Cheltenham School Board President’s commencement speech edited due to “white-washed account” of African-American history

The commencement ceremony for the more than 350 graduates of Cheltenham High School’s Class of 2021 was held on June 3rd. The ceremony marked the school’s 137th graduating class.

A speech given during the commencement by Cheltenham School Board President Joel Fishbein proved controversial. It has been edited out of the video of the commencement and an explanation of the edit states:

Please be advised, a section of this video has been removed because it contains material which reflects a white-washed account of the systemic, violent subjugation of generations of African Americans, and denigrates and trivializes the horrors, trials and tribulations of the enslaved as well as and those who were able to escape enslavement.

A link to the unedited version of the video was provided by the district in the description portion of the YouTube.com page. The video below is cued to Fishbein’s entire speech in the unedited version.

Approximately five minutes into Fishbein’s Speech, he shares a story about Frederick Douglas that was taken from Letters from an American, a newsletter from Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College. Her newsletter was profiled in The New York Times at the end of 2020.

In the May 23rd edition of the newsletter in the article about Douglas, Richardson wrote (and Fishbein shared) the following:

Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1838. In his twenty years of life, he had had a series of enslavers, some harsher than others, and one who almost killed him. But by 1838, he was a skilled worker in the local shipyards, earning good money for his master and enjoying a measure of freedom, as well as protection. He had good friends in the area and had fallen in love with the woman who would become his wife.

It was enslavement, but within that existence, it was a pretty good position. His peers in the cotton fields of the Deep South were beaten like animals, their deaths by violence unremarkable. Douglass himself had come close to being “sold down the river”—a term that referred to the slave convoys that traveled down the Mississippi River from older, worn out lands in the East to fresh, raw lands in Mississippi and Louisiana—and he knew that being forced to labor on a plantation in the Deep South would kill him.

His relatively safe position would have been enough for a lot of people. They would have thanked God for their blessings and stayed put. In 1838, Frederick Douglass was no different than they were: an unknown slave, hoping to get through each day. Like them, he might have accepted his conditions and disappeared into the past, leaving the status quo unchanged.

But he refused.

The article then provides details on how Douglas managed to escape slavery (he took a train north using someone else’s identification card). Richardson concludes by mentioning that her students at Boston College are about to graduats and shares the advice she offers graduating students when asked. She writes:

Tomorrow, my students will graduate, and every year, students ask me if I have any advice for them as they leave college or university, advice I wish I had had at their age. The answer is yes, after all these years of living and of studying history, I have one piece of advice:

When the day comes that you have to choose between what is just good enough and what is right… find the courage to step on the train.

GlensideLocal.com spoke with Cheltenham School Board Vice-President Pamela Henry about the decision to edit the video. She shared that they wanted the students to have a version of the commencement that did not bring further pain so a decision was made to create an edited version and for transparency publish the full version as well. Henry also mentioned that further actions may be taken to help the community heal.

Fishbein and Richardson did not respond to our inquiries for comment.

Photo: Fishbein at the graduation taken as a screengrab from the school district’s video.