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On a humid June afternoon, I arrived at Florida International University expecting to give what I thought would be a standard talk on my new book, Teach Truth, about the escalating assault on antiracist education. But when historian and freedom fighter Dr. Marvin Dunn took me to the campus, he made clear this would be no ordinary event.

“This is Florida,” he said. “They banned saying ‘systemic racism’ in the classroom.”

I knew this was true in theory. But when he locked eyes with me and I saw the turmoil beneath his composure, it became profoundly real. Students — adult students — who had enrolled in university courses to study the Black freedom struggle and its challenge to systemic racism were now barred from doing so. The state had outlawed ideas. For a moment, his words stole the air from my lungs as reality sank in: Thoughtcrime from the book 1984 had slipped off the page and into the present.

To challenge this dystopian drift, Dr. Dunn built a different kind of classroom — one without walls, either around students’ bodies or their minds. As he explained to The Miami Times, “They won’t let us teach it inside the classrooms. We’ll teach it outside under this tree.”

He calls this liberation academy, “Under the Learning Tree.”

We set up under a sprawling tree whose branches formed a wide canopy. Dozens of community members — students, elders, teachers, parents, artists — gathered beneath it, some in camping chairs, others cross-legged in the grass. That afternoon, Dr. Dunn taught the history Florida tries hardest to censor — from the 1923 Rosewood massacre that burned an entire Black town to the ground; to attending Jim Crow schools and fighting desegregation battles; to the 1980 Miami rebellion that erupted after white police officers killed Arthur McDuffie; to the laws today that ban teaching how these events upheld systemic racism. I spoke about the spread of these truthcrime laws — legislation that criminalizes honest history and punishes educators for teaching historically accurate accounts of race, gender, and power — and about something spreading alongside them: resistance.

In 2025, communities across the country have found their own learning trees, collectively teaching the truths that the powerful have tried to erase.

Public education has always been a battleground over national memory, but in 2025 the assault on honest teaching greatly intensified. The Trump administration launched a coordinated campaign to punish instruction that names systemic injustice, moving to abolish the Department of Education and roll back civil-rights protections that safeguard Title I and special-education funding. Executive orders threatening to defund schools that teach about racism, gender, or colonialism — and dismantling DEI programs across federal agencies — have sent a chilling message to districts nationwide.

The campaign extended well beyond classrooms, with Trump attacking the Smithsonian for teaching about slavery and ordering the removal of historical material — including images documenting the brutality of enslavement — from national parks, making the administration’s objective unmistakable: to transform public education and public memory into instruments of authoritarian control.

Yet even in a year defined by escalating repression, 2025 delivered something unexpected: cracks in the censorship machine.

At the ballot box, the public began pushing back. After far-right Moms for Liberty surged into school board seats in 2021 and 2022, voters delivered a sharp rebuke in 2025, when all 31 of the group’s contested candidates around the country

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