Vote Smart's Synopsis:

Vote to pass with amendment a bill that requires education about African-American History and the History of Genocide.

Highlights:

• Expands required educational instruction to include African-American studies and the history of genocide (Sec. 1).

• Defines “African-American genocide” as discriminatory genocidal laws, policies, or actions targeted against African-Americans and indigenous ethnic populations through history, including slavery, lynching, economic disenfranchisement, and other-state sanctioned killings (Sec. 1).

• Requires African-American studies to address African-American cultural systems and the experience of African-Americans throughout history, with topics including, but not limited to, precolonial indigenous ethnic populations, African-American genocide, the Underground Railroad, emancipation, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement, the so-called war on drugs, the federal War on Poverty initiative, and mass incarceration (Sec. 1). 

• Expands required educational topics within Maine studies to include Maine African-American studies (Sec. 1).

• Defines “Holocaust” as the program of discriminatory and genocidal laws, policies, or actions targeted against discrete groups of individuals based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical disability or national origin, from January 1, 1933 to December 31, 1945, in Nazi GErmany or in any European country allied with or occupied by Nazi Germany (Sec. 1). 

• Requires instruction on the history of genocide, which will include the Holocaust (Sec. 1).

• Requires the Department of Education to identify curricular themes, resources, and materials for the instruction of African-American history and culture, and the history of genocide (Sec. 2). 

• Requires the Department of Education to convene voluntary advisory groups with individuals who specifically have the knowledge, life experience, or educational backgrounds that would inform the collection of information and preparation of materials for the instruction of African-American history and culture, and the history of genocide (Sec. 2). 

• Specifies that this Act will take effect July 1, 2020 (Sec. 3). 

Full Bill Text