At Miami Norland Senior High School in Miami Gardens, Florida, Renee O’Connor continues to teach students about Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin and The 1619 Project in her African American history class.
She does this despite the ban on teaching the Pulitzer Prize-winning reexamination of African American enslavement and legacy in the state’s public schools, in a state regulation implementing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2022 “Stop WOKE Act.” The law aims to restrict educating children and others about the U.S. legacy of racism in schools and workplaces.
O’Connor isn’t defiant. She cites an obligation to her students.
“I teach a factual education based on documented proof,” O’Connor said.
Black students make up 92% of the Norland student body in this city, ranked 10th on a list of U.S. cities with the highest percentage of Black residents. O’Connor is Black, and her fellow teachers and the school administration are predominantly Black.
But in Deep South states, the chill over academic freedom has turned to ice at many primary and secondary schools and institutions of higher learning. Emboldened conservative students, parents and state legislators pressure academic leadership to curtail inclusive curricula and classroom discussion.
All five Southern Poverty Law Center focus states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — now have education censorship laws. Florida has led the nation in the sweeping nature of its anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) education laws since first passing the Stop WOKE Act and the “Don’t Say Gay” laws of 2022. The act’s application to Florida higher education was blocked in late 2022, and an appeal is pending.
“In Florida, teachers are really scared to speak up,” O’Connor said. “I teach based on people who went against the grain. I’d be a hypocrite if I’m teaching Jim Crow, segregation and Reconstruction and I don’t speak up. I’m also lucky I teach at a predominantly Black school. Parents are excited that their kids are learning African American history.
“If I taught [at a public high school] in Sunny Isles Beach (75% Hispanic/Latinx students) or Aventura (57% Black students), this would be a totally different conversation,” she said.
The SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth (DEY) and Inclusion and Anti-Extremism (IAE) litigation teams have worked on more than five legal cases challenging states and local school administrations that are banning books as well as outlawing “divisive concepts” and gender identity.
DEY Interim Deputy Legal Director Mike Tafelski said the SPLC will “continue to sue federal, state and local governments that seek to whitewash history and deny our children their freedom to learn in violation of our Constitution,” despite the Trump administration’s war against DEI as well as its threats to withhold school funding and to shut down the U.S. Department of Education.
The ax comes down on DEI
Gov. DeSantis’ attempts to control public education may represent the most prominent example, but other states have followed his lead. As of fall 2024, 23 states have education censorship laws.
23number of states — including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — with education censorship laws
In Alabama, faculty in The University of Alabama (UA) system who teach subjects related to race, gender and sex are reeling from the impact of the state’s 2023 anti-DEI law. The law, SB 129, prohibits DEI offices, programs and student-hosted campus events.
Last month, seeing no other way to stem the law’s damage to the university’s academic freedom and its impact on educators and progressive students since it took effect on Oct. 1, UA political science professors Richard Fording and Dana Patton, associate professor Cassandra Simon of The UA School of Social Work, three University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) students and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP became plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging SB 129. The complaint calls the law vague and discriminatory and a violation of the First and 14th amendments. The plaintiffs are Black, white and Latinx.
Fording said faculty are being forced to scrub their curricula, required readings, tests and classroom discussion of topics related to race, civil rights law, racial oppression and racial inequality, which prepare students for their future education and jobs.
“What’s happening in Alabama is a nationwide project to try to restrict the training and education offered on college campuses that the architects — the extreme right — feel threatens their extremist ideology,” Fording said.
To avoid trouble yet unwilling to censor discussion in a class called “The Politics of Poverty,” Fording has decided not to teach it in the spring. A pressure campaign that conservative students, their parents, state legislators and the university president unleashed on Patton after she taught the same class to Honors College students partly precipitated the lawsuit.
“Now that the class has been branded as ‘woke indoctrination,’ I won’t teach it until we [faculty] have protection,” said Fording. He developed and taught the course for years without complaint.
“It’s pretty obvious that the combination of book bans and curriculum bans against The 1619 Project and what they call ‘divisive concepts’ have the end goal to first take control of the narrative then make people amenable to the regressive policies they want to pass,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creative force behind The 1619 Project and related books and educational materials, which are often subjected to anti-DEI bans.
Climate of white supremacy
The lawsuit against the UA system comes amid a campus climate that is worsening in Alabama. Since 2016, the state has seen a rise in racist and antisemitic speaker events, slurs and a recent sidewalk “chalking” connected to white nationalist university student groups like Turning Point USA and Students for America First, according to Fording.
The complaint alleges that the harassment of Patton occurred after right-wing activists brought complaints to the attention of the UA president.
“Conservative white student groups benefited from a rise in funding for campus events sponsored from outside parent groups that pay white nationalist groups to speak at college campuses to make white nationalism legitimate discourse, to make unacceptable ideology acceptable and to portray the other side as extremist, unacceptable and outside the boundaries of discourse,” Fording said.
An hour east of UAB, at Alabama’s Jacksonville State University, professors across different departments said that no university official has told them to alter curricula.
“It’s clear that this bill violates the First and 14th amendments,” said Wesley Bishop, assistant professor of public and American history. “You can’t teach the history of the U.S. without talking about slavery. It dominates the country’s history. The law also says you have to teach meritocracy, but if you are born into a certain socioeconomic class, that’s tied to race in this country.”
Yet in the state capital at Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM), where the student body is nearly a 50-50 split between Black and white students, political science associate professor Pia Knigge, who teaches classes on race, gender and human rights, and some of her colleagues have engaged in self-censorship as a precaution. The 27-year AUM professor and a colleague with whom she co-teaches a course titled “Introduction to Diversity and Inclusion” stopped using a textbook that “had a DEI slant [to] avoid any red flags out of precaution,” she said.
“We noticed that some of our conservative students took issue with some parts of the textbook,” she said.
Knigge and her colleague are writing a textbook specifically geared for this class for use in fall 2025. They also replaced all references to the politically charged acronym “DEI” with the lesser-known “JEDI” (justice, equity, diversity and inclusion) in the course description and syllabus and renamed the course “Diversity and Equality.”
Seeing academic repression growing and the near passage of a bill to criminalize public librarians for holding books with “obscene” racial and LGBTQ+ content prompted the work on the new textbook.
Knigge was struck by the change in conservative students this winter when she collected a handout she distributes at the beginning of each semester. The questionnaire surveys students’ career goals, preferred name and pronouns.
“In the past, some students left the questions about gender blank,” she said, but this semester some objected to the option of selecting nonbinary pronouns.
In the spring, Knigge will make the survey optional.
Gutting progressive education
In 2023, DeSantis appointed six new ultra-conservative people to the New College of Florida board of trustees, including Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and writer who frequently appears on Fox News. The new board quickly denied tenure to five professors, which ultimately led to the complete transformation of the honors college. Once known nationwide for its diversity and inclusion, New College became an academically narrowed, conservative symbol of DeSantis’ “anti-woke” political agenda.
DeSantis promised to turn New College into the “Hillsdale of the South,” referring to the right-leaning conservative school in Michigan where systemic racism, disenfranchisement and violence against Black people have been downplayed in favor of a whitewashed, right-wing version of American history.
New College anthropology professor emerita Maria Vesperi played a leading role in organizing “Academic Freedom in the Sunshine,” an April 2023 teach-in that drew faculty speakers from several Florida campuses and featured Jeremy Young, PEN America’s director of state and higher education policy, who fights government censorship of colleges and universities. Vesperi, a former journalist, was also the longtime faculty sponsor of the school’s weekly, student online publication The Catalyst, which was a product of her journalism course. Vesperi guided student reporters and editors as they covered protests at the public college and closely tracked the takeover and backlash. The newspaper produced its final issue in May 2024, at the end of Vesperi’s final semester.
More than a third of the faculty left during the second half of school year 2022-2023, including the high-profile firing of a library dean, who was an open member of the LGBTQ+ community. By the start of the 2023-24 academic year, about 186 of the 691 students had left the school, according to a report issued to faculty by former New College Provost Bradley Thiessen before he, too, left the school. The shortage of professors led to the cancellation of some classes in fall 2023.
Vesperi officially retired in August 2024, the same month the school disposed of thousands of library books, including all of them that were housed in the school’s shuttered Gender and Diversity Center, in a dumpster. The library dean at that time was placed on academic leave and later terminated.
“Faculty and students resisted, but over time it became more difficult to look ahead and see what we’d be able to teach. It made it harder for them to stay,” Vesperi said, adding, “They [state legislators] don’t care if there is a teacher shortage because they are trying to undermine public education.”
Not only in colleges
O’Connor’s observation of the impact of race and class on parental acceptance of Black history education in Miami is backed up by Roberta Gardner, an associate professor of reading and literacy education. Gardner, who is Black, instructs future and already-licensed teachers on how to teach writing and reading.
Gardner has found that fear of running afoul of local and state censorship laws is rampant among K-12 educators due to the direct control that school administrations, local school boards and parents assert over curricula and books and to the vagueness of the laws.
“Some teachers are reading books that touch on issues of race and gender because they have the support of school administrators and parents who trust them and know they are knowledgeable, but others are extremely fearful about reading a book that may be deemed controversial and are avoiding these topics, especially if they are uncomfortable and unknowledgeable with them,” Gardner said.
To illustrate her point, she used the often-piecemeal teaching in elementary school of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality.
“Teachers may talk about the dream, but many don’t talk about segregation or the events that led up to the dream. Instead of giving students a comprehensive understanding of racial justice and equity, they just give them a worksheet or an isolated passage to read with no book, no story, no context,” she said.
Gardner, whose personal scholastic research is on Black children’s experience and literature, said that all children need to see models in the material they read.
“Learning to read is connected to cognitive science, and inclusive books with rich context and diverse characters help kids comprehend reading material — not just that it interests them,” she said. Otherwise, she said, “Why would a kid be interested?”
Rhonda Sonnenberg is a senior staff writer for the SPLC.
Image at top: Students at the New College of Florida in Sarasota during a demonstration on Jan. 31, 2023. Earlier that month, Gov. Ron DeSantis had appointed six new trustees to the college’s board, part of an effort to transform the college into the “Hillsdale of the South.” (Credit: Octavio Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)