“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Those words from George Orwell are not theory for me. I’ve been in classrooms since 1993, led schools as a principal, and now spend my days building pipelines for Black educators. I’ve watched over and over how adults try to narrow what young people are allowed to know about the past so they can control what those young people dare to imagine about the future.
That’s why what happened recently in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, caught my attention.
Back in 2021, Cherry Hill became the first district in the state to require an African American history course for graduation—joining a small but growing group of districts, including my home city of Philadelphia, that understood a simple truth: what you require all students to learn is what you declare essential. The course they built didn’t just line up enslavement, Jim Crow, and a few civil rights icons. It pushed students to see Black people as thinkers, creators, organizers, and nation-shapers, not just as a people things happen to.
And Cherry Hill did that in a state that had already put its values in writing. New Jersey’s Amistad law and Commission require districts to infuse African and African American history throughout K–12 social studies, explicitly to correct the omission and distortion of Black history and to give students a more accurate account of the United States. In other words, New Jersey has already said that Black history is not “extra.” It belongs at the center of how we teach American history.
In the middle of a brutal budget season, with Cherry Hill wrestling with a major deficit, job cuts, larger class sizes, and a tax increase, one board member suggested reconsidering the African American history graduation requirement and making the course an elective instead.
The argument, in essence, was that the class could still be offered without being required for every student.
That proposal drew immediate pushback from students, educators, and civil rights advocates, and it was ultimately withdrawn. Superintendent Kwame Morton also reassured families that the course was not in jeopardy at that point.
But that does not make the episode insignificant. In some ways, it makes it more revealing. The fact that this rollback could be publicly floated at all—in a district once held up as a model, in a state with Amistad on the books, in a national climate already hostile to #TeachTruth—shows how quickly Black history can be moved from “essential” to “negotiable” when budgets tighten and political courage thins.
I’ve watched and tracked too many budget hearings and scheduling decisions not to recognize that move. When people start talking about “we’ll keep it as an elective,” they are really saying, “We don’t think every student needs this.” We do not make Algebra I an elective. We do not make biology an elective. We do not say, “Reading is important, but if students care about it, they can choose that on their own.”
So even though Cherry Hill stepped back from the brink, the message embedded in that moment still matters. A district that once led the way had to be pushed, publicly, not to weaken its commitment to Black history. That should concern all of us.
And Cherry Hill is not alone. All over the country, there’s a coordinated effort to shrink what students can learn about race, power, and history: state bills trying to muzzle teachers, book bans, attacks on so-called “divisive concepts,” and local moves to sideline Black studies.
Thousands of educators have already said, in public, that they will not lie to students about U.S. history, no matter how much political pressure they face. That’s the heart of the #TeachTruth struggle. In a moment like this, Lerone Bennett Jr.’s warning rings loud: “An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.”
I see two main strategies of this backlash. The first is what Cherry Hill briefly entertained: take Black studies out of the center. Kill the requirement. Starve the course. Push it to the edges of the schedule and call that “choice.”
The second is quieter but just as dangerous: keep Black history on the books, but flatten it until it barely resembles honest history. Tell a thin story in which Black people appear mainly as the recipients of pain—enslaved, segregated, discriminated against—and then rush past the turbulence, backlash, and unfinished work that followed the civil rights era, as though a few landmark victories settled everything for good.
When schools only teach what was done to Black people, they are not teaching Black history at all. They are teaching the history of white supremacy’s assaults on Black life. That history absolutely must be taught. But if that is all students ever hear, they are getting a lie of omission.
Real Black history is not just a record of what broke. It is the story of what Black people built anyway. It is the story of Black literacy. For generations, it was illegal in much of this country to teach enslaved people to read. People were beaten, jailed, and killed for trying. And yet, in the years after emancipation, Black communities launched a literacy movement so fierce that historians describe the growth in reading as unprecedented, given the starting point and the hostility they faced.
It is the story of Black schooling. Between 1912 and 1932, Black communities—often working with the Rosenwald Fund and always investing their own money and labor—helped build nearly 5,000 schools, shops, and teacher homes across 15 Southern states. Those buildings served more than a third of Black children in the region. They were declarations that Black children’s minds were worth the sacrifice, even when state and local governments said otherwise.
It is the story of Black genius and innovation. From agriculture to engineering, from transportation to communications, Black people have designed, improved, and invented work that powered entire industries. Too often, those patents and profits were claimed by someone else, or not recognized at all, because the law and the culture refused to honor Black intellect.
It is the story of Black joy and creativity. The music, the literature, the theology, and the political thought that Black communities produced did not simply “add diversity.” They changed what American culture is. They expanded this country’s imagination about freedom, justice, and shared life, even when the country wanted none of it.
I’ve seen what happens when students encounter that fuller history and truly understand where they live. When I was a social studies teacher, my principal at Turner Middle School asked what materials I needed to teach well. My colleague Mrs. Kathleen Lee and I chose a text by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante because we wanted our eighth graders to encounter Black history as a serious field of study, not as a sidebar. I have never forgotten what that choice opened up for students.
When alumni of our programs—like Regina Banks—teach, they are drawing from a deep well of knowledge shaped by luminaries like Dr. Greg Carr and transmitting that history to students in the present. I have watched Black students recognize themselves in the curriculum in ways that made them lean in more fully. I have watched non-Black students become more grounded and more empathetic, not more “divided,” when they learn that the rights they take for granted were not handed down from on high. They were fought for—often by Black people whose names most textbooks still skip.
This is what makes moments like Cherry Hill so important.
New Jersey put Amistad in place precisely to stop the old pattern of erasing and flattening Black history. Cherry Hill’s original decision to require an African American history course was a model of what it looks like to take that mandate seriously. The fact that the district ultimately kept the requirement is a good thing. But the fact that the requirement became vulnerable at all should still serve as a warning.
That warning reaches far beyond one township. If Black history can be pushed toward the elective column in a state that has already said this work matters, then no district should assume its own commitments are safe from political pressure, budget panic, or historical amnesia. Coretta Scott King said it plainly: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”
Cherry Hill is a reminder that we cannot afford to rest on our laurels. Students, educators, families, and community leaders have to stay vigilant.
Some people will insist this is just about money, or scheduling, or local control. I’ve been doing this long enough to know better. Every budget tells a story. Every master schedule is a set of values laid out in columns and rows. When the cuts come, I look to see what moves and what doesn’t. That’s where the truth lives.
We do not make literacy optional. We do not make science optional. We should not make the full history of this country optional either. Not in New Jersey, where the law already says otherwise, and not anywhere else for that matter.
If we are serious about preparing young people to inherit this “democracy”—and not just inherit it, but improve it—then we owe them more than a comforting story. We owe them the truth about the people who built our institutions, challenged them, expanded them, and forced this country to live a little closer to what it promised on paper.
Not the convenient version, the complete one.
