Why Black History Month?

Why Black History Month? February 19, 2002
By Sean Gonsalves 

The idea was first envisioned by a man recognized as "The Father of
Negro History" -- Carter G. Woodson.

Woodson, whose best known book "The Miseducation of the Negro," was
born in 1875 in Buckingham County, Virginia. The son of former slaves,
he worked in mines and quarries until the age of 20 when he decided
that his mind would be a terrible thing to waste -- long before the
sentiment became a slogan for the United Negro College Fund.

Woodson received his high school diploma at the age of 22 and went on
to get a master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago. In
1912, Woodson received a doctorate in history from Harvard.

Unable to land a teaching post at the elite university because Harvard
wasn’t hiring black professors, Woodson went to teach at one of the
nation’s leading black colleges, Howard University.

In 1915, Woodson became the director of the Association for the Study
of Negro Life and History. A year later he was named editor of the
association’s scholarly quarterly, "The Journal of Negro History."

Woodson believed the study of black history, using the tools of
scholarly research and writing, could serve a dual purpose. It could
be used to counter white racial chauvinism, which was used to
rationalize the oppression of black people in America.

The distortions and deletions in the American historical record as it
pertains to race matters, Woodson believed, was detrimental to the
health of a nation whose inherent promise is life, liberty and justice
for all.

Perhaps more importantly, Woodson knew that in a society where black
intelligence and moral worth is incessantly demeaned and devalued,
studying black history would serve as a psychological defense shield
for black students against the assaults of white supremacy.

So he embarked on a quest to establish a national celebration of black
heritage. In 1926, Negro History Week was born.

"Besides building self-esteem among blacks, (Black History Week) would
help eliminate prejudice among whites," Woodson concluded.

It wasn’t until after the civil rights movement of the 1960s that
Black History Week was taken seriously outside of the educated black
community and expanded into Black History Month.

February was chosen as Black History Month because the birthdays of
the esteemed black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the celebrated
black poet Langston Hughes fall during that month. It’s also the month
the NAACP was founded. It just so happens that February is the
shortest and one of the coldest months of the year.

So how come there is no official White History Month? In the words of
a Tulane University Black History Month Web site, "a White History
Month is not needed because the contributions of whites are already
acknowledged by society. Black History Month is meant to remedy this
inequity of representation."

Of course, if standard U.S. history curriculum did a better job of
teaching both the tragic and triumphant aspects of the expansion of
democratic freedoms on this continent and its inextricable link to
Americans of black African descent, then a Black History Month would
be wholly unnecessary.

But when educated Americans at the dawn of the 21st century make
statements like: My grandparents were immigrants who faced
discrimination and made it. Why can’t blacks? All societies had
slaves. Besides, some blacks were sold into slavery by black Africans
-- it’s clear to anyone familiar with the history of white-skin
privilege in America that Black History Month has not outlived its
usefulness.

This isn’t to deny the importance of individual initiative or to lay a
guilt-trip on white brothers and sisters for every failure in the
black community. On the other hand, black social mobility, (or lack
thereof) cannot be understood without understanding the devastating
impact of not only two centuries of slavery but a hundred years of
organized, state-supported attacks on "free" black communities after
slavery.

For sure, there have been many blacks who have overcome the odds,
which is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. But those
blacks who have "succeeded" did so in spite of white-skin privilege;
not because of it.

Instead of asking why can’t blacks make it -- a grossly imprecise
question that ignores the significant achievements of thousands of
African-Americans -- we’d do better to ask: what obstacles have
impeded the economic, political and social development of many black
Americans? To candidly answer that complex question, the study of
black history is inescapable.

Looking for Blues Clues

So for starters, maybe we should all listen to Billie sing the blues
sometime over the next few weeks in honor of Black History Month,
paying particular attention to Holiday’s poignant musical portrait
"Strange Fruit."

In that song, the great American vocalist memorializes the black men,
women and children who hung from poplar trees during a century-long
reign of racial terror that be-gan after slavery ended and continued
until the civil rights movement changed the cultural paradigm in
America only a generation ago.

Since the day "everything" changed, if I had a dollar for every time
I’ve heard the phrase, or seen a sign, declaring "United We Stand,"
I’d have enough money to buy a mint-condition, limited-edition Billie
Holiday album.

Not that unity or Billie Holiday records are a bad thing. It’s just
that, like peace, unity is an ideal that everyone is for, but when
talk turns to the historic struggle for social justice in America, the
self-congratulatory feel-good facade covering public debate crumbles,
unveiling the deep ideological disagreements that still divide this
great nation.

Try starting a conversation at a cocktail party about reparations for
black America or the withdrawal of the U.S. delegation from the
U.N. Conference on Racism just before Sept. 11 and you’ll see what I
mean.

Discussion about these things is useless without knowledge of a bit of
black history, which, in this case, means a bit of politically
incorrect American history.

Consider the notorious 1921 Tulsa, Okla., riot, when a thousand or so
white Tulsans invaded, burned and looted the black Greenwood section
of Tulsa, leaving about 50 whites and an estimated 150 to 200 blacks
dead in their wake?

No reparations were ever paid. No one was ever convicted for the
murders, larceny or arson.

Gunnar Mydral, author of the seminal 1944 study on race relations, "An
American Dilemma," opposed the term "riots" to describe these attacks
on black communities. He preferred to call it a "terrorization or
massacre, and (considered) it a magnified, or mass, lynching."

Of course, the 1921 Tulsa riot was not an isolated event. There were
similar racial attacks in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, Atlanta in 1906,
Springfield, Ill., in 1908, East St. Louis in 1917, Chicago in 1919
and Detroit in 1943.

And we haven’t even begun to consider the history of lynching in
post-Reconstruction America -- a mostly Southern pastime that claimed
the lives of nearly 5,000 blacks between 1882 and 1968. That’s an
average of one lynching per week.

The rationale provided by apologists of this heinous act, in which
participants were known to mutilate their victims and keep body parts
for souvenirs, was that outlaw blacks needed to be controlled for the
safety of whites.

The Tuskegee Institute, whose estimates are considered conservative by
historians, is one of three sources for statistics on lynching. In
addition to keeping track of lynching victims, Tuskegee documented the
accusations used to justify lynching.

Contrary to the racist myth of black men’s uncontrollable desire to
rape white women, the majority of lynchings were for other alleged
"crimes."

According to Tuskegee records, 41 percent of black lynchings were for
alleged feloni-ous assault; 19.2 percent for alleged rape; 6.1 percent
for alleged attempted rape; 4.9 per-cent for alleged theft; 1.8
percent for alleged insults to white people; 22.7 percent for
mis-cellaneous offenses; and 1.5 percent for no offense at all.

A. Arthur Raper, author of "The Tragedy of Lynching," found that about
one-third of lynching victims were falsely accused and that,
occasionally, an unlucky black was lynched in a case of mistaken
identity.

How can there be a candid, inter-racial discussion about reparations
if this dark side of American history is ignored, as the conservative
scholar Thomas Sowell implies? Sowell argues that calls for
reparations is essentially about "race hustlers" trying to morally
blackmail Americans who immigrated to this country after slavery.

The case for reparations is not solely based on two centuries of slave
labor that gave America such a strong economic start but is further
buttressed by the recognition of a violent system of political
repression and economic deprivation used to control the emergence of
"free" blacks in America.

We can fund a Marshall Plan to help European countries rebuild in the
wake of Nazi aggression, but we can’t muster the national will to put
together an Urban Marshall Plan for poor black communities to rebuild
in the wake of violent oppression that went virtually unchecked for a
century after the Civil War?

Black History Month is needed, not only as a foundation for the
rootless, but as a serum for the historical amnesia that inflicts us
all from time to time.