Note to Florida and DeSantis: Enslaved Africans were already skilled

[Lee Cruz]

Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis doubled down Friday on controversial new rules passed by his state’s Board of Education that will require educators to teach that enslaved Black people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis told reporters Friday. “But the reality is, all of that is rooted in whatever is factual.”

DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Blacks benefited from slavery

Here are some simple, historical facts: Africans already were skilled before they were enslaved. And, in many cases, enslavers sought and purchased people coming from specific African societies based on skills common in those societies. Decades of research — slave ship manifests, plantation ledgers, newspaper articles, letters, journals and archaeological digs — by dozens of scholars supports this, much of it compiled in the 2022 book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/24/florida-slavery-history-ron-desantis/