DESANTISLAND 

HISTORIAN RECEIVES $1.5M GRANT TO EXPAND RACIAL JUSTICE TOURS

The 84-year-old still desires people to experience history at places where Black lives were lost to hatred

by Daniel Johnson

July 1, 2024

Marvin Dunn, a Florida historian and founder of the Miami Center for Racial Justice, received $1.5 million in funding from the Mellon Foundation. This grant will allow him to expand his “Teach the Truth” tours, which focus on sites of racial violence, from Florida to other Southern states.

As the Miami Herald reports, Dunn is looking to partner with universities in the states he will expand his tour to encompass. Dunn also recognizes that the story he is telling through his tours is the story of American history, not just Black history.

“Florida was not the only state where lynchings took place. It’s all of our history,” Dunn told the outlet. “It’s all of our pain. It’s not just Black pain or white guilt: it’s all of our pain; it’s all of our responsibility to correct this record.”

In 2023, Phillip Brian Harper, the higher learning program director at the Mellon Foundation, reached out to Dunn after reading about his tours, resulting in a $150,000 grant from the foundation, marking its second funding of Dunn’s center, which supports the tours.

Harper told the Herald that Dunn’s commitment to telling the complete story is what motivated him to fund his efforts. “If we don’t have a full variety of perspectives grounded in the full variety of experiences that inform the history and culture of this country, people will go through their lives poorly informed about the true depth, complexity, and richness of this country,” Harper said. “And that means we would have an extremely impoverished society.”

This time, the Mellon Foundation is granting Dunn’s center $1.5 million in funding, leading to the potential expansion of several sites in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. In an interview with the Herald, 84-year-old Dunn expressed his continued desire for people to experience history by visiting places where blood was shed, and Black lives were lost due to hatred.

“We’re just now beginning to find out where the worst lynchings in Georgia took place,” Dunn said. “That’s why we need to do this: I’m considered an expert on anti-Black violence in the country, at least in the South, and I’m not sure what happened everywhere in Georgia, but I know a lot of people died by the rope. We’ll find out and take people to those places.”

Since Dunn is of advanced age, he told the paper that the plan is to “identify faculty members and have them teach the students” in the states the tour will expand to. He also indicated that those students would receive payment for working as guides on the tour. Although he has not officially decided on the tour’s sites, he is interested in taking the tour either to Emmett Till’s grave in Mississippi or the Equal Justice Institute in Alabama.

Dunn’s tours received increased national attention in the wake of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crackdown on teaching Black history in Florida classrooms. 

Jamora Arroyo-Jefferson, a high school student who attended the first “Teach the Truth” tour in 2023 made a short documentary about her experience, which went on to win the 2024 Princeton Prize in Race Relations and a South Florida Regional “Certificate of Accomplishment” as well as praise from Dunn himself. 

Dunn told Arroyo-Jefferson in a blurb for the documentary, “Jamora, I congratulate you on your excellent documentary on the first “Teach the Truth” tour. I have seen no other film that captures my work so effectively and I have been followed on the tour by MSNBC, CNN, and a host of other filmmakers. Your film goes to the very heart of the purpose and success of the tour. To have this quality of work come from a high school student is incredible.”

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