There are those for whom the next three words will haunt their every waking moment until Feb. 28: Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson developed the original “Negro History Week” with the hope that black history would be recognized as essential to American history. That day has not come. What has come are controversy and vitriol. Watch Fox News a bit if you dare and find the angry racial resentment around this celebration of black history.
What, though, is black history? Far too often the African-American experience gets degenerated down to a watery version of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream or Rosa Parks and her famous bus ride. This ignores so much of the rest of the modern Black Civil Rights Movement. There’s the activism of women like Fanny Lou Hamer and Dorothy Height, or the labor organizing background of people such as A. Philip Randolph. This also excludes the unnamed people, the millions who’ve worked and struggled to survive and thrive and fight back in a country that constantly has worked to undermine black progress and human dignity. Think about the Federal Housing Authority, who used racist housing loan practices to exclude black families and people from owning property until the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and the people fought back to create those Civil Rights laws. Think about the people who saw their own children denied equal education, then and now, and worked day and night to feed, clothe and protest for the rights of those kids.
Black history is not just a couple heroes or heroines, but a continual human story more than worthy of equal billing to our currently mostly-white curricula. Don’t believe me on that last part? Why is Afro-American History (or Studies) its own department if not because there is an obvious need for more teaching on the subject in many colleges and universities?
It’s never going to fulfill its mission on its own. Ask one student, and get told Black History Month can be a way to smooth over longstanding racial tensions on the cheap. Ask another and the month is exclusive, disdainful of white achievement and a form of reparations. This discussion alone proves the need, continually, for Black History Month.
Black, white and all Americans are indicted in our collective failure to pull our nation from the depths of racial indemnities. We all lack knowledge of the important contributions and struggles for freedom black people have been a part of, and we are worse off for it. We all forget that all history is important and continues to be written by our action and inaction. And we all contribute either to a better world or a worse one. To get to that better world, first we need to know the world we’re in now better, and that requires a better accounting for black history, starting today.