In response to pressure from Ron DeSantis, the College Board has removed Critical Race Theory from its proposed AP African American Studies curriculum. This move has meant deleting Amiri Baraka, a virulent anti-White and antisemitic racist, from the curriculum—but he’s still popular in colleges and universities.

For roughly a century, the core purpose of American education was to uplift people. The 1883 The Fifth Reader, part of a series by Appletons’ School Readers, provides some insight into this approach.

The reader offers Shakespearean orations, poems (including Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, celebrating a doomed battle), science, Psalms, and history. It also includes essays entitled “How to render Noble Ideas,” “How to render Joyous Ideas,” along with George Washington’s “Rules of Behavior,” Benjamin Franklin’s “The Necessity of Government” and “The Way to Wealth,” and Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. Everything in the book is designed to improve young minds by exposing them to noble ideas and the principles of republican government and liberty.

Likewise, David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman reveals that one of the most important gifts Truman, who was born in 1884, received as a child was a book about the lives of Great Men. Each was included as an example of a person who made a positive change in the world, with many having risen from humble beginnings.

In the early days of the Black history movement (1960s/70s), American children learned about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, Louis Armstrong, and a host of other Black Americans who overcame tremendous adversity to succeed within or change for the better the American system. The message was that we are all one American family and that people of all races, colors, and creeds contributed to America’s greatness.

Image: Baraka reading the marginally intelligible but obviously anti-American “Somebody Blew Up America,” written after 9/11. YouTube screen grab.

American education has changed, and nothing more clearly illustrates that than the continued focus on the poetry of Leroy Jones, who rechristened himself Amiri Baraka. Jones was born in 1934 in New Jersey, not the Jim Crow south, and came from a middle-class home. He won a scholarship to Rutgers but went, instead, to Howard University, studying philosophy and religion. He was a sergeant in the US Air Force, where he was subject to crude racism and accusations (probably true) that he was a communist.

By the 1960s, Baraka’s affinity was openly supporting Fidel Castro. He embraced Black nationalism and espoused crude racism against White people and Jews. When Black nationalism failed to sustain him, he went for full Marxism. In honor of Islam, he named his publishing business “Jihad Press.”

Daniel Greenfield has compiled just a small sample of Baraka’s vile anti-White rants: “We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s**t).” “Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” He wrote about the original White person as “a beast” who is “white with a red, lizard-devil mask.” There’s much more, but the bottom line is that Baraka’s racial hatred is indistinguishable from what the Nazis offered. Since he shares Nazi antisemitism, the only difference is that he hates Whites too.

What’s galling is that, as Greenfield explains, the same institutions that would never dream of incorporating Nazi writings in their instruction are fine with elevating Baraka’s writing—and that includes the people behind the first draft of the AP African American Studies curriculum:

Amiri Baraka, arguably the country’s most racist poet, who frequently fantasized about the mass murder of white people and Jews, is widely taught in colleges across America. And he’s at the center of the controversy over Florida’s rejection of an AP Black Studies course.

The AP course had included BLM, domestic terrorist Angela Davis, and Amiri Baraka.

The Biden administration called Florida’s decision to reject this vile hatred “incomprehensible”.

Racemonger lawyer Ben Crump, who made his bones extracting millions from the deaths of violent criminals like George Floyd and Michael Brown, has announced that he’s ready to sue.

Karen Attiah of the Washington Post falsely claimed that it was an “advanced lesson in anti-blackness” and tweeted, “Florida and DeSantis are showing us what was under their *ahem* hoods this entire time.”

[snip]

The AP course includes any number of materials banned by Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, but the most remarkable of them all may be Topic 4.10 which recommends an examination of “an example of the writings of Amiri Baraka.” Topic 4.27 also recommends reading Baraka.

Fortunately, Governor DeSantis’s rejected the Critical Race Theory within the program. The College Board has revised the curriculum, which has included removing Baraka’s hate-filled screeds. Greenfield details, however, how Baraka remains popular across American college and University campuses.

In other words, the College Board beat a strategic retreat. The war against breaking America apart through Black-centered anti-White racism continues unabated. Conservatives must resist the temptation to which they inevitably yield, which is to view leftists’ strategic retreat as a full rout, allowing conservatives to retire from the field of battle. The battle is still on, and one of its objectives must be to remove Baraka from all classrooms, just as any other racist would be.