Marvin Dunn is widely considered to be one of Florida’s most esteemed historians, and with a brand new $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Dunn looks to radically expand the scope, size, and scale of his “Teach the Truth” tours. The “Teach the Truth” tours feature Dunn taking guests across Florida to witness the actual physical sites where acts of historical racial violence took place, and sometimes even to other states as well. The tours have already become an iconic fixture among locals, and the grant’s funding will allow Dunn to expand the tour and reach an even larger audience.
In response to his work at the Miami Center for Racial Justice, receiving the revolutionary grant, Dunn said, “Florida was not the only state where lynchings took place. It’s all of our history. 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 an age in which people have grown increasingly disconnected from the physical, preferring the ease and convenience of technological advancements, Dunn’s tours make a distinct effort to reconnect people with the history and the land itself. In this way and others, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ vehement lashing out against the teaching of Black history in schools, Dunn says there’s never been a better time to expand the “Teach the Truth” tour experience than now.
The tours have received national attention and have even been featured in publications as vast and varied as the Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News. What has made and continues to make Dunn’s work with the tours stand out is his commitment to what representatives from the Mellon Foundation called “complete, accurate narratives.” The physical act of walking to every destination on the tour lends a certain sense of a “transformational element” that allows people to embrace history in a palpable and unprecedented way.
“It’s not the same as reading it in the textbooks,” Dunn added. “You have to go where blood was shed.” During these tours, Dunn takes guests everywhere from Rosewood (the site of the Rosewood Massacre that claimed the lives of thirty Black Americans) to Mims (the site where activists Harry and Harriette Moore were killed in their homes on Christmas Day) to the graves of various lynching victims.
Robyn Haugabook, who attended a 2023 tour with her two daughters, felt the tour was an enlightening experience. “This trip has brought the history to life,” Haugabook told the Miami Herald in March 2023. “I want my children to take it back to their school, to their community, to their history teachers.”
As Dunn so eloquently put it, “We’re just now beginning to find out where the worst lynchings in Georgia took place. 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.”
