Black History Month begins tomorrow, and for a long time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole idea of a special month set aside for our African-American heritage. Now, don’t get me wrong. African-American history is not only crucially important—it is absolutely fascinating, and I think it is as almost as essential that folks in Bloomfield Hills learn about it as those in Detroit.
I only say “almost” as essential, because I think it is vitally important that black children who may lack real-life role models learn about the great people in the past that looked like them.
But when Black History month was first invented in the 1970s, my fear was that this would ghettoize it, that it might have the effect of saying, fine, you now don’t have to care about our African-American heritage for eleven months of the year. I felt as the actor Morgan Freeman did, when he said “I don’t want a Black history month; Black history is American history.”
He was right. However, I have come to believe that this month gives a chance to achieve what you might call teachable moments about black history, that it is a time that we can use to get people to pay attention to the magnificent pageant that is our African-American heritage.
Teachers in my day certainly didn’t do so. I was in elementary and junior high school in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were real-life figures being covered in the newspapers, not sacred historical icons. The only historic black American I learned about was George Washington Carver, who was presented as some sort of clever eccentric who made all sorts of things out of peanuts. We never heard of Robert S. Abbott, who founded one of the most important black papers in the country, the Chicago Defender, on his landlady’s table.
We never learned about Frederick Douglass, much less W.E.B DuBois or James Baldwin or Langston Hughes. I had to find out about them on my own. We learned about what Clarence Darrow did with the Scopes trial, and that was fine. But we also should have learned about Darrow’s defense of Ossian Sweet, right here in Detroit, in the very same year.
Black history is, indeed, American history. Blacks in this country, first slaves, then second-class citizens for decades, did utterly amazing things, often while dodging lynchings.
We now know something about the Tuskegee airmen, but did you ever hear of William Sanders Scarborough? He was a little slave boy in Georgia who secretly learned to read and write at a time when it was illegal to teach a slave to read. When the Civil War ended, he went on to become a renowned professor of the classics and the author of a textbook on Classical Greek.
I could fill many more minutes with the names of black folks who accomplished more than you can imagine against all obstacles, and are doing it still. The other day, a caller said that he thought a lot of black folks were afraid of white folks still, and felt inferior.
Playing the race game is always self-destructive. But in our own time, there was a black kid, younger than me, whose father left his mother, and left him with only a bizarre African name.
He went on to not only succeed, but live a life of almost unparalleled integrity and was twice elected President of the United States.
If all that isn’t worth celebrating … what is?
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