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How the Metropolitan Museum Acquired a Rare Painting with an Enslaved Person

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2023 //
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This story is fascinating. It’s about the quest to understand the origins of a painting of three white children that originally included a young slave. At some point, the enslaved youth was painted over and eliminated.

One determined art collector enlisted the help of art historians to identify the white children and the enslaved youth. The young man was named Bélizaire. The painting was held for decades in storage in a New Orleans art museum. It was just another family painting: three children. If you can open the video, please do (I don’t know if it is behind a pay wall).

Once the original painting was restored and its history documented, it was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is prominently displayed.

“How a Rare Portrait of an Enslaved Child Arrived at the Met” is a 10-minute film that touches on themes of race, art and history.

For many years, a 19th century painting of three white children in a Louisiana landscape held a secret. Beneath a layer of overpaint meant to look like the sky: the figure of an enslaved youth. But a 2005 restoration revealed him and now the painting has a new, very prominent home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who was the enslaved child? Who covered over his figure? Why did the painting languish for decades in attics and a museum basement?

The Times further describes the journey of the painting:

To learn more, read “‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met.” Alexandra Eaton writes:

One reason “Bélizaire and the Frey Children” has drawn attention is the naturalistic depiction of Bélizaire, the young man of African descent who occupies the highest position in the painting, leaning against a tree just behind the Frey children. Although he remains separated from the white children, Amans painted him in a powerful stance, with blushing cheeks, and a kind of interiority that is unusual for the time.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement, the Met and other museums have responded to calls to reckon with the presentation of Black figures. When the European Galleries reopened in 2020, the museum included wall texts to highlight the presence of African people in Europe and to call attention to issues of racism, previously unmentioned. In the American Wing, which had presented “a romanticized history of American art,” Kornhauser said, a presidential portrait was recast with the consciousness of the present: John Trumbull’s 1780 portrait of George Washington and his enslaved servant William Lee identified only the former president until 2020, when Lee’s name was added to the title. However, unlike Bélizaire, Lee is depicted at the margins, lacking in any emotion or humanity.

Jeremy K. Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, spent years trying to find “Bélizaire” after seeing an image of it online in 2013, following its restoration, that featured all four figures. Intrigued, he kept searching, only to find an earlier image from 2005, after the painting had been de-accessioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art and was listed for auction by Christie’s. It was the same painting, but the Black child was missing. He had been painted out.

“The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview.

Categories Art, Civil Rights, History, Race, Racism

Jan Resseger: Reflecting on the 10th NPE Conference

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2023 //
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In case you missed the Network for Public Education’s 10th annual conference, Jan Resseger gives you here a brief overview.

It was a well-planned conference with great speakers and panels. Every year, we say, “This was the best ever.” We said it again this time. How will we top this next year? The presentations of the keynote speakers were recorded and I will post them.

Jan Resseger writes:

It was while I was traveling home from last weekend’s Network for Public Education Conference that I realized I had not once heard Miguel Cardona’s name mentioned—even though the meeting was in Washington, D.C. Miguel Cardona is, of course, the U.S. Secretary of Education.

This year’s conference felt different than earlier conferences, when worries about federal policy brought by previous Secretaries of Education became a unifying focus. Rod Paige brought us “the Texas Miracle,” the test-and-punish model policy that spawned No Child Left Behind. Arne Duncan bribed the states with huge federal grants if they agreed to adopt his favorite Race to the Top priorities. And Betsy DeVos talked on and on about her favorite subject, school privatization.

Federal policy can be helpful or harmful for public schools. But with Miguel Cardona’s quiet management style and in the context of a badly divided Congress, any chance of our framing a collective narrative response to a nationwide policy has faded. It is, of course, true that a lot of awful remnants of the No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top era, like the federal Charter Schools Program that continues to support privately operated charter schools, remain in federal law. The remains of Race to the Top also still clutter the laws from state to state. But except for the Network for Public Education’s dogged effort to end funding for the federal Charter Schools Program, the focus on federal advocacy at this year’s conference seemed to have become limited. Keynoters were clear, however, that the attack on absolutely essential Title I funding from House Republicans is being vigorously countered by the Biden administration and in the U.S. Senate.

At last weekend’s conference it was clear that today the most damaging education policy is emerging in the 50 state legislatures, a situation which creates a challenge for collective advocacy. While states like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio are all facing school funding shortages and concurrent growth in the diversion of state dollars to school vouchers, state laws and state politics make it extremely challenging for advocates even in these three similar states to pull together a coherent and moving universal narrative that also accounts for each state’s wonky legislative differences. At last week’s conference, workshops on the implications of state policy informed participants about work to reform Pennsylvania’s charter schools; to defend public schools from Ron DeSantis’s attack on teaching inclusive history in Florida; to push back against state takeovers in Houston, Lorain, Ohio, and Nashville; to inform the public about school funding lost to tax abatements in Kansas, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Missouri; to press for the end of portfolio school reform in Denver; and to help parent and teachers union advocates work together to build support for investment in equitable public schools as they did during teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland.

Opposing the Growth of School Privatization via Vouchers

In this year of explosive growth of private school tuition vouchers across the states, several workshops explored the evidence that vouchers don’t fulfill the promises of their proponents. Experts presented research findings demonstrating that parents sign away their children’s constitutional protections when they accept a voucher to send a child to a private school. One researcher described the result as “the outsourcing of discrimination.” Another presented peer-reviewed research showing that students’ test scores in both math and reading dropped significantly after they took a voucher to attend a private school, and that many return suddenly to the public school district when their voucher school forces them out for one reason or another or she school suddenly closes. Public schools are prohibited by law from routinely expelling students; private schools accepting vouchers often push out children with special needs or those who do not fit their school’s profile.

Several workshops examined the fiscal damage when states divert massive tax dollars to uncapped voucher and Education Savings Account programs, which are often unregulated and poorly managed. Public Funds Public Schools, a collaboration of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center, shared its website that tracks voucher schemes across the states and provides up to date resources for advocacy. Two workshops presented full-service Community Schools, which are likely to become any family’s best school choice as medical, family, and community services are located right inside the neighborhood public school.

Refusing to Be Distracted by the Far-Right Culture Wars

Another factor creating today’s difficult public education policy climate is the massive investment in racist and homophobic “culture war” disruption by billionaire philanthropists and dark money groups. In A Citizen’s Guide to School Privatization, a new resource just published on the Network for Public Education’s website, Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham traces the dangerous groups working together to rile up and divide parents and distract us all from more constructive efforts to strengthen public schooling and make our schools more inclusive. The result? “Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to improve upon it.”

In a workshop last weekend, Cunningham described some of the research he has published in his new, and well documented Citizen’s Guide, for example, the following about the national organization that basically funds and operates Moms for Liberty: “The Council for National Policy… brings together wealthy conservatives, many from the oil and gas realm; Christian evangelists with vast communications networks; and groups that can turn out groups like the National Rifle Association. The Council for National Policy is a central directorate passing down plans to ‘obedient franchises’ like Moms for Liberty. The key Council for National Policy members that oversee Moms for Liberty are the Leadership Institute and Heritage Foundation. They run the annual summits, provide the training and literature, and even sue the Biden administration on Moms for Liberty’s behalf.”

What About the Separation of Church and State?

One workshop last weekend brought researchers from Documented to explore the Christian Right organization, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, which has worked to develop a legal strategy to confront public schools around the idea that “public schools are indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion.”

While private schools accepting vouchers have been quietly teaching religion for years and at the same time failing to protect the rights of their students, in a workshop last weekend three legal experts set out to clarify the issues posed by an explicitly religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City has proposed to open. The presenters explored the question legally: whether, as publicly funded private contractors, charter schools are “state actors.” The issue is so complex in terms of legal precedents that even among the presenters there was subtle disagreement.

Participants in this and another workshop I attended seemed concerned about the broader constitutional question of the separation of government and religion. Many seemed clearly to grasp the importance of the first Amendment’s Establishment Clause’s protection of church-state separation, and many were concerned and confused about the current U.S. Supreme Court’s reliance on the Free Exercise Clause instead. It seemed a good thing that staff from Americans United for Separation of Church and State were workshop presenters in this year’s Network for Public Education conference to help clarify the issues around the current U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of religious liberty.

Working for Racial Justice

Many of the leaders and powerful speakers at last week’s conference identified racism and its lingering role as the greatest factor undermining children’s experience in public school along with the unequal school funding from state to state that regularly disadvantages Black and Brown children. It is clear that today’s attacks on the honest teaching of American history, on critical race theory, and on “diversity, equity and inclusion” are a blatant attempt to marginalize Black, immigrant, and gay, lesbian, and transgender children and adolescents.

Last weekend we heard about and talked about what happens when Ron DeSantis and others attack “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts as “woke.” Their goal is to ensure that schools can remain segregated by race and economics so that parents can protect their children from exposure to diversity; that state school funding schemes remain inequitable by favoring wealthy suburbs; and that public schools can exclude the history and culture and identity of some children from the curriculum and ban books about these children. Promoting homophobia and “fear of the other” is central to this agenda. Speakers throughout the event traced the advent of school vouchers back to the segregation academies that were a response to Brown v. Board of Education.

Gloria Ladson-Billings, the retired Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, seemed the perfect person to launch the conference’s opening plenary in this year filled with attacks on efforts by schools to protect diversity, multicultural education and authentic welcome for all students. Ladson-Billings’ own website introduces her as “known for her work in the fields of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory, and the pernicious effects of systemic racism and economic inequality on educational opportunities.” Keynoter, Dr. Marvin Dunn, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Florida International University, described his project to lead students on tours of the site of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre of an African American community in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to suppress teaching about such events. A workshop highlighted the work of the Schott Foundation’s Opportunity to Learn Network along with the role of full-service Community Schools to house social, medical and community services to serve families and make them feel welcome and supported. Finally Jitu Brown and staff from the Journey for Justice Alliance introduced the Journey for Justice Alliance’s national Equity or Else Campaign for racial justice.

Remembering the Urgent Importance of Public Schooling for These Tough Times

Many of the event’s speakers called the growing attack on public education combined with rapid expansion of private school tuition vouchers and states’ investment in privately operated charter schools an existential threat to the primary institutions that anchor every small town, city neighborhood and suburb: the public schools that continue to educate the vast majority of our children and adolescents. As we strategize about how to push back against the threats to our public schools, however, the National Education Association’s Susan Nogan ended her workshop presentation with a reminder: “We must lead with our shared values.” Ladson-Billings opened the conference with a keynote entitled, “Regaining a ‘Public’ for Public Education.” Keynoter Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Western Michigan University declared, “Equity, inclusivity and democracy are what our public schools represent.” The American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten reminded a luncheon plenary: “Public school is the place where we do pluralism.”

I was reassured that despite a lot of worrying about threats to public education, speakers shared their confidence in the foundational principles underneath our American system of public schools. Public schools are publicly funded, universally available and accessible, and guaranteed by law to meet each child’s needs and protect all children’s rights. Public schooling represents not only individualist concern for one’s own children, but also a sense of obligation to all of the community’s children.

School privatization cannot move our society closer to these principles. Last week’s 10th Anniversary Network for Public Education Conference represented a commitment to work together to ensure greater equality of opportunity and to improve our public schools, but at the same time to affirm public education as the optimal educational institution for the investment of our efforts and tax dollars.

Categories Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Racism, Separation of church and state

Donna Ladd: How I Learned About Racism and Became a Journalist

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2023 //
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Donna Ladd is the editor-in-chief of the Mississippi Free Press, which exemplifies the importance of brave, independent journalism. In this story, she relates her own journey from Mississippi to graduate school in New York City and back to Mississippi, where she leads a crucial news outlet whose staff and board is a model of racial integration. I am honored to be a member of the advisory board of the Mississippi Free Press.

She writes:

You may know that I grew up in Mississippi, but left the day after I got my political science degree from Mississippi State University, hightailing it north, vowing never to live in my racist, misogynistic state that tried to kill the spirit of smart young people like me ever again. I thought, naively, that I’d left all that ugly behind. The lessons about bigotry and sexism being a 50-state strategy were still ahead of me. Good Lord, there was so much I didn’t know.What I did know is that a bunch of political science profs believed in this child of an illiterate mother from Philadelphia, Miss.—Howard Ball, Ed Clynch, David Mason and Stephen Shaffer among them—and treated me like I was smart enough to learn what I didn’t know. My career path, I thought, was law school, even though I was always attracted to writing and truth-telling through journalism. Still, I didn’t exactly leave State with a lot of immediately marketable skills. I enrolled in George Washington University in Washington, D.C.—helped along by Dr. Ball’s reference; he compared me to an unsophisticated but promising Norma Rae—but the school and I didn’t match well. Truth be known, I wasn’t ready to succeed there.

So, I dropped out and became a club DJ. That ended up funding my teaching myself to be a writer and a journalist, first with dalliances with small newspapers in Colorado and New York City. I learned on the job.But it wasn’t until I was nearly 40 that I got more schooling—and remarkable for the daughter of Miss Katie, it was at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where I honed my journalism skills and learned both what to do and what not to do as an editor and trainer. As any honest success story will tell you, I internalized that who you know and how they’ll help you get into a job to learn and grow inside is a major key to anybody’s success, regardless of your college major.We begin or 22nd year of Free Press Journalism in Mississippi on Sept. 22. Help us celebrate with a gift of $22, $222, $2,200 or $22,000 on #MFPGiving22Day!

Put simply: I didn’t need a fancy j-school degree to become a journalist, but it helped me improve my skills and meet people so that my work would be read—and, these days, funded. But it was other Columbia studies as part of my mid-career master’s, with more diverse instructors and thinkers than in the j-school then, that turned me into the writer, thinker, entrepreneur and mentor I am now—and taught me never to prop up false narratives wherever they spring from.Bottom line: I cared about racism deeply, and I came to understand that it was my job as a white journalist to expose the perils of “whiteness” (not the same as light-colored skin) to us all, that it was my work to do especially as a child of Neshoba County who knew some famous lynch mobsters. I already knew white folks all around me in Mississippi (and the whole U.S., so don’t get cocky) were either actively working to extend race inequity to keep the reins of power—I mean, nothing has ever been more obvious so stop the act, people—but also that my early censored Mississippi education kept me from understanding the connections and pathways out of this sick mess.My real grad-school education came after I crept shyly into the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and asked Dr. Manning Marable to allow me into his Black Intellectuals graduate seminar. And I read, listened, thought. A lot. I had no idea that I would soon return to Mississippi—but I know now that my studies with Dr. Marable and my white adviser Andie Tucker (a former PBS producer) urging me to come home to Mississippi and report about race, or “whiteness,” rewrote my future.Help grow Free Press journalism in Mississippi with your donation today.

Not to mention the future of others. I brought home everything I learned in that imperfect Ivy League institution among many people who loved to spit at the South without checking their own postage stamps. It was there that I first really understood just how bad de facto northern racism was, thanks to Dr. Marable. I first learned about so many Black American heroes who should, damn it, also be my heroes and all of yours. But they can’t be if I didn’t know they existed, or what motivated them, or the sheer bravery they mustered to face likely death for trying to make this country live up to its own constitutional and patriotic hype.Without the thinking and probing I did in my “soft” studies about humanity at Mississippi State and Columbia, Free Press journalism would not exist in Mississippi. I would not have influenced, trained, cheer-led, mentored, and recommended so many young Mississippians over the years, trying to help them believe that we can change the trajectory and inclusion of our state and, thus, the nation. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have so many white people of all ages walking up to me in the grocery store to tell me “I just didn’t know” about so many things they were lied to about in school and our textbooks.Not to mention, I wouldn’t be running the second and third publications I co-founded here, choosing truth and accuracy over blind partisanship, giving raises, recruiting, training teenagers in marketable skills and brainstorming with the most amazing team of journalists I would ever hope to share a newsroom with. And I wouldn’t be pinching myself because several of my profs from both my colleges donate to my newsrooms in Mississippi, even Sam Freedman, who challenged me the most. That’s full circle, baby.

Thank you, Mississippi State, Columbia, Andie, Sam and Dr. Marable (please rest in peace) for helping bring me to this place right now where I can sit on my porch and tell my Mississippians not to believe the political hype, to reject censorship, and to stop fearing education and the other. We sink or swim together, and heroes come in so, so many forms. Don’t deprive yourself.

Oh, and study whatever you need to to find your purpose and path. There is more to life, growth and prosperity than learning to code if that’s not your jam.

Donna Ladd, Editor and CEO

From the website of the Mississippi Free Press:

Founding Editor and CEO Donna Ladd is an award-winning journalist, editor and social entrepreneur from Philadelphia, Miss. After leaving the state the day after she graduated from Mississippi State, vowing to never live here again, she returned 18 years later with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. She co-founded the impactful Jackson Free Press in 2002 in order to bring an in-depth news source to the state that would not shy away from historic effects of structural, institutional and systemic racism—how the past connects to the present—in a way no other media outlet had done in Mississippi.

Donna, the daughter of illiterate parents, has won many awards for columns, political columns, editorials, feature writing and investigative work, and has shared in a number of public-service journalism awards for her work in Mississippi, from helping put an old Klansman, James Ford Seale, in prison for the kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in 1964, to deep systemic work on the causes and solutions of crime and violence now in the capital city and the embedded racism in the criminal-justice system since the time of slavery.

In 2001, Donna received a Packard Future of Children fellowship to study the discriminatory application of school discipline on children of color and the cradle-to-jail pipeline. More recently, she was a three-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation leadership fellow, deep diving into systemic inequity and pathways to “truth, racial healing and transformation” in her home state. The fellowship led to her efforts to change the narrative about race through the Mississippi Youth Media Project, which she started to train young people to challenge the media narrative about them and their communities. She has trained many award-winning journalists over the years.

She also had two fellowships to study racism in the criminal-justice system, through John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Penn Law School’s Quattrone Center, and two grants from the Solutions Journalism Network for the same work, which brought several of her dozens of journalism awards. In 2019, she had a Logan non-fiction fellowship at the Carey Institute for Global Good, where she did a five-week writing residency in upstate New York.

Ladd publishes long-form features in The Guardian related to racism, whiteness and criminal justice. She and her journalism have been covered in Glamour and Reason magazines, Next Tribe, CNN, NPR, CBC, CBS Radio, the BBC, al Jazeera, among other outlets. In 2017, Southern Living magazine named her as one of the “Innovators Changing the South.”

In 2011, Ladd was honored with a Fannie Lou Hamer Humanitarian Award, a Dress for Success Women of Strength Award in 2009 and the 2009 Angel Award from the Center for Violence Prevention for her work against domestic abuse. After surviving breast cancer, Ladd is the 2020 Survivor of the Year for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Jackson on April 25, 2020. She also was a 2020 alumni award winner from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 2020. In 2005, Ladd was named one of Mississippi’s 50 Leading Businesswomen by the Mississippi Business Journal, and she is the recipient of the 2006 Friendship Award, along with Mississippi (and now national) NAACP President Derrick Johnson, from Jackson 2000/Dialogue, a racial-reconciliation organization.

Categories Mississippi, Racism

Mississippi: Can a White Democrat Win the Governor’s Race?

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2023 //
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Mississippi is as red a state as any in the country but a white Democrat has a real chance of winning. His name is Brandon Presley. He’s a second cousin of Elvis, and he grew up dirt poor. He’s a genuine progressive. He has gone out of his way to court Black voters. Presley has a chance of upending politics in the state and perhaps the region.

The Daily Yonder reports that Presley must overcome the rural-urban divide:

American politics are defined by the rural-urban divide. Democrats own the major cities; Republicans dominate smaller cities and the countryside. Brandon Presley aims to change that, at least in Mississippi. The 46-year-old Democrat is challenging the GOP incumbent, Tate Reeves, for the governorship. If he wins, he would be the Magnolia State’s first Democratic governor in a generation.

But a Presley victory is potentially something more. To win, the Democrat must score well with Mississippi’s rural voters. Such a turnabout would redound across the nation. William Browning, a Mississippi-based reporter, claims “If Brandon Presley beats Reeves, this changes the way people view elections.” In other words, a Presley victory could shake the nation out of its rural-urban divide. It would prove that Democrats can win rural America, and prompt Republicans to woo the cities.

Presley’s campaign is an uphill climb. Mississippi is the definition of a Republican stronghold. The GOP controls every statewide office and possesses supermajorities in both the state Senate and House. The race will be decided by rural voters, a Republican-leaning demographic. Sixty-five of Mississippi’s 82 counties are designated as rural (using the nonmetropolitan definition) and more than half of the state population, 54%, qualify as the same.

Despite these realities, Presley has more than a puncher’s chance at victory. Reeves is vulnerable. A January 2023 survey showed 57% of state voters wanted an option beyond Reeves. A June poll was even more ominous for the incumbent. One-fifth of Republicans supported Presley over the GOP incumbent. A Mississippi political observer explained these numbers bluntly, “Reeves is not likeable and is kind of arrogant.”

Presley’s prospects go beyond an unpopular incumbent. Every observer of any political stripe agrees that he is a one-of-a-kind political talent. Brannon Miller, a longtime state political hand, calls him Mississippi’s “best retail politician.” One reporter already termed him the “second best politician in state history.”

Tall, gregarious, and oozing Southern charm, he is, as one Democratic official described him, “a back-pattin’ doesn’t-know-a-stranger Democrat.” He is also equipped with a biography straight from a Hollywood script. Second cousins with Elvis, Presley was born dirt poor. Raised just down the road from Elvis’s Tupelo, he came of age in tiny Nettleton, Mississippi (population 1,995). At age 8, his alcoholic father was murdered. Thereafter, his single mom struggled to provide for him and his two siblings, Greta and Greg. The family regularly lived without electricity, running water, or a phone.

In 2001, the 23-year-old came home from college and was elected mayor of Nettleton. He has been running ever since. In 2007, voters elected him Public Service Commissioner for northern Mississippi, a post he has been reelected to three times by successively wider margins.

Presley is not a standard issue “national” Democrat. He steers clear of divisive social issues. Pro-life on abortion, he is an evangelical Christian who hews to Mississippi’s cultural mainstream. He is also a self-described “populist.” Born from his rough-and-tumble childhood, Presley also draws upon the rich tradition of Southern economic populism. Dana Burcham, the Nettleton city clerk, sums up Presley’s philosophy in saying, “He’s for the little people.”

Presley’s populism is apparent in his rhetoric. He defines his politics as one in which, “you side with the people against a system that is set up against the people all day long.” But his populism is also obvious in his record. As mayor and public service commissioner, he focused upon bread-and-butter issues for his rural and small-town constituents. Nettleton’s current mayor, Phillip Baulch, and Burcham credit Presley as the source of the town’s turnaround. Mayor Presley turned abandoned property into parks, audited the city’s books, balanced the budget, and cut taxes. The results are tangible. Storefronts abound with commerce. Downtown is tidy. Nettleton, if not thriving, is surviving.

Read on to finish the story.

The New York Times says changes in the laws of Mississippi may have a large effect on the outcome of the Mississippi race.

Just three years ago, Mississippi had an election law on its books from an 1890 constitutional convention that was designed to uphold “white supremacy” in the state. The law created a system for electing statewide officials that was similar to the Electoral College — and that drastically reduced the political power of Black voters.

Now Mississippi is holding its first election for governor since those laws fell, the contest is improbably competitive in this deep-red state, and Black voters are poised to play a critical role.

Voters overturned the Jim Crow-era law in 2020. This summer, a federal court threw out another law, also from 1890, that had permanently stripped voting rights from people convicted of a range of felonies.

Black leaders and civil rights groups in Mississippi see the Nov. 7 election as a chance for a more level playing field and an opportunity for Black voters to exercise their sway: Roughly 40 percent of voters are Black, a greater share than in any other state.

Presley is going after Black voters.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

Black Mississippians lean heavily Democratic: Ninety-four percent voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, according to exit polls. Any path to victory for a Democrat relies on increasing Black turnout and winning over some crossover white voters.

Mr. Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a second cousin of Elvis Presley, has made outreach to Black voters central to his campaign, seeking to win them over on Medicaid expansion, addressing a rural hospital shortage and providing funding for historically Black colleges.

On a recent October weekend, Mr. Presley navigated the tents and barbecue smokers at the homecoming tailgate for Alcorn State University, one of six historically Black colleges in the state. As he darted from tent to tent, wearing a purple-and-gold polo to support the home team, Mr. Presley introduced himself to unwitting voters and took selfies with his backers, many who flagged him down amid the din of music and aroma of smoking ribs.

Presley needs a strong turnout to win. I plan to send him a donation.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

If Mississippi voters elect Presley, it would affect th southern

Categories Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Hope, Mississippi, Poverty, Race, Racism

Randi Weingarten On “”The War on Woke”

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2023 //
11

The New Republic convened a meeting to discuss Trump, book banning and the culture wars. Randi Weingarten described the attack on schools as a coordinated strategy to destroy public schools and promote vouchers. Edith Olmsted of The New Republic interviewed her. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but the American public needs to hear this message. Again and again.

Book Bans Are a Conservative Plot to Destroy Public Schools, Says Randi Weingarten, The teachers union head denounced the “extremist strategy,” which also includes voucher campaigns and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.

DANIEL BOCZARSKI/GETTY IMAGES FOR MOVEON

Teachers union head Randi Weingarten says that the campaign by conservatives to ban books isn’t about the books at all, but part of a broader strategy to destroy public schools—one that was supercharged by the pandemic.

“You take the agita and the anxiety that people had at Covid, that fear, and you combine it with a right wing who has wanted to kill public schools for years and take that money for vouchers, and you have the scenario we have,” Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Wednesday at The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit.

Vouchers, which use public education dollars to fund private and religious school attendance, are just one pillar of the conservative campaign to “undermine, destroy, and defund” public schools, she said. The other two are book banning and manufactured outrage over critical race theory.

Weingarten pointed to conservative activist Chris Rufo and a comment he made at Hillsdale College, a Christian nationalist school, in which he admitted that focusing on these issues was all part of a master plan to promote universal vouchers: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

In an interview with TNR after the event, Weingarten explained the “extremist strategy” Rufo and other conservatives have used to defund public schools. “The hook was trust. If you really create as much distrust as possible in public schooling, then parents will look at privatization as an option,” she said.

That’s where critical race theory comes in.

“[Rufo] tried to make a term that nobody knows so toxic, so that you can weaponize it and make fear,” she said. “Conversations about hard subjects became weaponized as indoctrination. Which is patently ridiculous, and dangerous.”

Race, as well as gender, is the subject conservatives have focused on in their campaigns to ban books in public schools and libraries.

“What [Republican Governor Ron] DeSantis is doing in the so-called ‘war on woke,’ is exactly part of their playbook—to make people afraid of books, and afraid of what we do in school,” Weingarten said. According to Pen America, Florida passed 15 “educational intimidation” bills in the last two and a half years.

The “parents’ rights” movement is made up of a loud minority, Weingarten said, and actively undermines what most parents want. “What we see in Florida is that 60 percent of the book banning has been done by 11 people,” she said.

The AFT has partnered with The New Republic in fighting back against such bans. TNR’s Banned Books Tour has been delivering thousands of banned books across the country this month, most recently in Florida.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Read, Privatization, Racism, Vouchers

Joshua Benton: What You Never Knew about Elon Musk’s Grandfather

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2023 //
20

Joshua Benton wrote about Elon Musk’s grandfather in The Atlantic. Benton spent more time researching him than did Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson. It’s not a pretty picture but it might provide insight into Musk’s worldview. I hope not.

Benton wrote:

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

Benton writes that Haldeman wrote a self-published book, and there is only one copy in all of North America, at Michigan State University. Benton traveled there to read it. It’s title:

The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa.

In this book, Haldeman expressed his hope that South Africa would become “the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.”

He was, quite simply, a vociferous racist and anti-Semite. Isaacson’s father was Jewish. It’s surprising that he paid so little attention to Musj’s lineage.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Racism

New Hampshire: Anti-Woke Law Jeopardizes Holocaust Education

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2023 //
37

The Boston Globe reported that teachers in New Hampshire are torn between two laws: one requires teaching the Holocaust, the other bans teaching “divisive concepts.” The reactionary “Moms for Liberty” has offered a $500 bounty to anyone who turns in a teacher for violating the “divisive concepts” law. The Anti-Defamation League has documented a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents in New England; the majority of those incidents occurred in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire schools have become battlegrounds in the culture wars over racism and gender identity, and comprehensive education on the Holocaust is in danger, experts and teachers say. In 2020, after events including the mass shooting two years earlier that killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, New Hampshire passed a law requiring instruction on the Holocaust and other genocides in grades 8 through 12. But then, in 2021, as part of a backlash to the nation’s racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, New Hampshire banned the teaching of “divisive concepts” such as implicit bias and systemic racism.

Now these two laws are colliding in the state’s classrooms. Some of the topics that the divisive concepts laws restrict are precisely the ones that Holocaust education experts say must be covered to prevent a repeat of history. A key part of teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is examining how one group of people could agree to participate in the mass murder of another. The answer, in part, lies in the use of propaganda that asserts one group as inferior. Adolf Hitler modeled his depiction of Jews as an inferior race on America’s racist treatment of Black people and the study of eugenics in this country.

Letters of concern to the New Hampshire Legislature and interviews with teachers reflect that, in teaching about the Holocaust, many feel scared to discuss certain topics as a way to draw contemporary parallels because of the state’s divisive concepts law.

Kingswood social studies teacher Kimberly Kelliher is among them. She says the state’s reporting mechanism for parents to accuse teachers of violating the law — plus a monetary award offered by the parent activist group Moms for Liberty aimed at encouraging such reports — frightens her. “The Holocaust is not a single event. It is a series of attitudes and actions that led to an atrocity,” says Kelliher, who has taught social studies for more than two decades. “When we look at the divisive concepts law, if we are denying people from talking about certain things, then we’re not honestly talking about the attitudes and actions.”

Kelliher, like other teachers I spoke with, said she now avoids the word “racism” when talking to students about the Holocaust. Others say they avoid mentioning current events and hot-button topics such as implicit bias.

But a New Hampshire scholar says it’s impossible to avoid subjects like these if we truly want to learn from the atrocities of the past. “You can’t teach about Nazi perpetrators without teaching about implicit bias. You just can’t do it. What motivates the perpetrator?” says Tom White, the coordinator of educational outreach at Keene State College’s Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Hitler took advantage of implicit bias and conspiracy theories against Jews that had existed through thousands of years of antisemitism. “The central crux of fascism is to make their followers afraid that they’re under attack by another group, that they’re threatened by another group,” White says. “Implicit bias,” he adds, “is the crux of all of this….”

Under New Hampshire’s law, instruction must include facts about the Holocaust and other genocides, plus teach students “how and why political repression, intolerance, bigotry, antisemitism, and national, ethnic, racial, or religious hatred and discrimination have, in the past, evolved into genocide and mass violence.” Teachers, state Department of Education guidelines say, should help students “identify and evaluate the power of individual choices” in preventing such behavior.

Reports of antisemitic incidents and propaganda are on the rise nationally and regionally, according to the Anti-Defamation League of New England. In 2022, the nonprofit tracked 204 antisemitic incidents in New England, a 32 percent increase from the previous year. In New Hampshire, where 183 of those incidents took place, the spike of white supremacist propaganda activity included a classmate shouting antisemitic comments at a Jewish student; a swastika and the phrase “Kill all Jews” scrawled on a rock in a public place; and a neo-Nazi group distributing stickers with the Star of David and message “Resist Zionism…”

The divisive concepts law in New Hampshire prohibits students from being “taught, instructed, inculcated or compelled to express belief in or support” that someone is “inherently superior” to another based on a particular trait, including sex, race, and religion, and also states that students cannot be taught that an individual is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Educators who run afoul of this provision can face sanctions, including loss of their teaching licenses…

The state’s two largest teacher unions are suing the New Hampshire education commissioner, the attorney general, and the head of the human rights commission to repeal the divisive concepts law, citing the chilling effect it is having on teaching. Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire, says the law’s title, which includes the words “Right to Freedom from Discrimination,” is downright Orwellian in its doublespeak, given the law itself “is in effect chilling speech on the very concept of discrimination against various marginalized groups.”

The vagueness of the divisive concepts law is one of teachers’ biggest concerns, Howes adds. “The divisive concepts law is so broadly worded. None of us are teaching that anyone deserves to be inherently oppressed, but we also know that when you’re talking about either history or the impact of history on current events, there are people who are oppressed and it comes from somewhere,” she says.

Categories Bigotry, Education Reform, New Hampshire, Racism, Republicans

Who Are the Billionaire Wilks Brothers of Cisco, Texas?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2023 //
2

Dan and Farris Wilks are politically powerful billionaires who live in Cisco, Texas. They both finished high school but went no further. They got into fracking early on and sold their oil and gas business to the government of Singapore for $3.5 billion in 2011.

They are passionate evangelical Christians. They fund Christian nationalist groups. They fund anti-gay organizations and anti-abortion groups. They consider climate change a hoax. They are major funders of voucher advocacy. They would like to see every student enrolled in a private Christian school or home-schooled.

The brothers are closely associated with ALEC and the Koch network. They are big contributors to Senator Ted Cruz.

Dan and Farris Wilks are major funders of PragerU videos, which present history and economics from a rightwing perspective, echoing the views of Dennis Prager, the talk-show host who created the videos.

Read about Dan Wilks here.

Read about Farris Wilks here.

The Wilks brothers have been described as “the Koch brothers of the Christian right” for their funding of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTgroups. In addition to a variety of groups on the Religious Right, the brothers have funded organizations associated with the Koch brothers’ political network such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). Farris Wilks runs The Thirteen Foundation, which has been described as “one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.”

The Guardian summarized their negative influence here.

Experts who follow the influence of the Wilks brothers say their sprawling agendas and big checks spark strong concerns.Videos denying climate science approved by Florida as state curriculum

“Farris and Dan Wilks, who believe their billions were given to them by God, have spent the last decade working to advance a dominionist ideology by funding far-right organizations and politicians that seek to dismiss climate change as ‘God’s will’, remove choice, demonize the LGBTQ community, and tear down public education, all to turn America into a country that gives preference to and imposes their extreme beliefs on everyone,” said Chris Tackett, a Texas-based campaign finance analyst.

“The goal of [the] Wilks and those that share their ideology is to gain control of levers of power and control information. That’s why they invest heavily into politicians, agenda-driven non-profits and media organizations like PragerU and the Daily Wire. It is all connected.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Vouchers

Florida Education Official Paid with Federal $$ to Promote DeSantis’s Extreme Views

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
7

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the DeSantis administration used federal funds to create a new office to network with rightwing school boards, headed by Terry Stoops. DeSantis wants to stamp out anything he thinks is “woke,” that is, any instruction about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of injustice or bigotry.

Leslie Postal writes:

A new Florida Department of Education employee who’s reaching out to conservative school board members makes $126,000 a year, a salary funded by a federal grant designed to boost “well-rounded educational opportunities,” health and safety and effective use of technology.

Terry Stoops was tapped in April to head the department’s new office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts. Most of his contacts during his first months on the job were to school board members who’d been endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and representatives of conservative groups, his emails and calendar show.

In April, for example, he met several school board members at a “Learn Right” summit in Sarasota spearheaded by a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group launched in Florida and focused on schools.

He emailed more than a dozen school board members endorsed by the governor in the 2022 election cycle and others who had the backing of Moms for Liberty, including Alicia Farrant, elected to the Orange County School Board in November.

And in May, Stoops met with the Herzog Foundation; its goal is “Advancing Christian Education.”

Apolitical school boards have not been contacted.

DeSantis, who is running for president, told Fox News in June that if elected he would try to abolish the federal education department and other agencies. If Congress would not approve doing that, “I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” he said in that interview on June 28…

Stoops also met with people who were not school board members but seemed to share his political views. For example, he attended a virtual meeting about American Birthright, a blueprint for how to teach students social studies that embraces “the ideals of conservative Americans.”

Stoops, who spent nearly two decades in North Carolina mostly working on education policy for the conservative John Locke Foundation, was on the executive committee that helped devise American Birthright, which was released last year.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Racism

Justin Parmenter: North Carolina Funds Bigoted Christian Academy

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2023 //
2

NBCT high school teacher Justin Parmenter frequently tweets (X’s) about politics and schools in North Carolina. He has been reviewing the religious schools that take vouchers. Here is the latest.

Fayetteville Christian got $1.3m NC taxpayer dollars this year. They deny admissions to non-Christians and LGBTQ (whom they refer to as “deviate and perverted”).

I don’t want my public dollars going to institutions that can discriminate this way. #nced #ncga #ncpol

His Twitter handle is his name.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, North Carolina, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Vouchers
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