This Mississippi bill is the latest of several attempts to restrict discussion of race and racism in the state’s schools. The anti-CRT bill comes almost exactly one year after Mississippi sought to ban The 1619 Project, a collection of essays and other materials related to slavery and racism in America, as well as a book and curriculum, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times. The so-called Saving American History in Mississippi Schools Act, which was introduced in Jan. 2021 but never passed, would have cut 25% of state funding from any school that taught material from The 1619 Project. Ironically, the original text of the bill asserted that “the true date of America's founding is July 4, 1775, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress,” getting the actual date of the Declaration of Independence wrong by one year.

In December, many people became outraged when it was revealed that the Mississippi Department of Education, or MDE, had quietly changed standards for the state’s social studies curriculum. The revised curriculum removed references to specific civil rights movement leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as specific instruments of Black oppression like the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. The MDE later reversed some of these changes in response to parent outcry.

mississippi freedom summer

Get relevant content delivered to you once a week