Florida Is Teaching Children That Slavery Was Better Than Dying
Ron DeSantis approved a cartoon for Florida classrooms where Christopher Columbus tells children that slavery is "better than being killed." Kimberly Overman is running to fight back.
In a Florida classroom, an animated Christopher Columbus sits across from two time-traveling children.
One of them asks about slavery.
“Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?” Columbus tells them. “I don’t see the problem.”
This is not a fringe video from the internet. This is state-approved curriculum. Ron DeSantis’s Department of Education made Florida the first state in the country to greenlight PragerU, a self-described conservative media organization, for use in public school classrooms.
The same content tells children that Frederick Douglass, a man who had been enslaved, believed the Founding Fathers were right to keep slavery in place to hold the country together.
Florida has become the testing ground for the far right’s education agenda. DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law was just the start to suppressing and controlling education in Florida. He rewrote the state’s history standards to suggest enslaved people gained skills that could be used for their “personal benefit.” He tried to ban AP African American Studies entirely. And when he needed a curriculum to fill the space left by everything he banned and restricted, he turned to PragerU.
This is what Florida children are being taught.
Why This Seat Matters
Florida is not the end of the road. It is the blueprint.
What DeSantis started here is already spreading. Oklahoma adopted PragerU. Arizona signed on. Ten states now allow this material in public school classrooms. The far right is running a nationwide experiment and Florida is where they perfected it.
Congress controls the federal funding that flows into every public school in America. The people sent to Washington from districts like FL-12 decide whether to fight for the classrooms in their communities or let the testing ground become the national standard.
Right now, Florida has no one in this seat fighting back.
The Woman Running to Change That
Her name is Kimberly Overman.
She is a mom and grandmother who grew up in a working-class family that knew what housing insecurity felt like. She knows what it means when a good school is the difference between staying stuck and getting out. She knows what it means when that ladder gets pulled up.
For her, education is not a platform for ideology. It is the tool that working families use to build a life. She will fight for fully funded public schools, better teacher pay, and real pathways to college and trade careers, because she knows what those things mean to the families that need them most.
She has called Tampa Bay home for more than forty years. She served as a Hillsborough County Commissioner, delivering results on public health, affordable housing, and the things that make a community work.
This campaign runs on small dollar donations from people like the ones she is fighting for, not corporate PAC money. That means every contribution, at any level, is what keeps her in this race. Her campaign belongs to the people who fund it.
✦ A PragerU “educational” video is telling Florida kids slavery was “better than being killed.” Kimberly Overman is running to fight back.
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