Texas Senate Passes Bill That Removes MLK, Suffrage and Native American History from Required Curriculum

The Texas state senate passed a bill that would no longer require public schools to cover writings on the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage and Native American history in its social studies classes.

Senate Bill 3 would be appended to a law signed by Governor Greg Abbott in May, which is set to come in effect later this year. Although not stated explicitly in either the bill or the law, Republican lawmakers say both bills would ban the teaching of critical race theory, which asserts that racism is woven into the U.S. legal system and ingrained in its primary institutions.

The proposal diverts from the new law, removing requirements to teach works pertaining to racial relations and white supremacy in U.S. history. It would drop teachings of the life and works of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and writings by Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” would be abandoned.

It also cuts the requirement to teach “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

Additionally, the bill makes it harder on teachers to broach controversial issues or current topics. The bill says instructors must not give “deference to any one perspective.” It also forbids schools from granting course credit for joining organizations that lobby for legislation “at the federal, state or local level.”

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