In 1965 after the Civil Rights Act was law but before the Voting Rights Act became law, Martin Luther King Jr. motivated those fighting for equal voting rights for all but was drained by the previous year’s fight for civil rights for all, by proclaiming to them that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice”. In other words, hang in there because truth crushed to the earth will rise again and in the end, the victory will be ours. As America observed the Juneteenth Holiday on Monday the wisdom of Dr. King’s 1965 words rang true for all America’s school rooms in 2023.
The combination of the racial demographic change occurring in America and the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, which forced a true acknowledgment by most Americans of the role that race and racism play in American history and society, has created both a racial and a hide-history backlash among those that fear the cultural and racial changes taking place in America.
In April 2021 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a letter, signed by him and over 3 dozen other Republican Senators, to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona protesting a new rule to promote education programs throughout America that address systemic racism and the legacy of American slavery. McConnell and the Senators took particular exception in the letter with The 1619 Project saying, it “has become infamous for putting ill-informed advocacy ahead of historical accuracy. Our nation’s youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart”.
In November of 2021, 2024 presidential candidate and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum signed HB 1508 into law. HB 1508 makes it illegal for K–12 public schools to include what Gov. Burgum and the North Dakota state legislature refer to as “critical race theory” in all school curriculums throughout the state. Based on the new law North Dakota legally defines “critical race theory” as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality”
Speaking about North Dakota’s attempt to hide America’s racial history the North Dakota ACLU said: “It is natural that many will interpret a ban on critical race theory to mean a ban on discussing or raising issues of race in the classroom at all. How is a history teacher supposed to discuss slavery, the civil rights era, or teach high school students about the history of redlining, an explicitly systemic policy initiative that purposefully segregated housing? North Dakota created the law even though state legislators conceded that true critical race theory is not being taught in North Dakota schools. One state senator described the law as “preemptive”.
The attempts by federal or state legislatures to restrict or make it illegal to teach about America’s racial history are described by PEN America, a non-profit organization that works to guarantee access for everyone to history, ideas, and works of literature, as educational gag orders. According to PEN America, 36 states have introduced 137 educational gag order bills in 2022, compared to 22 states introducing 54 bills in 2021. The symbolic state leader for creating any educational gag order law is Florida and its governor Ron DeSantis, who has built a national profile and his 2024 presidential campaign on Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” law.
The Stop WOKE Act law prohibits workplace training or school instruction that teaches that people are privileged or oppressed based on race, gender, or national origin; or that a person “bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” over actions committed in the past by members of the same race, gender, or national origin. The law says such training or lessons amount to discrimination.
But fortunately also in 2021, the long moral arc of America bent towards history justice, when all 100 U.S. Senators and all but 14 of 435 U.S. Congresspersons voted to create the Juneteenth National Independence Day, a federal holiday to commemorate the end of chattel slavery for American Blacks in the United States. Creating the Juneteenth Holiday makes all attempts to hide America’s racial history or punish anyone who proliferates it null and void. The Juneteenth Holiday celebrating the end of slavery makes enlightenment or knowledge on the subject of slavery the law of America. This means the question, “What does the Juneteenth Holiday celebrate”, will likely appear on an immigrant test for American citizenship like the question, “Who is Martin Luther King Jr”, periodically appears on the American citizenship test.
The Juneteenth Holiday makes white nationalists and anyone else who make attempts to delete history, members of the walking-dead club. Not only will the subject of the Juneteenth Holiday appear on the USA citizenship test, but it will also appear on academic tests of all kinds from the SAT down to high school or elementary classroom tests and basic entrance exams for schools. All future creditable educational curriculums must include the subject matter of a national holiday that uplifts a point of national history. And there is no way to accurately celebrate or educate about the end of slavery WITHOUT educating about its 1619 beginning or the American racism that made it possible.
All the Republican-controlled state legislatures and all the school districts across the United States that have decided to ban teaching 1619 subject matter must prepare to reverse themselves. Because the Juneteenth Holiday now forces the yearly exposure of all Americans to the past existence of slavery in America and to the racism that created it.
Martin Luther King Jr. also said, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”.
Any absence of America’s slave history truth is the presence of American autocratic lies that proliferate joyful, heroic, patriotic, and feel-good lies that weakens and eventually kills American democracy. Now that the U.S. House and Senate have bent America’s long moral arc towards history justice by creating the Juneteenth Holiday, American history will never again be silent about things that matter regardless of what laws or policies any state legislature or school board creates. Because the Juneteenth Holiday will proliferate the sometimes painful, uncomfortable, shameful, but enlightened redemptive history truth that shall strengthen and fortify American democracy for present and future generations of Americans yet unborn.