A former student of Ron DeSantis’ says he was ‘hostile’ to her because she was Black and would play ‘devil’s advocate’ about the Civil War: NYT

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Before Ron DeSantis was Florida’s governor, he spent a year as a teacher and coach at a prestigious private school in Georgia, where one former student said he was hostile to her because of her race, according to a New York Times report.

As a 23-year-old graduate from Yale University, DeSantis was described as cocky but well-liked among students when he taught at Darlington School during the 2001-2002 school year, according to the Times. 

While teaching history and government, DeSantis liked to debate controversial subjects, including the Civil War, former Darlington student and 2003 graduate Danielle Pompey recalled to the Times. 

“Like in history class, he was trying to play devil’s advocate that the South had good reason to fight that war, to kill other people, over owning people — Black people,” Pompey told the Times. “He was trying to say, ‘It’s not OK to own people, but they had property, businesses.'”

Pompey, who is Black and attended Darlington on a scholarship, said she felt that DeSantis treated her differently because of her race, the Times reported. 

“Mr. Ron, Mr. DeSantis, was mean to me and hostile toward me,” Pompey told the Times. “Not aggressively, but passively, because I was Black.”

Pompey told the Times that she initially thought she and DeSantis would have something in common since they were both from out of state – Pompey from New York and DeSantis from Florida (though he went to Darlington after attending Yale in Connecticut). 

“He had a good opportunity to enrich people, to come there from the Northeast and show people in the South that we can blend,” Pompey told the Times. “It seemed like he didn’t want to do that.

Another former student in the same class, Gates Minis, said she recalled DeSantis’s debates about the Civil War and thought, in some cases, that he was factually incorrect, the Times reported. In one instance, Minis said DeSantis claimed every city in the South burned during the war, and Minis corrected him that her hometown, Savannah, was not burnt down. 

A third student, who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions at his job, said DeSantis’s antics about the Civil War were so well known among students that they made a video mocking him over it. 

In the video seen by the Times, a student pretending to be DeSantis said, “The Civil War was not about slavery! It was about two competing economic systems. One was in the North…” while another student fell asleep in the class. The student who helped make the video told the Times they did not have actual footage of DeSantis making those claims. 

A spokesperson for DeSantis did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.