LA Students Make the Case for AP African American History Class

Los Angeles high school history teacher Donald Singleton has nearly 30 years of teaching experience. But he still finds joy in watching the students in his Advanced Placement African American Studies class immerse themselves in the class content.

“The excitement for me is starting in Africa, and for millions and millions of Black kids, Africa is born in them,” Singleton told CBS News. “My students come in excited. They’ve done the reading. And they wonder, ‘Wow, I never learned this in any of my other classes.’”

Among its course goals, AP African American Studies attempts to help high school students realize the global impact of African societies before the transatlantic slave trade and establish a connection between Black communities in the United States and the greater African diaspora.

The College Board spent over ten years developing the course with input and direction from college faculty. The comprehensive curriculum calls on students to analyze primary sources like maps, music, literature and historical artifacts. And students who complete the course are eligible to earn college credit.

Over 700 high schools across the country are currently participating in a pilot of the course before the College Board makes it available to all schools that want to participate next year.

Conservative Republicans around the country have blasted the course with criticism, standing firmly by their cause against “wokeness,” “wokeisms,” and all forms of “wokeology.” Trusty anti-woke hero, Florida governor Ron DeSantis banned the class in his state, while Arkansas’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders took a more passive-aggressive approach and won’t allow the class to count towards graduation telling Fox News the course perpetuates a “propaganda leftist agenda teaching our kids to hate America and hate one another.” But Mr. Singleton’s students say the course has given them a whole new appreciation for the contributions of their ancestors.

“There’s a major difference between having somebody tell you that you’re the ancestor of a slave family and having somebody tell you that you’re the ancestry of an advanced civilization,” junior Jordan Love told CBS News.

After Florida’s ban, the College Board revisited the curriculum and took out all of the stuff about systemic racism, the Black Lives Matter movement and reparations, a move some like Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Alberto Carvalho have criticized as a “sanitized” version of history.

“If you want to really learn about the history of the African American experience, you cannot leave out or sanitize slavery or the civil rights movements, or the fact that our nation has criminalized activities resulting in disproportionate numbers of people of color being imprisoned,” he said.

And while Republicans fight AP African American Studies, calling it indoctrination, Mr. Singleton says at his school, where a majority of the population are students of color, the content of his course is empowering and just as important as our National Anthem.

“I inculcate my kids with the idea that you’re just as beautiful, just as brilliant, as anyone else,” he said. “If it’s not about empowerment, why do you say the Pledge of Allegiance? Why do we teach about the Declaration of Independence? Why do we teach about the Constitution? Isn’t that empowerment?”