Vice President Kamala Harris, left-wing media outlets and some misguided 2024 Presidential aspirants have claimed that Florida's school curriculum teaches students that slaves in the U.S. “benefited from slavery.” As usual, Harris has distorted the facts, perhaps intentionally, and is clearly wrong about the curriculum content.
In an interview with Dr. William B. Allen, one of the developers of Florida's new K-12 social studies curriculum, NPR's Steve Inskeep asked the professor . . . "[the] instruction includes how slaves developed skills, which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit. What did you mean by that?”
Dr. Allen responded, “I think the sentence explains itself. Its grammar is certainly perfectly clear when refers to the fact that those who were held in slavery possessed skills, whether they developed them before being held in slavery, while being held in slavery or subsequently to being held in slavery, from which they benefited when they applied themselves in the exertion of those skills. That’s not a statement that is at all controversial. The facts sustain it. The testimonies of the people who lived the history sustain it.”
Later on, in an interview on the Fox News network (Jesse Watter’s Prime Time) he said, “Permit me not to give you Kamala Harris’ motives. They’re invisible. I don’t know them. We can all have suspicions that there’s a dishonest purpose afoot. But what’s more important than that dishonest purpose is the truth, and this curriculum is devoted to telling the truth. Whereas, Kamala Harris has re-told a lie. Now, it may have only have been a falsehood the first time she stated it. But when you repeat a falsehood, it becomes a lie.”
Allen defended the curriculum, saying that it centers on enslaved black voices and allows them to “tell their stories.” He went on to say “that critics of the curriculum are attempting to project modern sensibilities and grievances onto people of an earlier era. By doing this, they are erasing their stories and legacies.” [William Barclay Allen is an author, professor, and political scientist from Fernandina Beach, Florida, United States. Dr. Allen has been described as a "conservative black leader in education." He was the former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, professor emeritus of political science at Michigan State University, and is now a member of Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup. His participation in the development of the Florida curriculum was as an uncompensated volunteer.]
The professor is correct. It is interesting that the founder of the University of Florida School of Journalism, the late Missouri Congressman, Orland K. Armstrong, wrote a book titled “OLD MASSA’S PEOPLE: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story” that was published in 1931. It was based on over a thousand interviews with former slaves throughout the South conducted from 1925 to 1930. OK Armstrong was an early Civil Rights warrior and author. He has had little recognition even in his own state. But his book, written in the vernacular of the old slaves, is an honest effort to state the truth.
OLD MASSA’S PEOPLE has been republished by American Freedom Publications LLC and is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The biography of OK Armstrong entitled “SHOW-ME WARRIOR” is also available. Both publications are available in hardback, paperback and Kindle/Nook versions.
Ms Harris trivialized slavery with her thougtless comment. Slavery was a most horrifying and demeaning period in history.