Editorial: Florida rewrites history with a right-wing slant

[S. E. Anderson]

Editorial: Florida rewrites history with a right-wing slant

Stonewall Jackson Middle School, 6000 Stonewall Jackson Rd, Orlando, on Thursday, July 16, 2015. A memorial for

Confederate soldiers at Lake Eola Park is not the only relic or remembrance of the post-Civil War-era South still standing

in Central Florida. Amid the trees, dog-walkers and swans of Lake Eola, it stands out like a sore thumb: a marble statue

of a Confederate soldier, often referred to over the years as “Johnny Reb,” which recently became the local focus of

renewed national scrutiny of Confederate relics. But the lasting influence of dark chapters in the American South’s past,

from the Civil War to segregation, lingers in Orlando in ways both over and subtle. That includes everything from the

iconic park in which the statue sits — which was gifted to the city by a man who delivered 25,000 head of cattle to the

Southern army — to Division Avenue — which separates historically-black Parramore from the heart of downtown —

to local schools still named for Confederate generals.

 

By Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel Editorial Boards | ins...@orlandosentinel.com

PUBLISHED: May 19, 2026

Several generations of Florida students were taught that the Civil War had nothing much to do with slavery, that secession was a noble “lost cause,” and that plantation life was beneficial for the slaves.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the perpetrators and perpetuators of those myths, had seen to it that the only textbooks allowed in Southern schools would peddle those fictions.

Revisionist history never plays well. But here we go again.

Not for the first time, Gov. Ron DeSantis is messing with the minds of students, distorting the history of slavery and its persistent and pernicious legacy of racism.

The new U.S. history course his Department of Education has crafted as an alternative to the widely used and respected Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum does that and more.

It is right-wing revisionism throughout. It exalts the influence of Protestant religion. It misstates the extent to which the Founders opposed slavery. It misrepresents the Constitution as an antislavery document. Sections about FDR’s New Deal are light on his accomplishments and riddled with criticism of his Democratic liberalism.

The only approved textbook is “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story” by Wilfred McClay, a historian at Hillsdale College, a private institution in Michigan. Hillsdale was DeSantis’ go-to source for converting New College of Florida from a liberal to a conservative institution and for influencing public schools as well.

Glossing over slavery

DeSantis’ public school standards, which the Board of Education approved last year, drew well-deserved serious criticism for glossing over slavery by teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

The syllabus for the new “FACT U.S. History” course picks up that diversionary theme.

“Describe the variety of enslaved people’s experiences — labor systems, family and community life, religion and spirituals, and everyday resistance — across both the Upper South and the Deep South,” it says.

The syllabus describes the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as having “opposed slavery in principle as well as in constitutional provisions and policy.” Not so. The Continental Congress eliminated all of Thomas Jefferson’s language that was critical of slavery before approving the Declaration of Independence.

The Constitution accommodated slavery and compromised the issue in four ways: by never using the word “slavery”; allowing slaves to be imported at least until 1808; requiring states to return fugitive slaves to their owners; and by allowing three-fifths of the slave populations, who could not vote, to be counted for state representation in Congress and thus in the electoral voting of presidents.

The eventual ban on the international slave trade actually made Southern slaveholders wealthier by increasing the value of their human chattel.

The course describes the treatment of the three-fifths issue in Federalist 54 as a criticism of slavery. It attributes that to James Madison, the more likely author, although some credit it to Alexander Hamilton. A better reading is that Federalist 54, written primarily for a New York audience, cited Northern objections in order to knock them down in favor of the perquisites of property ownership. Madison was a slaveholder, as were 11 other presidents.

We did not find any explanation of the Electoral College in the syllabus, nor anything relating to the racist dogmas spawned by the slaveholders’ need to rationalize their brutalities. Although the outline deals at length with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, it appears to be silent on how Nixon, Reagan and the Republican Party exploited them to turn the once-solidly Democratic South into a rigidly Republican bastion.

A total disservice to students

It all fits squarely into the current Republican narrative, which is especially virulent at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Florida, that racism has been wiped out and that there must be no efforts to promote diversity or inclusion in education, employment and governance.

The course also parrots one of the anti-abortion movement’s tropes by asserting that the “Roe v. Wade decision removed a contentious topic from the democratic process.”

The traditional Advanced Placement U.S. history course, produced by the College Board, is a college-level curriculum that offers college credit to high school students. While colleges in Florida may be required to accept the state’s alternative, no colleges or universities elsewhere should or likely will. It would be a disservice to their students for Florida high schools to substitute it for the standard AP course.

The College Board is another of those institutions, along with teacher unions and accreditation organizations, that Republicans in general and DeSantis in particular have been trying to take down as impermissibly liberal.

DeSantis’ new accreditation alternative, Commission for Public Higher Education, will doubtlessly applaud his new history curriculum. No independent accreditation organization ought to. No responsible Florida school board should accept it.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to ins...@orlandosentinel.com.

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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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