[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 25 (Thursday, February 6, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H515-H516]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1100
                   BLACK HISTORY IS AMERICAN HISTORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Massachusetts (Ms. Pressley) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. PRESSLEY. Madam Speaker, good morning and happy Black History 
Month.
  Black history is American history, so I rise today to give a history 
lesson.
  I think, at moments of inflection for our country, history provides a 
critical contextualizing. In order to go forward, we need to look back, 
especially when the White House is working overtime, as laid out in 
their playbook, Project 2025, to ban our history and to dismantle our 
Department of Education.
  Let's start at the beginning.
  Why did we establish a Federal Department of Education? In the early 
days of this Nation, education was left entirely to the States, and 
schools were run by a patchwork of religious schools and one-room 
schoolhouses, leaving many children excluded based on their race, 
gender, or poverty.
  Madam Speaker, there is much I disagree with our Founding Fathers on, 
but they knew that preserving democracy required an educated 
population, one that could participate in civic issues, understand 
social and political issues, vote, and resist tyrants.
  In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the concept of free public 
education began to take hold, but not for everyone. Enslavement ruled 
the day. Black and Native American families faced State-sponsored 
violence and systemic exclusion from education.

[[Page H516]]

  In the 1830s, it was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a 
legislator named Horace Mann who established the common school 
movement, pushing to extend free public education to poor and middle-
class children. Yet, Black children across the Nation were still barred 
from learning and faced severe punishment and abuse if they tried.
  By the 1870s, Reconstruction in the South gave way to Jim Crow laws 
that segregated public spaces, explicitly including our schools.
  Additionally, child-labor exploitation was rampant; education for 
girls lagged far behind; and children with disabilities were far too 
often institutionalized and not educated at all.
  A little more than 100 years later, our Department of Education in 
its modern-day form was championed by none other than the late, great 
President James Earl Carter. May he rest in peace and power.
  He knew that fully implementing the civil rights legislation of the 
1960s and fighting Jim Crow would require a well-resourced Federal role 
in education. This agency had existed for over a century in many 
iterations, but Carter explicitly understood that at the core of 
education was a vision of opportunity and access for every child in 
America.
  He and Congress resourced the Department accordingly, and this 
Department was tasked with implementing core tenets of the Civil Rights 
Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
  Federal funding through the Department of Education became integral 
to addressing disparities, hiring and training teachers, building 
accessible school facilities, enforcing civil rights protections, 
heating and powering those buildings, and, finally, living up to our 
ideals of education as a pathway to opportunity in America.
  Madam Speaker, today, that progress is under attack. The Trump 
administration's attack on education is a fundamental attack on 
democracy and on every child who calls this country home.
  Let's call it what it is: resegregation and a full-scale attack on 
civil rights.
  Dictating what can be taught is shameful.
  Madam Speaker, I stand firmly on the side of our public school babies 
and our educators and families today and always.

                          ____________________