Two years ago, Florida governor Ron DeSantis made national headlines for rejecting the College Board’s curriculum for AP African American Studies. This year, Black History Month again arrives at a moment of state backlash—this time as Donald Trump intensifies the right’s anti-“woke” assault and looks to expand civil rights rollbacks.
As novelist Tananarive Due noted in the wake of the 2016 election, “the past is not as far past as we believed.” The pieces in this week’s reading list examine the history that the right so vigorously tries to repress—and imagine, as Farah Jasmine Griffin writes, what justice looks like in light of it.