Sydney Boles via Creative Commons
Shortly after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor ignited nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, North Kingstown, Rhode Island, resident Jennifer Lima declared her candidacy for the town’s school board.
“I realized that if I wanted my children to participate in making change, I had to walk the walk, too,” she tells The Progressive.
In twenty-eight states, legislators have introduced bills to restrict what students can be taught about racism, bias, and the contributions of Black, Asian and Latinx groups to U.S. history. Eleven states have enacted them.
As the founder of Toward an Anti-Racist North Kingstown, Lima was already well known in the area, and she easily won a seat on the board in November 2020. In fact, she received 22.7 percent of the vote, making her the top vote-getter, and she wasted no time in working with the rest of the board to establish a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force.
Things seemed to be going smoothly until July 2021, when a small group of people submitted a Declaration for Intent to Petition for Recall against her.
Leaflets distributed to residents by the Friends of North Kingstown Schools, a group affiliated with the Gaspee Project—the name commemorates the 1772 dynamiting of a British ship called The Gaspee and the murder of its captain by Rhode Island settlers—accuse Lima of promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Marxism and have dubbed her an anti-police “race predator.”
Lima calls the smears preposterous. But she has had to take them seriously since the Gaspee Project has gained some traction in state politics.
The group bills itself as “Rhode Island’s premier political advocacy organization advancing pro-parent policies,” and its playbook includes a host of familiar conservative positions: Opposition to “regulatory burdens” on businesses, a denunciation of mandatory HPV and COVID-19 vaccines and in-school masking, demands for opt-out provisions for public school sex education instruction, pushback against LGBTQIA+ acceptance and inclusion, and opposition to highway tolls and tax hikes.
Years back, their focus was on opposition to marriage equality. More recently, however, they’ve turned to Critical Race Theory and opposition to curricula that reference race, racism, or gender identity.
Lima was not the Gaspee Project’s first school target. In nearby South Kingstown, a Gaspee spinoff called Parents Defending Education went after school board member Emily Cummiskey, a self-described “liberal Democrat,” this spring and she resigned in June. Similarly, the board’s vice chairperson, Christine Fish, relinquished her leadership role on the board this summer due to the sustained attacks.
“This victory,” Lima says, “led them to try something similar in North Kingstown. We had just created the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force in March. I expected it to ruffle some feathers, but I was surprised when the recall was announced and floored by the bullying and harassment.”
The attacks against Lima in North Kingstown are not anomalous; similar things are happening to progressive teachers and school board members in cities and towns throughout the country. Already, the National School Board Association has documented more than twenty instances of “intimidation, harassment, and disruption” in states as varied as California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and Ohio, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has called on the FBI to investigate threats and menacing behavior.
Whats more, in twenty-eight states, legislators have introduced bills to restrict what students can be taught about racism, bias, and the contributions of Black, Asian and Latinx groups to U.S. history. Eleven states have enacted them.
Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, calls these bills “laws against teaching history,” and they’ve been pushing back in several ways, including the creation of 100 national study groups for educators that use a book called Teaching for Black Lives.
“The right wing has always paid attention to what children are learning and reading,” Menkart explains. “What they are really worried about now is that white children will feel a sense of solidarity with people of color. That’s what they’re trying to squash.”
Their tactics, she continues, are reminicent of of those used by Senator Joe McCarthy more than half a century ago: Making false accusations; trying to intimidate people who support anti-racist education; and publishing widely-circulated lists with the names of teachers who’ve signed a pledge “to teach the truth.” The pledge, which, as of early October, had been signed by nearly 8,000 people, was launched by the Zinn Education Project to give educators a way to publicly declare their opposition to the hysteria surrounding CRT and to invoke support for the teaching of non-Eurocentric education more broadly.
“The long term impact of the right’s attacks will depend on how we respond and how well we organize,” Menkart says.
Back in Rhode Island, Lima is doing just that--speaking out and organizing--and she has been heartened by the amount of support she’s received, telling The Progressive that despite a spate of hate mail and taunts, many people have rallied around her. “I’ve raised more unsolicited donations since the recall attempt began than I raised when I was campaigning,” she explains. “I’ve been invited to speak by groups all over the state. The interest has gone far beyond our community because people understand that if something like this can happen in North Kingstown, it can happen everywhere.”
As Lima speaks, she sounds strong, determined, and anything but conciliatory. That said, she is eager to put this chapter behind her so that she can focus on what actually matters: Racial and gender justice and educational equity.
“Yes, the possible recall has been really stressful,” Lima says. “I got into this knowing it would be hard, but it still pales in comparison to what people of color go through every day. I cope by running. I also eat ice cream, and I do the work.”
Update: conservatives had until the end of business on October 12 to turn in signatures to provoke a recall election. They failed to do so.