In her constant attacks on “MAGA lawmakers” for “censorship of honest history,” American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) President Randi Weingarten emphasizes a “professional obligation” to “teach students honest history.”
The union’s commitment to historical accuracy, however, comes second to the AFT’s endeavor to insert its radical political agenda into public education.
A recent AFT lesson plan titled, “The Black Panther Party Then, Black Lives Matter Today,” for example, presents a historically dishonest, airbrushed characterization of the Black Panther Party meant to proselytize the next generation of left-wing activists.
Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party described itself as a civil rights activist group established to oppose police brutality in the San Francisco Bay Area. But instead of embracing the integrationist, nonviolent philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Leadership Conference, the Black Panthers were inspired by the likes of Malcolm X and Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of the Communist Party of China.
Black Panther members were often armed, and repeatedly threatened to overthrow the U.S. government. Party newsletters routinely advocated for violence against “pigs”— the party’s term for police officers. “(W)e must always remember,” one such article stated, “that a gun in our hand is for the purpose of killing someone. If we don’t kill the pig, he will kill us.”
To this end, the group’s members engaged in frequent, deadly shootouts with police.
Founder Huey Newton spent more than two years in prison for his involvement in a 1967 traffic stop shootout that resulted in the death of officer John Frey. Though the voluntary manslaughter conviction was later overturned, Newton served additional, unrelated sentences for assault with a deadly weapon, illegal firearms possession, embezzlement and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Contemporaneously, the FBI classified the Black Panther Party as “a black extremist organization” that “advocated the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”
Though the Party officially dissolved in 1982, splinter groups like the New Black Panther Party have co-opted the original party’s imagery and “10 Point Platform” to promulgate a racist, antisemitic ideology. The group has faced repeated accusations of voter intimidation and is labeled a “hate group” by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Even original Black Panther Party members agree with that characterization.
With the emergence in recent years of the Black Lives Matter movement, academia and mainstream media outlets have sought to rehabilitate the Black Panther Party’s legacy. A publication from the University of Michigan, for example, argues that the party “did not advocate violence, despite what the FBI and police departments around the nation said,” while Smithsonian describes Huey Newton as a “misunderstood visionary.”
The AFT apparently agrees, according to an email from Andy Kratochvil, the union’s senior digital strategist, promoting teaching materials available through its Share My Lesson platform.
In his message, Kratochvil asserts that teaching “about the Black Panther Party is a must … learning about the Black Panthers helps kids understand that activism can take many forms.”
The lesson plan, available for AFT members’ use in the classroom, invites students to consider how the legacy of the Black Panther Party connects with modern “racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.”
The lesson’s content, however, sanctifies the Black Panther Party by ignoring the organization’s characteristic violence. According to the AFT, Black Panther members “confronted politicians, challenged the police and acted … in self-defense to protect citizens from brutality.”
The lesson focuses nearly exclusively on the Black Panthers’ community food distribution programs.
Shockingly, the lesson plan suggests teachers assign students a project that would require meetings with local Black Lives Matter activists to “expand on the idea of community action and the fight for civil rights.”
“Teaching America’s history requires considering all the facts available to us,” Weingarten told AFT members in 2021, “including those that are uncomfortable.”
The AFT’s convenient disregard for “uncomfortable” historic truths to eulogize extremist groups like the Black Panther Party, however, casts serious doubt on the sincerity of Weingarten’s statement.
If Weingarten truly believes that “dishonest” history in schools “erode(s) the quality of education our children receive,” the AFT needs to take accountability for its hypocritical contributions and revise its lesson plans accordingly.
