Black History as Political Battleground: School Repression and Church Responsiveness in Southern States

• In Event: Racial Politics and the Law

Abstract

This presentation examines public pushback against increasingly widening demands for fuller and more formalized historical accountings of the long and destructive reach of racial injustice and inequality in America. Conservative American cultural warriors animated by panic over America’s expanding and emboldened diversities have coupled active reassertions of white privilege and normativity with overt opposition toward critical analysis of race in America. In efforts to fend off frameworks viewed as counter-positional to entrenchments of whiteness, defenders of whiteness have placed strategic importance on curtailing efforts to advance critical race consciousness and have regarded public schools as a key battleground and southern states as a front line of the struggle. The presentation will examine governmental mobilizations against black history instruction within states such as Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma and the public rhetoric and policy initiatives through which they have sought to advance this cause, The primary focus however will be on ways churches in these states have countered recent governmental assaults on black history instruction in public schools by facilitating supplemental black history studies curriculums that operate under church auspices.

Author

• R. Drew Smith, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary