In the expansion, what students are asked to know and do shifted. For example, the earlier version asked students to evaluate the contributions of African American individuals. The new standards now ask students to simply identify African American individuals. And there are now gaps in terms of standards focusing on ancient African civilizations outside of the context of slavery.
Knowing people from history does not really matter. However, knowing what their contributions are is crucial to understanding history. This is because those contributions have caused historical imprints thus why we are talking about them and referring to them as historical figures in the first place. You take that away and they just seem like random people we could forget about.