The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.

The all-white school board voted 5-2 to stop offering Black history and literature courses.

A Missouri school board that previously voted to rescind an anti-discrimination resolution has voted in favor of removing elective Black history and literature classes.

The seven-member Francis Howell School Board voted 5-2 Thursday night to stop offering Black History and Black Literature courses, which had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021, KSDK reported. All seven members of the board are white.

“Our students really wanted these electives,” Harry Harris, whose son is a student in the district, said during the board meeting. “Our families really wanted them and our teachers really wanted them. It’s important. It’s been great.”

In July, the conservative-led board revoked an anti-racism resolution that had been passed in 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd.

  • Flying Squid
    147•11 months ago

    Growing up in Indiana, they didn’t teach black history, and I turned out just fine except for not knowing about Jim Crow or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or redlining or the Tulsa race massacre or Ruby Bridges, or lynching, or Malcolm X or the Black Panther movement or the MOVE bombing or…

    • chaogomu
      30•11 months ago

      I grew up in Wyoming. We didn’t get most of that well…

      We did hear about lynching and Malcolm X. Not much in details about either, mind, but we were told that both had existed. They glossed over anything that Malcolm X stood for, or actually said, or did…

      As for lynching… We learned the word.

    • Aniki 🌱🌿English
      2•11 months ago

      To be fair, I grew up in the north east and went to a very good public school and never learned about ANY of that until I went to college/uni and started taking real history courses.

    • @Fredselfish
      2•11 months ago

      The people of Tulsa didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Until that HBO show Watchmen I never heard of it.

      Ask my wife who was born and raised here and my ex wife both had no clue and they went to school in the Tulsa area.

      It fucked up but Until HBO shine a light on it they had plan to never educate anyone about it.

    • @dakial
      1•11 months ago

      Is black history not taught inside the main history classes? Slavery, civil rights, etc etc? What is the argument for these classes?