Frederick Douglass would disapprove of Florida's Black history curriculum

Revisionists misuse the former slave and abolitionist as a cheerleader for the founding fathers and as someone who benefited from slavery

In a jaw-dropping video approved for Florida schools, an animated Frederick Douglass gushes to a couple of time-traveling children about the greatness of the founding fathers — how they knew slavery was “evil and wrong” but understandably had bigger priorities when creating the country.

“The big problems have to be approached very carefully,” the fictional Douglass tells Leo and Layla while taking a thinly veiled jab at the Black Lives Matter movement for being too eager for change.

“So you’re trying to work for change inside of the American system,” Layla says.

“Precisely, Layla,” Douglass responds. “Our system is wonderful and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

PragerU, an unaccredited ultra-conservative school, produced the video along with a large catalog of children’s videos offering an inaccurate, rosy version of American history. Florida recently approved PragerU’s videos for use in the classroom.

It’s in keeping with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s pledge to defeat “woke ideology” that he says unfairly portrays the United States as a racist country. Florida has completely revamped its African American history curriculum as required by the Stop WOKE Act to offer lessons that won’t make any white student feel responsible or guilty for the sins of the past. That led to controversial new standards that include teaching that slaves benefited from being taught skills and that the founding fathers set in motion the eventual end of slavery.

Perplexingly, a historical figure often cited by those defending this guilt-free version of history is Frederick Douglass, who made a daring escape from slavery as a young man and then in a searing autobiography exposed the cruel acts he witnessed as a child. Perhaps no one has written more forcefully about the evils of slavery.

Take this example of how Douglass was fed as a child.

Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.

Douglass recounted several murders by cruel overseers and the brutal whipping of his half-naked aunt.

I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest.

Anyone who reads Douglass’s books or speeches would be perplexed and horrified that he would be described as a defender of America’s past or a beneficiary of slavery.

In a famous speech Douglass gave in 1852, he called the Constitution a “glorious liberty document” and praised the signers of the Declaration of Independence. But in doing so, he was making a nuanced, lawyerly argument, using the words of white power against itself. While this tactic made sense for someone trying to find a way to end slavery, it wasn’t good history.

Slavery is indeed embedded in the Constitution through at a minimum the 3/5ths compromise. By 1857, the Supreme Court would decide in Dred Scott that the authors of the Constitution clearly didn’t intend Black people to have any rights at all. And Congress nationalized slavery with the fugitive slave act that put escaped slaves like Douglass in peril. Douglass supported the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery but thought it didn’t go far enough.

But PragerU completely distorts Douglass’s words as a young man by failing to show the nuance of Douglass’s argument. Much like Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech is now distorted as being anti-affirmative action, Douglass’s What to a Slave is the 4th of July is being twisted by PragerU as an affirmation of the goodness of the founding fathers.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. Frederick Douglass

But the speech is actually a scathing attack on America’s traditions and on slavery. “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour,” Douglass said.

Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University, and author of the best-selling book White Rage, said using Douglass as a defender of the founders is “a fake history, like so much of what is being propagated here.”

“It is slanted. It is cherry-picked. It is inaccurate,” Anderson said.

In the same speech PragerU distorts, Douglass doesn’t hide his disdain for the founding of the United States.

Douglass’s words were also contorted to defend requiring Florida teachers to instruct students that slaves developed skills that they could use to their personal benefit. Again, Douglass was used as an example of this.

William B. Allen, a scholar at the far-right Claremont Institute, was one of only two members of a secret 13-person workgroup that argued in favor of this standard, according to NBC News. Yet somehow it survived to the final draft and was approved.

On Fox News, Allen told Jesse Watters that Douglass benefited when the wife of one of his overseers started to teach him to read. But in truth, that instruction was quickly halted and the wife went from being kind and generous to mean and authoritarian. It’s actually an example of how slaves were denied benefits offered to even the poorest white children.

Many states made it a crime to educate a slave. The experience was an epiphany for Douglass, who now realized very clearly the imbalance of power and the ways slaves were kept oppressed. He vowed to learn somehow on his own. He succeeded by bribing poor white children in town with extra pieces of bread.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Anderson argues there are grave risks to trying to present slavery as something acceptable, comparing it to trying to find good in the atrocities of the Balkan Wars.

“How do you talk about gang rape, forced pregnancy, forced birth and basically genocidal violence and find the good in that? It's not there. And so we do moral damage when we try to create some kind of balance with the heinousness. We need to make sure that the heinousness of these acts is clear so we don't do this dance again.”

Perhaps the best place to learn about the atrocities of slavery is in the writings of Frederick Douglass.