LEVITTOWN, UNITED STATES (AFP) – As Joshua Waldorf was running for a third term on the Pennsbury school board in November, one particularly heated debate triggered a flood of vitriolic messages to his inbox – one of them urging him to shoot himself.

In a shift mirrored in cities across America, his local council overseeing schools in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia had unwittingly become a battleground in the politicised culture wars roiling the nation.

The hateful messages aimed at Waldorf were just one example of the flow of anonymous slurs and threats directed at him and fellow members of the nine-seat board in past months – as their once studious meetings turned to angry shouting matches.

“I’ve been pretty consistent in terms of my views,” Waldorf, a 58-year-old businessman, told AFP as the board prepared to meet in an elementary school gym in Fallsington, in a leafy neighbourhood of family homes. “But I’m being vilified for those that I wasn’t 18 months ago.”

In much of the United States (US), locally elected school boards are tasked with governing a community’s public schools – deciding who to hire as superintendent to manage day-to-day operations, which textbooks to buy, and what education policies to enact.

But over the past year, with the country in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic and a historic reckoning over race relations, the boards have had to rule on far more charged issues – prompting intense backlash from parents often bitterly divided along political lines.

For choosing to require students and staff to wear masks, the Pennsbury School Board – all Democrats – were accused of “child abuse”, and seeking to “dehumanise” students.

After hiring a specialist in “equity, diversity, and education” last year, the board came under fire from parents convinced they had “far left radical agenda to indoctrinate students”.

POLARISATION

School boards from coast to coast have had similar experiences, reflecting “a national polarisation now seeping into other levels of government”, according to Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

“By and large, school board politics in the US tend to be relatively uneventful and relatively free of emotion,” Hopkins told AFP.

But now, he said, “the really contentious questions that occupy national politics are finding their way” into the meetings.

In Pennsbury, things took a turn for the worse after the board appointed Dr Cherrissa Gibson – a local assistant principal – to a newly created role overseeing diversity and equity in the district’s 10 elementary schools, three middle schools, and one high school.

Her first audit in April 2021 found “an underrepresentation of professional staff of colour”, as well as a disproportionate level of discipline targetting Black students.

Situated in the woodsy outer suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsbury has about 10,000 students, of whom 75 per cent are white, seven per cent are Black, eight per cent are Asian, and four per cent are Hispanic, according to the district’s website.

For District Superintendent Thomas Smith, the audit was a way to help “ensure that every student regardless of where they come from, regardless of their gender, or regardless of the colour of their skin are treated equally.”

But opponents, like 54-year-old Simon Campbell, believe such initiatives only sharpen divisions.

“It is all about trying to stereotype people by race, by gender and separate them and then customise education based upon those separations,” said the former school board member and stock trader.

“Basically kids are being taught that if you’re Black… you are impoverished and need help from the government,” he told AFP. “If you’re white, then you are an oppressor.”

Campbell, who no longer has children in the school district, posts videos of his remarks at school board meetings to YouTube, where he now has more than 30,000 subscribers.

Like other disgruntled parents, he has been invited to appear on conservative radio and television programs to discuss so-called “critical race theory”.

The term, which refers to the study of persistent racism in social institutions, has been seized upon by Republicans to broadly attack Democrats’ racial equity policies in what has become a lightning rod for conservatives across the country.

MISINFORMATION

Christine Toy Dragoni, the outgoing Pennsbury school board president, blames a national “campaign of misinformation” for the intensity of the backlash.

“People are being gaslighted,” she told AFP.

The 50-year-old psychotherapist said the deluge of e-mails began after videos of heated board meeting exchanges went viral online.

Most of the e-mails wished bad things “happen” to the board members, versus direct threats, but “when they do it repeatedly, you start to worry”, said Dragoni.

“Are they going to take the next step and, you know, take action on their words?”

The risk of violence is real: many school districts have been forced to ramp up police presence at board meetings, to remove unruly attendees, as well as to escort members to and from their cars.

Two months ago, US Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI and federal prosecutors to meet with local law enforcement to discuss strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.

Republicans and conservative media seized on the memo, accusing the Biden administration of weaponising law enforcement to intimidate parents.

“People are within silos,” said Waldorf, who won re-election in November, “we’ve lost the ability to compromise.”

HAVANA (AFP) – In its 91 years, Havana’s majestic Hotel Nacional has borne witness to some of the biggest events of Cuban history.

It was once bombed as part of a conflict between rival units of Cuba’s military, hosted a summit of mafia dons, was a key site of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a holiday jaunt for Hollywood’s most eccentric figures.

Yet for 20 months ending in mid-November, this building that mixes Art Deco and neoclassical elements along with Moorish tiles was deserted because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Far from a death knell for the hotel, it was an opportunity to restore the facade, and put in new floors and windows in the rooms.

“A lot of work was done so that when the tourists returned they would find the 1930s hotel, although with greater comfort… reliving the past,” said specialist in the hotel’s history Arleen Ortiz.

Now guests will often specifically request to stay in certain rooms, like number 211 where the Italian-born gangster Lucky Luciano sojourned in December 1946 during the mafia bosses summit.

That was an incident immortalised in the 1974 film by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather II.

As the mobsters meet on a terrace at the hotel, they divide up a cake in the shape of the island nation – a metaphor for their sharing out control of lucrative illicit businesses.

The real summit opened on December 22, 1946, with Luciano seated at the head of a large rectangular table.

“Las Vegas didn’t exist and Cuba was the perfect place for entertaining due to its proximity to the United States (US), the climate, the beaches,” said Ortiz.

The entire hotel had been booked by the dons for their families to spend the holidays in the city, with Frank Sinatra a special guest for the occasion.

Perched on a hill overlooking the Straits of Florida, the Hotel Nacional – with its brand new English china, clocks imported from Germany and chandeliers hanging from the ceilings – was opened on December 30, 1930, allegedly financed partly with mob money.

Just three years later, 400 army officers loyal to the deposed president Gerardo Machado hunkered down in the hotel as government troops bombarded it from land and sea.

Outnumbered and with ammunition running out, they were soon forced to surrender.

The hotel survived, bearing the pockmarked signs of the siege, but would soon be attracting a very different kind of attention.

The halls and rooms are filled with photos, objects and letters of the celebrities that have stayed at the hotel.

Five-time Olympic swimming champion and former Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller was one such guest, impressing staff by jumping from a second floor window into the swimming pool below.

In the 50s, Ava Gardner had a breakfast at the hotel after a night out in Havana’s cabarets alongside the likes of Ernest Hemingway.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Winston Churchill, Marlon Brando, Errol Flyn, Rita Hayworth and Nat King Cole all stayed at the hotel.

But following Fidel Castro’s communist revolution of 1959, the hotel was converted into a dormitory for 900 peasant women who went to the capital to learn to sew.

“Those young women, who had never before left their homes with no electricity and dirt floors,” suddenly found themselves in the plush hotel’s elegant rooms, said Ortiz.

Tensions would soon mount again with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when soldiers dug trenches and tunnels underneath the hotel grounds as the US and Soviet Union teetered on the brink of nuclear war.

But it is for star-gazing that it is best known.

“The foreigners know this place and what they want is to sit where so many celebrities did before them,” said Cuban doctor from Sancti Espiritus province Tania Fernandez, who brought her children to explore the tunnels.

The hotel underwent another makeover in the 1990s, a time when the hardline communist regime barred locals from staying there.

“It’s beautiful, it’s magical being here. I love the Cuban people and I love the energy. It’s incredible,” Sierra, 39, an American teacher, said while sipping a drink with her boyfriend and looking out to sea.