed in law schools in the 1970s and 1980s and isn’t really taught in grade school.
State of play: PEN America said the Clemente book is one of 176 pulled by Duval County Public Schools since last year.
Others include “Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII,” by Marissa Moss and Yuko Shimizu.
“Henry Aaron’s Dream,” by Matt Tavares, and “My Two Dads and Me,” by Michael Joosten and Izak Zenou, were also pulled from Duval County Public Schools.
The intrigue: The Clemente book references the racism the Black Puerto Rican player faced in the U.S. — something well documented in his interviews and biographies.
Duval County Public Schools told WTAE-TV the book is not permanently banned, but it is under review with many others.
What they’re saying: The removal of the Clemente book “is the latest attempt from Florida’s education administrators to score cheap political points at the expense of the education and well-being of Florida’s children,” Lourdes M. Rosado, president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said in a statement.
“Learning about Clemente’s achievements, his pride in his Afro-Boricua identity and his struggles with racism and discrimination would provide needed insight on historical conditions in the U.S.”
Rosado said the book is an inspiration for the majority Black and Latino student population in Duval County schools and should be placed back on the shelves.
Afro Latinos are redefining America’s pastime even as the nation can’t define them.
What’s next: The National Council for Black Studies, an organization dedicated to advancing Black Studies, will be holding its annual conference March 22-25at the University of Florida.
Scholars in Black Studies will be coming to Florida in solidarity with other scholars in the state facing pressure to limit classroom materials on race.
Del. Danica Roem at a 2017 White House protestPhoto: Ted Eytan/via Wiki
Out transgender Virginia lawmaker Del. Danica Roem (D) shut down opponents of transgender students participating in school sports by calling out the hypocrisy of conservatives who say they want to protect girls’ sports.
“When we want to deal with the idea of how do we support women athletes, how about we show up to their games?” she said.
Roem was speaking against H.B. 1387, a Republican bill that would ban transgender students from participating in school sports as their authentic selves, effectively banning many of them from participating in school sports. Del. Karen Greenhalgh (R) said the bill is needed to “encourage” cisgender girls to participate in school sports.
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“Similarly gifted and trained males will always have the physical advantage over females, which is the reason we have women’s sports,” she said, defending her bill.
Her rhetoric echoes that of Republicans across the country over the past several years: girls’ school sports need to be saved from transgender girls, and only transgender girls, not from a lack of interest from local communities, sexual predation, and harassment, or bullying girls face for participating in school sports.
Prominent Republican politicians have claimed to have saved girls’ sports, despite never showing any interest in girls’ or women’s sports except when they could attack transgender girls for wanting to participate.
Roem wasn’t having it.
“How about we pay them equally?” Roem said, calling out income inequality between women’s and men’s professional sports.
“How many times have any- any of you here gone to a girls’ basketball game followed by a boys’ basketball game where the girls’ game starts at 5 or 5:30 and the boys’ game starts at 7 or 7:30, and you saw the gym get packed right in the very end of the fourth quarter of the girls’ game because so many people were there excited for the boys’ game, regardless of how competitive, regardless of the skills, regardless of the rankings of the girls’ team?” Roem asked her colleagues.
“If we want to support female athletes, then show up to their games! Fight for equal pay for them! But at the same time, to beat up on trans kids because nine trans kids last year wanted to play sports, we’re now going to affect a policy for more than 1.2 million students?”
WATCH: Del. @pwcdanica's powerful statement on the House floor today, calling out the hypocrisy behind the anti-trans sports ban.
This is great. The short post details his upset and anger at a lot of religions being accepting of gay people. Many have come to the idea that the sin is the sex act not the person’s orientation, and some sects are allies and supportive of gay people and same sex relationships. But you see this interferes with their grift of raising money from bigots, mostly older religious people who are sure gays being allowed to exist in society will anger the god of all things to the point he will destroy or hurt the entire country including maybe them. If most churches catch up with the modern era, well the people won’t be told how bad and evil it is so they won’t give up their merger social security check or make the big donations these hate groups have come to depend on to keep them living well. Think of the fund raising pitches they have lost recently. They can not raise money on stopping abortion after the SCOTUS gave a completely religious ruling on the issue. They fund raised hard to stop same sex marriage before the congress and Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act with every pitch saying they could stop it if you gave just another donation. But of course, they failed again. Now Brian Brown has another pitch about the gays he is pushing to grift more money. That is not to say these people are not dangerous and that they don’t still have a lot of inflance on the right with the republican leaders. Bigotry and fear raise a lot of cash and gets votes. And both the republicans and the fundamentalists / evangelical religious groups do want to wipe the LGBTQ+ out of society to install their religious doctrines into laws to regress the US society back to the past and keep it there. Simply put their comfort zones and what they can deal with is 70 or 80 years old, and their holy book is stuck in the deep past of 2,500 years ago. They can not accept the modern age when their all knowing god only knew what was accepted by a minority 2,500 years ago. Hugs.
Want to live in a theocracy? This is the situation in the US, we have a set of Christian Nationalist aided by traditionalist conservatives that think 1950s was the golden days in society in the US. This is not just an attempt to roll back the advances in society the last 70 years, changes that are normal if you look at history, this is an attempt to lock all of society to a point in the past with it never changing. We are at a very dangerous point in history. Look how this people project their actions on others claiming the LGBTQ+ and their supporters are violent thugs, are brown shirts and SS troopers, are intolerant of others views, all the things these Christian nationalists do to the LGBTQ+ community. You don’t see the LGBTQ+ removing Christian books or the bible from libraries defunding them for having books with Christian characters, attacking churches or places where bible studies are happening. The Christians are not the victims here. Hugs
OT. I am really trying to post and to make sense of the information. I had a setback with my pharmacy for the new medication my pain doctor prescribed due to the Florida government’s laws so I had to call them, and it will be three days from when prescribed to when I may be able to get it. There were other problems. The pain doctor removed one medication to add another stronger one, but that caused a problem with the pharmacy which is under threat from the Florida government on any pain medication. I hurt so bad right now in back, arms, legs, fingers that I can hardly reason and make this post. The doctor offered me several different changes of medications including OxyContin and its versions, Vicodin, and the one that scares me the most Fentanyl. They agree I need more pain relief than I am getting. They scheduled an appointment next month for an injection into my T6 /T7 vertebrae but there is also a problem with my T8 vertebrae. Another issue is under Medicare I can only get 4 injections a year in any one area. Plus another issue is the amount of steroids I can take with my poor bones VS the number of injections I need to relieve the pain. Also remember the state of Florida legislators think they know more than the trained professions so they restrict the help I can get. The important thing is my doctors now all agree I am beyond functioning, and they need to go to a higher level to help me. Also a side note: I got a jury summons. I showed it to my pain doctor. She said no way you can do that; they would be calling an ambulance if you tried. She wrote a letter to the clerk of court and had her office fax it to them. I also sent an email to the clerk of court with the same. I got a reply very shortly saying I was permanently removed from jury duty. Understand I have done jury duty before, and I take it seriously and back then wanted to do it. I even might say I enjoyed doing it. But there is no way I can do so now when I cannot sit to read news or even handle my blog that I love. Hugs
He tried to de-fund Sesame Street for letting a gay actor appear on the show. Now he’s taking on the drag queens running America.
A staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Arkansas Republican is warning his constituents about the dangers of drag queens “running this place” and said that Christians have to “take authority” over the government in the U.S.
“We must take authority,” Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R) said on his Save the Nation with Jason Rapert broadcast. “God told us to go out there and be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue it, and have dominion over everything.”
“Friends, the reason the country is struggling,” he continued, “is because the Christians in America have failed to take authority and now is the time to choose, now is the time to stand.”
“Look, do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place? No!” he said, not mentioning any drag queen by name who is in a position of political power in the federal government. There is only one known former drag queen in Congress, Rep. George Santos (R-NY), and he haspromoted staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ political positions.
“If you’re tired of that stuff, it’s time to make a change,” Rapert continued.
“This is a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. It was created for you to be in charge,” he said, likely referring to his conservative constituents and no one else.
Former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers Jason Rapert declares that Christians “must take authority” over government: “Do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place?” pic.twitter.com/cUp6pyr4XF
Former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers Jason Rapert declares that Christians "must take authority" over government: "Do you think that America is gonna be free with a bunch of drag queens running this place?" pic.twitter.com/cUp6pyr4XF
Rapert has a history of anti-LGBTQ+ statements and actions. In 2020, he suggested cutting off funding for PBS because out actor Billy Porter was going to appear on an episode of Sesame Street.
“I can pass a bill to cutoff all funding for the rebroadcast of PBS programming through AETN [Arkansas’s PBS affiliate] and also stop all funding for AETN altogether if necessary,” he wrote on Facebook at the time.
In a separate Facebook post, Rapert claimed to have signed a petition to stop Porter from appearing on Sesame Street, a petition started by Canadian rightwing website Lifesite News that claims to have over 38,000 signatures.
The petition said that Sesame Street was trying “to push drag queens on children,” even though Billy Porter isn’t a drag queen. It claimed that Porter’s appearance on the show would “sexualize children” and cited a statistic about the epidemic of suicide among transgender youth, implying that Sesame Street will turn kids transgender and being transgender leads to suicide.
“The LGBT activists who behave as Nazis are trying to ruin anyone who ‘disagrees’ with them – even grandmothers,” he said on Facebook. “Simply believing in the Bible is offensive to these activists. They can’t stand it if you disagree. They demand full compliance with their diminished morality. They clearly behave just like the ‘brown shirts’ and ‘SS’ troops that Nazis used to destroy Jews and anyone who disagreed with the Nazi ideology.”
“I don’t care what THEY believe, but I refuse to let them intimidate those who disagree with them,” he continued. “Our laws should not give special protections to people who behave this way. It is a sad time in American history.”
That same year, he tried to get the Arkansas Senate to ban marriage equality despite the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges protecting same-sex couples’ right to get married in every state. He claimed that a “silent majority” spoke out against equal rights in the 2016 election and “they’re going to speak again.” His bill failed.
“It is not bigoted to say that marriage is between a man and a woman,”he said at the time.
In 2020, he spoke out against his state’s mask mandate, calling measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic “draconian measures” as originating from “liberal hacks” who are “spreading fear.”
“There is no question that Covid19 is serious and can be very deadly for those with underlying conditions and the elderly,” he wrote in a Facebook post about then-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s (R) mask mandate. “But the fact is 99% of our nation has not been afflicted and this pandemic is no worse statistically than other severe outbreaks we have endured without draconian measures isolating the healthy and shutting down our entire economy.”
By July 2020, he had been hospitalized for pneumonia after testing positive for COVID-19. He told his supporters that his family was “sincerely grateful for the many prayers of love and support that have been expressed on our behalf.”
This bill is specifically aimed at gay and trans people, especially gay and trans kids. In the article on Rep talks about traditional values and we all know what that is code for. A view that society was better in 1950 when white Christian men were in assumed to always be in charge, women were subservient to those white Christian men, black people knew and kept to their place, while the LGBTQ+ were hidden from society never being seen or talked about publicly. These republicans want to enshrine in law the right to discriminate against those they think shouldn’t be in society. They want to have it be legal to show your displeasure / hate by denying people public services that are extended to the people they think are good normal people. If you think this is OK for doctors to deny care to LGBTQ+ people because they don’t like them, substitute black for LGBTQ+ and do you still see it as OK. I worked around doctors and I can tell you many are bigots and racists. Especially now that it costs so much to go to college and medical school new doctors tend to be from families of doctors. It is fast becoming a profession that runs in families while those not wealthy students tend to be come either Phyicians Assistants or go into nursing and become Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner. I have sat at the nurses desk and listened to the most bigoted religious doctors (Catholic doctors seem to have a huge moral superiority chip on their shoulders or at least the ones I worked with did.) talk about their patients / the families of patients that horrified me. I have told the story of a highly religious catholic doctor that refused to recognize or honor the legal paperwork giving a same sex partner authority over his lovers care going to the extent to contact the estranged family to instead follow their wishes. When told by the hospital legal department that he was not allowed to do that and to include the same sex partner the doctor came in, signed himself off the case, and left. Our ICU director had to scramble to find a doctor with the needed credentials to take over care as the patient was in an ICU which needs doctors with certain qualifications. The point was his bigotry and hate for gays meant more to him, was more important to him than the health of the patient, the patient’s wishes, or the patient’s long term same sex relationship. Think what would have happened had this law that they are trying to pass would have let that doctor do? How is that tolerable? Hugs
HB 303, which allows medical providers to decline services based on moral or religious beliefs, cleared a key House vote Monday.
State lawmakers in the House of Representatives gave broad approval Monday to a bill that would allow medical providers, health care facilities and insurers to deny services based on “ethical, moral, or religious beliefs or principles,” signaling the bill’s likely advancement to the Senate this week.
House Bill 303, sponsored by Rep. Amy Regier, R-Kalispell, passed the Republican-majority chamber largely along party lines, with 65 votes in favor and 35 against, after roughly 20 minutes of debate.
Regier portrayed the bill as a “preservation and protection for medical conscience” in the state for practitioners and health care institutions that object to specific “lifestyle and elective procedures” such as physician aid in dying, prescribing marijuana or opioids, abortion procedures and gender-affirming medical care for transgender people.
“To be clear, this bill would not give the right to refuse to serve a person. It would only apply to the narrow circumstances where a nurse or physician cannot conscientiously perform a specific procedure,” Regier said.
A subsection of the bill says it is not meant to conflict with the federal emergency health care access law known as EMTALA as it applies to health care institutions, such as hospitals. But the bill does not provide a holistic exemption for emergency departments and emergency health care providers. When it comes to abortion, for example, the bill would require providers to opt-in to participating in those procedures in writing beforehand.
Similar legislation has had recent success in other states. For instance, a Medical Ethics and Diversity Act was signed into law in South Carolina last spring. The legislation in that state saw support from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious advocacy group that is also backing the Montana proposal.
The opposition to South Carolina’s legislation, including from transgender patients and LGBTQ advocacy groups, echoes concerns now surfacing in Montana over HB 303. Medical associations and groups, including the Montana Hospital Association, Montana Primary Care Association, Montana Nurses Association and the Montana Medical Association, testified against the bill during a January committee hearing, saying it would put patients’ care at risk.
During Monday’s debate on the House floor, Democrats reiterated that the bill includes no discrimination protection for patients, and does not guarantee that a patient has a right to access health care even if a specific provider declines to participate in those services.
Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, told fellow lawmakers the bill would mean transgender people like herself could be turned away from medical services they need.
“What is actually going to happen is it will be a denial based on diagnosis. Something like, I am diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” Zephyr said. “And the thing is, that is inherently discriminatory because you cannot pass my diagnosis from who I am. To deny me based on my diagnosis of gender dysphoria is to deny me based on my being a trans woman.”
Republican moderates appeared to try and derail the bill by proposing a strategic amendment during Monday’s floor session.
As written, HB 303 does not apply to a “health care institution or health care payer owned or operated by the state or a political subdivision of the state.” Some Republican representatives showed interest in striking that provision from the bill, an amendment that would have triggered a higher threshold for the bill to pass because of a specific provision of the state constitution. That amendment, proposed by Rep. Tom Welch, R-Dillon, failed in a 39-61 vote.
Republicans who spoke in support of the bill on the floor said they hoped the bill would protect freedom of expression for medical providers, even those they disagree with.
“I think in this increasingly lack of traditional values and conscience world, and oftentimes profit-driven world, that protection needs to be provided for providers and health care workers that do have those values and do have that conscience,” said Rep. Jerry Schilling, R-Circle.
Other Democrats who considered the bill as part of the House Judiciary Committee urged lawmakers to consider the unintended consequences of the bill. Rep. Laura Smith, D-Helena, said she’d heard stories from parents of young children faced with challenging medical circumstances who feared that, had HB 303 been in place, their desires for care would have been trumped by the prerogative or ideology of their providers.
“This is just one of many examples that I receive where medical teams have tried to deny parents’ rights to choose procedures for their children,” Smith said. “If the bill passes, it will take away parental rights, and your constituents’ parental rights, to make these life-and-death procedural and medical decisions for our own children.”
The bill ultimately passed with widespread Republican support and one affirmative vote from Rep. Frank Smith, D-Poplar. Four Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in opposition.
If the bill passes a third, non-debatable vote this week, it will then be transmitted to the Senate and assigned to a committee for a second hearing.
Speaking to Montana Free Press Monday afternoon, Regier said she was pleased by the vote margin.
Scottie's Playtime 