Accurate account of Black history is necessary to establishing curriculum

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth in a series about the work of the Remembering our Past … Redefining Our Present… Reaffirming Our Future: “The Teaching our History” Task Force. This article focuses on “Reviewing Our Past.”

By Johnny Turner
Special to the Outlook

The President of the Florida General Baptist Convention appointed Rev. RB Holmes to chair the Teach Our Own History Task Force Committee to focus on responding to the Governor’s mandate to erase our history from textbooks in Florida.

The chair appointed sub-committees to keenly focus on specific areas of significance to catapult our rich and valuable history amid political differences. Our thematic summary is “Remembering Our Past, Redefining Our Present, and Reaffirming Our Future.” This theme helps us bridge our task force with churches, educational institutions, communities, and legal support to accomplish our goal as we remember our ancestor’s legacy from the antebellum South. 

This urgent task united pastors, ministers, and church leaders statewide. Therefore, the task force’s primary objective is to prepare, publish, and present an authentic and accurate model that provides substantive teaching. We aim to advocate an amicable approach to presenting and preserving our history. This focus is to emphasize African American culture, experience, and substantial contributions of African Americans in the state of Florida’s K-12 curriculum and other educational ventures that add credibility to align with educational benchmarks. 

The following subcommittees are the Curriculum Development, Resource, and Research, the Establishment of Private Academic Institutions, the Establishment of Freedom Schools across Florida by 2025, and the Black Press. The Committee has been discussing the expunging of our history from the textbooks and devaluing the integrity of skills brought to slave the tradition.

Our history is too rich to be extracted and overlooked by the Florida political constituency. As a committee, we believe that the younger generation needs to know our history and from whence we came. 

In one session, we discussed contacting various churches to have them run their own school to teach our history. The committee reviewed our purpose and focus with sub-committees: Our objective is to prepare, publish, and present an authentic model with accuracy to teach African American history.

We discussed the seven objectives that support our aim and platform as we confront the turbulent waters of political opposition to sustaining our history amid the attempt to devalue and dehumanize our character, integrity, and tradition. The motive was to collaborate on critical and practical thinking to devise a plan of aggressive response that brings positive information through a symposium of interaction to reach the goal of maintaining our history. 

The symposium will focus on linking sacredness to the social teaching of our history. We have heard from elected officials, the voices of students, and millennials because we have a charge to keep while persevering in supporting the legacy and integrity of our history. This symposium further reminds us of the book Troubling Biblical Waters by Cain Hope Felder, which emphasizes race, class, and family in the Bible and modern-day society. We live in the tight grip of social injustice, and this task force has passionately prayed, planned, and presented a viable and accurate model of authentic teaching our history in a pluralistic society.

Johnny Turner, Ph.D., is a member of the Establishment of Freedom Schools Sub-Committee.