Florida
Reconstruction Vignette
| Dear Sir, We the undersigned, colored grocers of this city, take this method to Present themselves to you. We Protest against the crushing Taxes that are charged by the civil authorities as unbearable, under the circumstances. If we do not keep such astablishments to Protect our People against Paying the Rebels such a high Price for what they need what will they have at the end of the year to begin with. we hope you will give to the Subject your most favourable View we Remane dear sir your most Obt Servts Respectfully
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On April 5, 1866, a man named Robert Williams wrote this letter to the Florida Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner on behalf of himself and six other Black grocers in Tallahassee. They called for an end to high taxes levied against them to support former Confederates. Bureau records do not contain a response from the assistant commissioner.
Florida
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Extensive
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 1.5 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in Florida’s standards is extensive, but their content is dreadful. The Florida Department of Education adopted the current social studies standards in 2014. According to these standards, Reconstruction is taught in grades 4, 8, and 11.
Grade 4
In grade 4, Reconstruction is covered in a unit titled “Crisis of the Union: Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida.” The “Benchmark” requirement for the Reconstruction portion of the unit is that students should be able to “Summarize challenges Floridians faced during Reconstruction.” The only challenge that the standards recognize, however, is economic. The “Access Points” for further discussion emphasize that students must “recognize that during Reconstruction, Florida’s freed slaves needed jobs and land owners needed workers.” This theme is repeated several times: “recognize that during Reconstruction, freed slaves in Florida got jobs and homes by working for land owners who needed workers (sharecropping).” The standards make no mention of formerly enslaved people’s struggle for land and political rights, or the white supremacy and violent repression that brought Reconstruction to an end.
Grade 8
The standards in grade 8 provide more details and guidance on Reconstruction in one lengthy “Benchmark:”
Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan).
Grade 11
The grade 11 standards provide the most comprehensive in the Florida curriculum. Coverage includes the Reconstruction Amendments, Jim Crow laws and the KKK, sharecropping and debt peonage, and Native American experiences during Reconstruction, but the content therein is framed in troubling ways.
Educator Experiences
Florida teachers who responded to our survey reported struggling to fit Reconstruction into their teaching plans. One elementary school teacher explained that their district devoted only an hour per week to social studies and so teachers were unable to include content on Reconstruction beyond “Florida’s own experience.”
Some teachers reported using outside resources to supplement their teaching of Reconstruction but expressed difficulty with finding materials that were appropriate for students’ ages that also conveyed “the factual history of our country” concerning the violence of the Reconstruction era.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools high school social studies teacher Matthew Bunch wrote for In Context about the challenge posed by where Reconstruction falls in the curriculum: “. . . U.S. History is taught across two courses. The year 1877 is used as the dividing line, reflecting its significance. In practice, however, teachers are given two unenviable choices: One is teaching this critical period of history at the very beginning of the second course, at the start of a school year when student schedules are barely set and orientation activities are kicking off. The other (even worse) option is jamming this topic in at the end of the first course, when students and teachers have one eye on final exams and another on the door to the end of the semester or school year.” He added in a tweet, “It’s fascinating how big structural forces (historical reliance on Dunning School) AND more minute, banal structural forces (instructional planning around summer breaks) can combine to create such large systemic problems (in education and elsewhere).”
Assessment
Overall, Florida’s Reconstruction standards are extensive but contain altogether inadequate content. While the coverage of Reconstruction is relatively robust, many of the thematic and framing choices made by the Department of Education reflect misconceptions of Reconstruction history.
The grade 4 standards present Reconstruction as simply a rearrangement of employment relationships, with no mention of the radical nature of Black people’s claims on freedom and equality or the violent white supremacist backlash that followed. The standards in grades 8 and 11 cover a good deal of the history but underemphasize Black people’s experiences by focusing primarily on political history and white historical actors. None of the standards mention the Freedmen’s Bureau. The standards rarely mention Black people as a group or as individuals. There is a section in grade 11 for students to “assess the influence of significant people or groups on Reconstruction,” but the only Black person mentioned by name is Harriet Tubman.
Grade 11 standards, in particular, reflect approaches to Reconstruction history based on the flawed and white supremacist Dunning School. The Reconstruction Amendments are discussed in terms of the “freedoms guaranteed to African American males,” which is an unnecessarily narrow description of Amendments that expanded rights and reshaped constitutional protections for all Americans, even as the 15th Amendment excluded women. Bizarrely, the standards charge students with recognizing “the social issue of forced integration” — a concept given the same weight in the standards as “the social issue of segregation.” This framing, which seems targeted at rationalizing “opposition to Blacks by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan,” conceals the violent nature of white supremacist opposition to Black people’s claims on freedom and equality. The standards also do not engage deeply with the positive or negative legacies of Reconstruction, though they do emphasize the significance of the period.
Teaching Reconstruction effectively requires centering Black people’s struggles to redefine freedom and equality and gain control of their own land and labor during and after the Civil War. Any discussion of Reconstruction must also grapple with the role of white supremacist terrorism in the defeat of Reconstruction and the negative and positive legacies of the era that persist to this day.
In June 2021, the state board of education voted to approve a rule to ban schools from teaching materials from the 1619 Project, as well as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
In January 2022, Republican legislators introduced HB7 and SB148, two bills designed to restrict discussions and lessons about racism and sexism. With particularly troubling language, the Senate bill states: “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The House bill passed that session and became law.
In April 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act, or Stop W.O.K.E. Act, to bar instruction and discussion of systemic racism and sexism. This law also allows parents “private right of action” to sue if they believe their children are being taught “critical race theory.”
Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such measures can have around the country, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.