Slavery (Historical)

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    Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

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    This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yale Apologizes for Its Connections to Slavery

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      The university also issued a historical study and announced steps to address this legacy, including new support for public education in New Haven, Conn.Yale University on Friday issued a formal apology for its early leaders’ involvement with slavery, accompanied by the release of a detailed history of the university’s connections to slavery and a list of what it said were initial steps to make some amends.The announcement came more than three years after Yale announced a major investigation into the university’s connections to slavery, the slave trade and abolition, amid intense national conversations about racial justice set off by the murder of George Floyd. And it frames what the school’s leaders say will be a continuing commitment to repair.“We recognize our university’s historical role in and associations with slavery, as well as the labor, the experiences and the contributions of enslaved people to our university’s history, and we apologize for the ways that Yale’s leaders, over the course of our early history, participated in slavery,” the university’s president, Peter Salovey, and the senior board trustee, Josh Bekenstein, said in a message to the university community.“Acknowledging and apologizing for this history are only part of the path forward,” they continued. The university is also creating new programs to fund the training of public schoolteachers for its home city, New Haven, Conn., whose population is predominantly Black. And Yale will expand previously announced research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities across the country, with a “significant new investment” to be announced in coming weeks.Unlike Harvard, which in 2022 committed $100 million to a “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” Yale did not announce an amount for all its initiatives.David W. Blight, the Yale historian who led the historical research, said in an interview that the purpose of the effort was not “to cast ugly stones at anybody,” but to present the university’s history honestly and unflinchingly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      History Argues for Disqualifying Trump

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      One of the most difficult things to ask a judge to do is issue a ruling that he or she believes is actually dangerous. Even if you can make a strong case that the letter of the law is on your side, judges are tempted to narrow the reach of disfavored laws or sometimes virtually rewrite them in order to avoid outcomes that are deemed too radical or disruptive.Thus, it’s incumbent on good lawyers to argue not merely in favor of the letter of the law but also for the underlying merit of the law itself. My newsletter two weeks ago focused mainly on the legal argument for disqualifying Donald Trump from the presidency on the basis of the text and history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I made the case that the plain language of the amendment should disqualify Trump regardless of the consequences, which many observers — including some strongly opposed to Trump — believe would be dire and violent.Today, by contrast, I will make the case that even the consequences argue for Trump’s disqualification. Or, put more directly, that the consequences of not disqualifying the former president are likely to be worse than those of disqualifying him. This is the lesson of history both recent — the Trump era and Jan. 6, 2021 — and more distant. The profound mistakes of the Reconstruction-era Congress, just years after the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, teach us about the high cost of welcoming insurrectionists back into high office.I addressed these points briefly in a short post for our new Opinion blog, but they deserve more attention. Critics of applying Section 3 to Trump have correctly and eloquently argued that removing him from the race could trigger a convulsive and potentially violent backlash in the American body politic. Millions of Americans would feel as if their choice was taken from them and that scheming elites were destroying American democracy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Erases Civil War History

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      Nikki Haley drew criticism this week for what she didn’t say. As she campaigned in New Hampshire for the Republican presidential nomination, a person asked her to name the cause of the Civil War.Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, joked it was not an “easy question.” She then mentioned “how government was going to run,” “freedoms,” the need for “capitalism” and individual liberties. When the questioner observed that she hadn’t mentioned slavery, she asked, “What do you want me to say about slavery?”She told a radio interviewer the next morning that “of course” the war was about slavery, that she was not evading the issue but trying to reframe it in modern terms. While we shouldn’t read too much into one video clip, it’s fair to ask: How is the Civil War’s cause not an easy question?The facts of our history are currently contested — especially that history. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has acted to restrict what he sees as woke views of slavery and race in schools. Other Republican-led states have taken similar measures, and Donald Trump has offered his own hazy views of the past. It’s no wonder Ms. Haley spoke cautiously. The history of race has become as fraught a topic on the political right as it has been on the left.All this points to a reality we would do well to confront: Some Americans do not believe slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I encountered some of them while discussing a recent book on Abraham Lincoln.A few days ago, a caller on C-SPAN identified as “William in Lansford, Pa.,” asserted this to me: “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was about the states fighting with one another about money.”It was far from the first time I’ve heard such claims. It’s not hard to see why a candidate might avoid engaging too deeply with voters on this topic.But the rest of us can arm ourselves with a few base-line facts. Far more than most historical events, the Civil War is debated among ordinary people as much as among historians. (Lincoln called it “a people’s war,” and it’s now a people’s history. I recently attended the annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, Pa., where scholars shared the room with hundreds of superfans.) If we are to hold on to our history, we can prepare ourselves to respond calmly and with facts when someone makes a doubtful claim. Evidence shows what the war was about. It also shows why some people think it wasn’t about slavery — and why it matters a century and a half later.The evidence is straightforward. Southern states rejected Lincoln’s 1860 election as a president from the antislavery Republican Party. South Carolina was the first of 11 states that tried to leave the Union, and Confederates fired the first shot of the Civil War there at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.Leaders of the would-be new republic named slavery as their cause. Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in 1861 in which he said “the assumption of the equality of races” was “an error” and “a sandy foundation” for the country he intended to leave.More than 30 years of agitation over slavery preceded the war. Northern antislavery leaders denounced the South’s institution more and more loudly and finally organized through the new Republican Party to gain political power. Southern leaders, who once cast slavery as a tragic inheritance from colonial times, increasingly defended it as moral and good.After the South’s defeat in 1865, these plain facts were obscured. Former Confederates cast their war heroes, like Robert E. Lee, as defenders of their home states rather than champions of slavery.The United Daughters of the Confederacy campaigned for generations to downplay slavery’s role in the war. In a 1924 speech to the group’s annual convention, Hollins N. Randolph asserted that “Southern men” had “fought to the death” for “the liberty of the individual, for the home and for the great principle of local self-government.” Never mind that it was “the liberty of the individual” to own other human beings. The speech advocated raising money for a great Confederate monument that still exists at Stone Mountain, Ga.Beyond the bombast, historians contested many facets of the long road to war. To give just one example from the immense scholarly record: T. Harry Williams, a 20th-century writer, put some blame for the war on Northern capitalists. He said they foresaw “fat rewards” in knocking proslavery aristocrats out of power and reshaping the economy to benefit their own factories and railroads. But really, such arguments amount to different interpretations of how the United States came to fight a war over slavery.Today some people quote Lincoln — accurately — saying his main war aim was preserving the Union, not ending slavery. But these quotes cannot sustain any argument longer than a social media meme. Lincoln also said that slavery was “the cause of the war.” Preserving the Union ultimately required slavery’s destruction.It seems that people question the historical record less because of doubt about the past than because of conflicts in the present. Some conservatives feel that progressives use slavery as a cudgel against their side in modern debates over race and equality.The first Republican president saw slavery neither as a cudgel nor as something that he needed to obscure. In an 1864 letter, he described slavery as a “great wrong” and added that people of the North and South alike shared “complicity in that wrong.”Complicity. Lincoln affirmed his country’s responsibility for failing to live up to its promise of equality. He still believed in the country and its promise.Lincoln never claimed to be morally superior to his countrymen. He focused on an immoral system, which he worked to restrict and then to destroy. The end of slavery is now part of this country’s legacy. It’s also part of the legacy of Lincoln’s party, though Ms. Haley’s example shows it can be hard for Republican candidates to talk about it.Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “Up First,” is the author of “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Nikki Haley, in Retreat, Says ‘Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery’

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      A day after giving a stumbling answer about the conflict’s origin that did not mention slavery, Ms. Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, on Thursday walked back her stumbling answer about the cause of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, a state that is central to her presidential hopes, where she was asked what caused the Civil War. She stumbled through an answer about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after jokingly telling the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted she never uttered the word “slavery.”“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Ms. Haley replied. “Next question.”Speaking on a New Hampshire radio show on Thursday morning, Ms. Haley, who famously removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, said: “Yes I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”But she also insinuated that the question had come not from a Republican voter but from a political detractor, accusing President Biden and Democrats of “sending plants” to her town-hall events.“Why are they hitting me? See this for what it is,” she said, adding, “They want to run against Trump.”In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.She tried to walk back her comments on Thursday, asking: “What’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”The episode also undermined her appeal to moderates and independents seeking to thwart Mr. Trump’s return to the White House by portraying Ms. Haley as an agent of compromise.Her record as governor of South Carolina included blocking a bill to stop transgender youths from using bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity. Her push to lower the Confederate battle flag came after the mass shooting of Black worshipers at a Charleston church by a white supremacist. And she has recently called for a middle ground on abortion.“Haley’s refusal to talk honestly about slavery or race in America is a sad betrayal of her own story,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. More

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      Haley, Asked About the Cause of the Civil War, Avoids Mentioning Slavery

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      A pointed question, at a town hall in New Hampshire, raises a complicated topic for Nikki Haley, who as governor of South Carolina wrestled with issues stemming from the Confederacy.Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina who for years has wrestled with how to approach issues of race, slavery and the Confederacy, found herself again confronted with those subjects at a town hall event on Wednesday in New Hampshire, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.Her answer to a simple yet loaded question by an audience member in the city of Berlin — “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” — showed just how much she continues to struggle with such topics.“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she said eventually, arguing that government should not tell people how to live their lives or “what you can and can’t do.”“I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people,” she said. “It was never meant to be all things to all people.”Notably missing from her answer was slavery, which most mainstream historians agree was at the root of the United States’ bloodiest conflict — specifically the economics and political control behind slavery. Democrats were quick to jump on her answer, with President Biden’s re-election campaign team and others spreading video of the exchange on social media.After a quick back and forth with the questioner, she said, “What do you want me to say about slavery? Next question.”“I am disgusted, but I’m not surprised — this is what Black South Carolinians have come to expect from Nikki Haley, and now the rest of the country is getting to see her for who she is,” Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.How much it matters, if at all, in the Republican primary race is yet to be seen. Former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race, has been ramping up the temperature on his own divisive rhetoric, not lowering it. Ms. Haley is looking to tap into some of his supporters. But as she looks to New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23, she is counting on moderate Republicans and independents — who may vote in the contest — to give her a strong showing.Her latest remarks were in keeping with the way she and most of her Republican rivals have toed the line on race and racism on the 2024 presidential trail, downplaying the nation’s sordid racial history and portraying structural racism and prejudice as challenges of the past. The remarks also are in line with her campaign message, which has included pledges to reduce the size of the federal government and leave it up to the states to decide how to handle major issues like abortion.A Haley spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on Wednesday night.Ms. Haley, who governed a state at the heart of the Confederacy, has a particularly complicated record on issues of race.She drew national acclaim when she signed legislation to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina State House, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015, including a state senator. On the trail, she recalls the experience to significant effect, casting herself as a new generational leader in the Republican Party capable of bridging differences.But as she ran for election in 2010 and then re-election in 2014, she rejected talk of removing the flag. In a 2010 interview with Confederate heritage group leaders, a major political force in her state, she argued that the Confederate flag was “not something racist” but about tradition and heritage. She said that she could leverage her identity as a minority woman to fend off calls to boycott the flag. “You know for those groups that come in and say they have issues with the Confederate flag, I will work to talk to them about it,” she said.After the 2015 attack shook South Carolina, Ms. Haley seized on efforts from state lawmakers to remove the flag.In response to the audience member on Wednesday, Ms. Haley argued that the United States needed to have capitalism and economic freedom and to ensure “freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”The audience member said it was “astonishing” that Ms. Haley had answered his question without saying the word slavery. More

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      Tim Scott Tackles Race and Racism in Chicago, Trying to Gain Traction

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina gave his speech as his struggling presidential campaign said it would move most of its staff to Iowa.Senator Tim Scott, struggling to gain traction less than three months before the first Republican primary ballots are cast, came to the South Side of Chicago on Monday to rebuke the welfare state and the liberal politicians he dismissed as “drug dealers of despair.”The speech was at New Beginnings Church in the poor neighborhood of Woodlawn. It may have been delivered to Black Chicagoans, but the South Carolina senator’s broadsides — criticizing “the radical left,” the first Black female vice president, Kamala Harris, and “liberal elites” who want a “valueless, faithless, fatherless America where the government becomes God” — were aimed at an audience far away. That audience was Republican voters in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the donors who have peeled away from his campaign.His political persona as the “happy warrior” gave way to a chin-out antagonism toward the Black leaders who run the nation’s third-largest city, and the Democratic Party that “would rather lower the bar for people of color than raise the bar on their own leadership.”Speaking to a largely receptive audience in a church run by a charismatic Republican pastor, Mr. Scott added: “They say they want low-income Americans and people of color to rise, but their actions take us in the opposite direction. The actions say they want us to sit down, shut up and don’t forget to vote as long as we’re voting blue.”The speech came just minutes before a Scott campaign staff call announcing that the senator’s once-flush campaign would move most of its resources and staff to Iowa, in a last-ditch effort to win the first caucus of the season and rescue the campaign.“Tim Scott is all in on Iowa,” his campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, said in a statement.Mr. Scott, the first Black Republican senator from the South in more than a century, launched his presidential bid in May, with a roster of prominent Republicans behind him, a $22 million war chest and a message of optimism that separated him from the crowded primary field. To many white Republicans, his message on race, delivered as a son of South Carolina, where slavery was deeply embedded and where the Civil War began, resonated, while many Black Democrats found it naïve and insulting.“If you stop at our original sin, you have not started the story of America, because the story of America is not defined by our original sin,” he said early this year as he considered a presidential run. “The story of America is defined by our redemption.”But from the beginning, even supporters wondered aloud whether optimism and uplift were what Republican voters wanted, after so many years of Donald J. Trump and the rising culture of vengeance in the G.O.P.This past weekend, Don Schmidt, 78, a retired banker from Hudson, Iowa, put it bluntly to Mr. Scott as the senator campaigned in Cedar Falls before the University of Northern Iowa beat the University of North Dakota in football. Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Scott he was thinking of supporting him or Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.“But,” he cautioned, “I don’t know whether you can beat Trump.”Race has lately been a particularly problematic subject for Mr. Scott. He has at once maintained there is no such thing as systemic racism in the United States, but has also spoken of having a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South, and of his own brushes with law enforcement simply because he was driving a new car.His audience on Monday on the South Side were the grandchildren of the Black workers who left the segregated South during the Great Migration to lean their shoulders into the industrialization of the Upper Midwest. And he seemed to invite the pushback he got after the speech as part of the political theater.Rodrick Wimberly, a 54-year-old congregant at the New Beginnings Church, was incredulous that Mr. Scott really did not believe that the failings of some Black people were brought on by systemic impediments. He brought up redlining that kept Black Chicagoans out of safer neighborhoods with better schools and lending discrimination that suppressed Black entrepreneurship and homeownership.“What we see in education, in housing, the wealth gap widening, there is statistical data to show or suggest at the very least there are some issues that are systemic,” Mr. Wimberly told the senator. “It’s not just individual.”But Mr. Scott held his ground, just as he has since June, when the senator tried to stir up interest in his campaign with a clash on the television show “The View” over an assertion that he didn’t “get” American racism.When Mr. Wimberly suggested that the failing educational system was an example of the systemic racism holding Black Chicagoans back, Mr. Scott responded: “But who’s running that system? Black people are running that system.”Such sparring has largely failed to lift his campaign, however. On Saturday, his hometown newspaper, The Post and Courier of Charleston, advised Mr. Scott and other Republican candidates to drop out and endorse Ms. Haley as the candidate best positioned to challenge Mr. Trump in the primaries, which begin in fewer than three months.Last week, Mr. Scott’s super PAC, Trust in the Mission PAC, or TIM PAC, told donors it would cancel “all of our fall media inventory.”“We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is a co-chairman of the super PAC, wrote in the blunt memo. As Bill Brune, 73, a Republican and Army veteran from La Motte, Iowa, put it this weekend: “There’s a lot of good people, but they get no attention. The good guys finish last.”Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, who has a glittering high-rise hotel on the Chicago River, have for years used the city as a stand-in for urban decay and violence, though that portrait is at best incomplete. Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican presidential candidate, came to a different South Side neighborhood three miles from New Beginnings in May to discuss tensions among Black residents over the city’s efforts to accommodate an influx of migrants, many of whom were bused there from the border by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas — but also to show his willingness to speak with audiences usually ignored by Republican candidates.Monday’s appearance was, in effect, Mr. Scott’s take on adopting — and amplifying — Mr. Ramaswamy’s flair for the dramatic. Shabazz Muhammad, 51, was released from prison in 2020, after serving 31 years. Since then, he said, he has struggled to find work and housing because of his record and what he called “the social booby traps” in his way. Beyond the candidate’s critique of the welfare state, Mr. Muhammad wanted to know specifically what Mr. Scott wanted to do to help people like him.Mr. Scott, though sympathetic, was unwavering in his description of social welfare policies as “colossal, crippling, continual failures.”“Are we tough enough to get better and not bitter?” he asked his audience.Neil Vigdor More

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      DeSantis Faces Swell of Criticism Over Florida’s New Standards for Black History

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      In one benchmark, middle schoolers would learn that enslaved Americans developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”After an overhaul to Florida’s African American history standards, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s firebrand governor campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, is facing a barrage of criticism this week from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.For instance, the standards say that middle schoolers should be instructed that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit” — a portrayal that drew wide rebuke.In a sign of the divisive battle around education that could infect the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris directed her staffers to immediately plan a trip to Florida to respond, according to one White House official.“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris, the first African American and first Asian American to serve as vice president, said in a speech in Jacksonville on Friday afternoon.Ahead of her speech, Mr. DeSantis released a statement accusing the Biden administration of mischaracterizing the new standards and being “obsessed with Florida.”Florida’s new standards land in the middle of a national tug of war on how race and gender should be taught in schools. There have been local skirmishes over banning books, what can be said about race in classrooms and debates over renaming schools that have honored Confederate generals.Mr. DeSantis has made fighting a “woke” agenda in education a signature part of his national brand. He overhauled New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college, and rejected the College Board’s A.P. course on African American studies. And his administration updated the state’s math and social studies textbooks, scrubbing them for “prohibited topics” like social-emotional learning, which helps students develop positive mind-sets, and critical race theory, which looks at the systemic role of racism in society.With Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Biden now both official candidates in the 2024 campaign, each side quickly accused the other of pushing propaganda onto children.Florida’s rewrite of its African American history standards comes in response to a 2022 law signed by Mr. DeSantis, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.The new standards seem to emphasize the positive contributions of Black Americans throughout history, from Booker T. Washington to Zora Neale Hurston.Fifth graders are expected to learn about the “resiliency” of African Americans, including how the formerly enslaved helped others escape as part of the Underground Railroad, and about the contributions of African Americans during westward expansion.The teaching of positive history is important, said Albert S. Broussard, a professor of African American studies at Texas A&M University who has helped write history textbooks for McGraw Hill. “Black history is not just one long story of tragedy and sadness and brutality,” he said.But he saw some of Florida’s adjustments as going too far, de-emphasizing the violence and inhumanity endured by Black Americans and resulting in only a “partial history.”“It’s the kind of sanitizing students are going to pick up,” he said. “Students are going to ask questions and they are going to demand answers.”The Florida Department of Education said the new standards were the result of a “rigorous process,” describing them as “in-depth and comprehensive.”“They incorporate all components of African American History: the good, the bad and the ugly,” said Alex Lanfranconi, the department’s director of communications.One contested standard states that high school students should learn about “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” during race massacres of the early 20th century, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre. In that massacre, white rioters destroyed a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., and as many as 300 people were killed.By saying that violence was perpetrated not just against but “by African Americans,” the standards seem to grasp at teaching “both sides” of history, said LaGarrett King, the director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo.But historically, he said, “it’s just not accurate.”By and large, historians say, race massacres during the early 1900s were led by white groups, often to stop Black residents from voting.That was the case in the Ocoee Massacre of 1920, in which a white crowd, incensed by a Black man’s attempt to vote, burned Black homes and churches to the ground and killed an unknown number of Black residents in a small Florida town.Geraldine Thompson, a Democratic state senator who pushed to require Florida schools to teach the massacre, said she was not consulted in the formation of the new standards, though she holds a nonvoting role on the Commissioner of Education’s African American History Task Force.She said she would have objected to the standards as “slanted” and “incomplete.” She questioned, for instance, why more emphasis was not placed on the history of African people before colonization and enslavement.“Our history doesn’t begin with slavery,” she said in an interview. “It begins with some of the greatest civilizations in the world.”The Florida standards were created by a 13-member “work group,” with input from the African American history task force, according to the Florida Department of Education.Two members of the work group, William Allen and Frances Presley Rice, released a statement responding to critiques of one of the most dissected standards, depicting enslaved African Americans as personally benefiting from their skills.“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited,” they said, citing blacksmithing, shoemaking and fishing as examples.“Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history,” they said. “Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”Florida is one of about a dozen states that require the teaching of African American history.Other states with such mandates include South Carolina, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey.The state mandates date back decades — Florida’s was passed in 1994 — and often came in response to demands from Black residents and educators, said Dr. King, at the University at Buffalo.“There is a legacy of Black people fighting for their history,” he said.But for as long as Black history has been taught, he said, there has been debate about which aspects to emphasize. At times, certain historical figures and story lines have emerged as more palatable to a white audience, Dr. King said.“There is Black history,” he said. “But the question has always been, well, what Black history are we going to teach?”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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      A Battle Over Murals Depicting Slavery

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      More from our inbox:Corporal Punishment in SchoolsWhat We Don’t Know About Ron DeSantisHelp for CaregiversCalifornia and the Colorado RiverGuns and CrimeThe murals in the Chase Community Center have been covered at Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton, Vt.Richard Beaven for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Artist and School Spar Over Murals of Slavery” (front page, Feb. 22):The decision to cover these murals is totally outrageous. One doesn’t learn from the past by covering it over. You learn by studying, and that is what an educational institution should provide. You don’t erase, or cover over, the past because it is unpleasant or disturbing.Of course it is, and continues to be, disturbing, but when you literally come face to face with it as these murals make possible, you then must consider what that discomfort means in terms of both our history as a nation and our laws and actions today.The school should take down the panels, expose the murals and their history once again and provide context and the opportunity for discussion.Elaine Hirschl EllisNew YorkThe writer is the president of Arts and Crafts Tours, which hosts trips about 19th- and 20th-century art and architecture.To the Editor:The quote from a law student who was distressed by a visual depiction of slavery by a white artist — “The artist was depicting history, but it’s not his history to depict” — is most disturbing. The argument is not whether the artistic merits of the mural should be considered? Or that the mood of the piece may be too harsh for a student center?Those who think censoring painters or other artists by limiting their creative themes according to their race or ethnic identity are closed-minded, and will erode free artistic expression.Steve CohenNew YorkTo the Editor:The diverse reactions to the murals in the article can be attributed to a debate over the periods that influenced the artist’s painting style.The intent of the school and the artist to represent the state’s role in helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad was admirable. Yet the figurative style still harkens back to the comedically formulaic and stereotypical blackened ones of minstrels’ stage entertainment prevalent in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.The spirit of mockery seen in the most famous minstrel, Jim Crow, persists today in the form of white supremacy, voter restriction and inequity. That style’s history would not be lost on many viewers.A discussion hosted by the school’s National Center for Restorative Justice about this issue could be a powerful learning tool for us all.Theresa McNicholCranbury, N.J.The writer is an art historian.Corporal Punishment in SchoolsCharles Lavine, the chairman of the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee, is among the lawmakers who have filed bills to bar corporal punishment in private schools.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Bills Push Corporal Punishment Ban in New York Private Schools” (news article, March 3):I was shocked to read that physical violence against children is still tolerated in some New York schools. I suffered the occasional whack from the nuns in parochial school, usually for “having a fresh mouth,” but that was many years ago. I thought that anachronistic practice had long since ended.I support the effort of Assemblyman Charles Lavine and his colleagues to protect students and bring all of our schools into line with the progressive values of a modern society.John E. StaffordRye, N.Y.What We Don’t Know About Ron DeSantis Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “My Fellow Liberals Are Exaggerating the Dangers of Ron DeSantis,” by Damon Linker (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Feb. 27):Mr. Linker misses the point of voters’ anxiety about Florida’s governor. The fear stems not from what we know about Ron DeSantis, but what we do not. We know that he shares Donald Trump’s penchant for bullying, bigotry, trolling and media manipulation.What we do not know is whether Mr. DeSantis shares Mr. Trump’s contempt for the presidential oath of office. Will Mr. DeSantis use the bully pulpit to undermine faith in our elections, as Mr. Trump did? Will he try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, as Mr. Trump did? We cannot know, because Mr. DeSantis refuses to enlighten us.Until he speaks forthrightly to these questions, voters (not just “liberals”) have a right to view Mr. DeSantis as more dangerous than Donald Trump.Indeed, all Republican candidates should be expected to repudiate Mr. Trump’s malfeasance. Trust has been violated, and must be restored if we are to move forward together again as one nation.Andrew MeyerMiddletown, N.J.Help for CaregiversPresident Biden at an Intel facility under construction in New Albany, Ohio, in September. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Funds to Bolster U.S. Chip-Making Come With Catch” (front page, Feb. 28):The Biden administration’s efforts to leverage its investments in semiconductor infrastructure to expand child care are laudable and much needed, but the policy falls short of supporting millions of Americans caring for aging or disabled loved ones who also need support to stay and succeed in the work force.The 32 million working caregivers at this end of the spectrum continue to be left out of administrative and federal action to support working families. For example, working caregivers of older adults, people with disabilities and people living with serious medical conditions were excluded from the expansion of paid leave for federal workers and from the emergency paid leave provisions of Covid response legislation. As a result, these caregivers are more likely to report negative impacts at work because of caregiving responsibilities.Using administrative authority to help caregivers balance care and work is urgently needed given stalled efforts in Congress to pass policies like paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and strengthened aging and disability care. But without a comprehensive approach, millions of family caregivers will continue to be left behind.Jason ResendezWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Caregiving.California and the Colorado RiverA broken boat, which used to be underwater in Lake Mead now sits above the lake’s water line because of a decades-long megadrought, outside Boulder City, Nev., Feb. 2.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “California Wants to Keep (Most of) the Colorado River for Itself,” by John Fleck (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Feb. 23):The essay does not acknowledge that only California has voluntarily offered to significantly cut its use of Colorado River water in the near term under a proposal that also ensures that cities in Arizona, Nevada and across the Southwest have the water they need for their residents.California’s proposal strikes a balance between respecting longstanding law and recognizing that every city and farm that relies on the river must reduce its water use — precisely the sense of fairness and shared sacrifice that Mr. Fleck lauds.The six-state proposal took the presumptuous approach of assigning the vast majority of cuts to water users that didn’t sign on: California, Native American tribes and Mexico. Ignoring existing laws will likely land us in court, costing time we don’t have.We have to work together to keep the Colorado River system from crashing and protect all those who rely on it. We can do this through developing true consensus through collaboration — not by bashing one state or community.J.B. HambyEl Centro, Calif.The writer is chairman of the Colorado River Board of California and the state’s Colorado River commissioner.Guns and CrimeTo the Editor:Re “Chicago Reflects Democratic Split on Public Safety” (front page, March 2):As Republicans look to exploit crime — gun violence in particular — as a campaign issue, Democrats would do well to point out the G.O.P.’s unwillingness to prevent illegal guns from spilling across state borders early and often.Bruce EllersteinNew York More