At a press conference in January 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida argued against an advanced-placement course in African American studies, warning that such material acted as a trojan horse for indoctrinating students into “left-wing” ideology.
The statement infuriated me, but once I settled, I had to agree with him.
In fact, such a thing had happened to me. I was raised a racist child in 1960s Laurel, Miss., and it was those very trojan horses that finally slipped through my generations-old wall of white supremacy and turned me into a left-wing ideologue.
When I was 19, I was recruited to sell the first edition of Ebony Pictorial History of Black America door to door in African American neighborhoods to pay my way through college. This collection was the first set of Black history books that a Black author wrote for a mainstream Black market. Clarksdale, Miss., native and former Ebony magazine executive editor Lerone Bennett Jr. penned the books. Nobody had seen anything like it, so they should sell well I thought.
But I had never stepped foot in a Black person’s home before and was pretty sure they didn’t want me in theirs. I was no civil-rights activist. I needed the money.
My True Identity Lies in the Entire Story
In the summer of 1971, the Southwestern Company out of Nashville, Tenn., sent me to Smithfield, N.C., where I sat in tar paper shacks without indoor plumbing, under shade trees, out in tobacco barns, or in the brick home of the rare Black professional. This same phenomenon repeated itself as parents gathered their children to see what the “white man” had brought.
I flipped through the books, showing them pictures and telling the stories of African American heroes. And not just the usually promoted sports stars and singing acts, but Black entrepreneurs, a Supreme Court justice, an Air Force general, inventors, intellectuals, orators, militants, revolutionaries, kings and queens.
I remember the solemn weight of that unknown history as it settled upon them. The children’s eyes opened wide, the parents pulled their kids closer, sometimes there were words of
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