Photo: Koshu Kunii
When Charlene Farrington and her staff gather teenagers on Saturday mornings, they talk about South Florida’s Caribbean roots, the state’s dark history of lynchings, how segregation still shapes the landscape and how grassroots activists mobilized the Civil Rights Movement to upend oppression. Since Faith in Florida developed its own Black history toolkit last year, more than 400 congregations have pledged to teach the lessons. While Florida has required public schools to teach African American history for the past 30 years, a common complaint is that the instruction seems limited to heroic figures. Sulaya Williams, who launched her own organization in 2016 to teach Black history in community settings, now has a contract to teach Saturday school at a public library in Fort Lauderdale. State lawmakers unanimously approved the African American history requirement in 1994, after historians published an official report on the deadly 1923 attack when a white mob razed the majority-Black community of Rosewood. When the Florida Legislature approved financial compensation for Rosewood’s survivors and descendants in 1994, it was seen as a national model for reparations.
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