Sharpton: ‘Baby Trump’ DeSantis Needs to ‘Tell the Whole Truth’
Hundreds protest Florida governor at capital over attack on Black history course
Telling Gov Ron DeSantis that he must “tell the whole truth” about Black history, a prominent civil rights activist and TV personality is reproaching the Florida governor for his attack on a high-school Black history course in his state.
A potential contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis moved to ban in his state the teaching of an Advanced Placement history course in African-American history.
That has set off a battle with the organization which created the course — as well as citizens who don't want to see Black history whitewashed in the nation's classrooms.
Hundreds of protesters gathered Wednesday outside the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., to protest DeSantis’ actions — including faith leaders from around the country — condemning the his decision to block a college-level African-American Studies course from high schools.
“So here we are, three or four generations past, and you’re now going to tell us that, ‘We will decide what part of black history is acceptable and comfortable to us?’ Well, we need to talk about what was uncomfortable for Blacks and others, for Latinos, for poor whites, for LGBTQ, and how we dealt with that discomfort,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a political commentator, civil rights leader and founder of the National Action Network. “The history of America is trying to deal with everybody’s plight and this experiment for democracy, not trying to eliminate the parts you want. And he’s doing it for political reasons.
“He feels, 'If I can do what Donald Trump did,' — Donald Trump launched his political career off of birtherism, saying that Barack Obama was other, and then he went on from there with other racial kind of tropes — so now we have Ron DeSantis, who I call ‘Baby Trump,’ who is now trying to do the baby Trump thing and come with a new racial divide, like he is in some way going to liberate America from its past, rather than to say, ‘Let’s glorify that these people were enslaved and fought their way all the way to where we put a black man in the White House, re-elected him, and have a black woman as vice president today.’ Tell the whole story, Baby Trump,” Sharpton said in an on-camera appearance on MSNBC.
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