Rep. Justin Pearson rouses Miami marchers at education protest

By Kevin Deutsch

On August 22, 2023

About 300 demonstrators marched in Miami last week in opposition of Florida’s new standards for Black history education – a protest capped by a fiery speech from Tenn. Rep. Justin Pearson outside the Miami-Dade County School Board Administration Building. 

Participants in the march, organized and led by Black Miami historian Marvin Dunn, walked a mile from Booker T. Washington Senior High School to the school board building on NE Second Avenue. Along the way, they blasted the state’s updated Black history curriculum as offensive and inaccurate, some carrying signs that read, “There were no benefits to slavery,” while chanting “When Black history is under attack, what do we do? We fight back!” 

As protestors packed the street, Pearson stepped onto a small stage and delivered remarks that had the crowd roaring. 

“They thought that they would be able to change these standards and we wouldn’t say nothing,” said Pearson, 28, who has garnered national fame in the wake of his April expulsion from the Tennessee Legislature. “That they’d be able to say something like ‘slavery had benefit for our ancestors’ and we would stand there and take it. But see, we fired up.” 

Preacher’s son Pearson, who was later reinstated after his expulsion and won a special election this month to reclaim his House seat went on to say, “Being raped, having your children stolen from you, being maimed, being denied the right to read, those were not benefits for our ancestors. And for (that) history to actually be taught to our children and to white children … That is devastating, that is wrong, that is immoral and we have to change that right now.” 

Approved in July, the state’s new Black history teaching standards include instruction about how slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. The curriculum also requires instruction about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” at the 1920 Ocoee Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre, drawing a false equivalency between the white supremacist killers who carried out those atrocities and their Black victims, Dunn and other critics said. 

Dunn, a prominent author, Ph.D. and FIU professor emeritus of psychology, called on the Miami-Dade County School Board and other school boards to reject the standards. 

“DeSantis is trying to wipe out our history,” Dunn, 83, told his fellow demonstrators. “Worse than that, he’s trying to rewrite it by having teachers teach that there was equal violence, Black against white … Don’t teach those lies.” 

Dunn, who took a busload of county teachers to Ocoee and the site of the Rosewood Massacre the previous weekend on what he dubbed the “Teach No Lies” tour, said people “cannot allow this government to muzzle our teachers.” 

Calling the inaccuracies in the new standards “poison,” he cautioned against being “blindsided by a little dictator in Tallahassee who wants to impose his right-wing, quasi-Nazi ideology on the school children of Florida.” 

Demonstrators said they marched Wednesday both to show Florida politicians that they disagree with the standards, and to inform the public about the teaching changes. 

“Tell them kids the truth, stop lying to the kids,” said Janie Jackson, 55, a Miami resident and mother of eight children. “One of the Ten Commandments is, ‘thou shall not lie,’ and Mr. Ron DeSantis, ever since [his election], that’s all that he’s been doing. He has children, and he shouldn’t be lying to his children.” 

Protester Jonathan Gartrelle, 34, of Miami, led many of the chants during the march and called parts of the new Black history curriculum offensive. 

Donning an elaborate costume resembling the one worn by Jamie Foxx’s slavery-era character in “Django Unchained,” Gartrelle said: “I believe that it is a horrific rewriting of history that is meant to keep children ignorant.”

This piece was republished from The Miami Times.