EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
**
Black History: Fascinating — and Part of All of Us
I’m not black, and according to the genetic service 23 and me, I don’t have any detectable African ancestry. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter much socially; I have always been perceived as a white man.
You can argue that we are all treated equal now, but I can tell you this. If I go to Somerset Mall and wander around some expensive store, nobody is going to pay any attention to me unless I look like I want to buy something.
If Ken Coleman or any other African-American man does that, he is more than likely to feel eyes watching him. While I know a fair amount about the lives of black people in America, I can never pretend I really know what it is like to be black.
But what I do know is that black history is also my history. America is many things and includes many people. But more than anything else, the story of America is the story of the relationship between white people and black people.
We are inseparably interconnected.
Morgan Freeman, who happens to be one of my favorite actors, was once asked by the late Mike Wallace what he thought of the idea of black history month, which we now celebrate in February. Freeman said, “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.” He had a point.
Segregation of any kind is a bad thing. I am a Detroiter, I grew up here, and what happened to Ossian Sweet when he bought a house in a white neighborhood is part of my history too, even though I wasn’t born till many years afterwards.
As a journalist, I am fascinated and inspired by the story of Robert S. Abbott, a poor black young man from Georgia who became a lawyer in the late 19th century, but was told his skin was too dark to allow him to successfully practice law.
So he moved to Chicago, started a newspaper on his landlady’s table, and by the 1920s, had built his Chicago Defender into the most successful African-American newspaper in the country, with a nationwide circulation.
Pullman porters dropped off bundles of the Defender in Southern towns and even cotton fields, with train schedules printed to help spur the Great Migration that transformed Detroit and this nation.
Black history is not monolithic; there are saints and sinners, heroes and scoundrels, but what’s most important to remember is that it can’t be considered in a vacuum. Black America developed along with white America.
Ossian Sweet had the courage of his convictions, but he was saved from prison by a white lawyer named Clarence Darrow. Most of the people who voted for America’s first black president happened to be white.
White America, so far as that term has any meaning any more, has to confront its history as well. The fact that none of my ancestors ever owned slaves, so far as I can tell, does not excuse me from understanding the white privilege I enjoy.
Studying history doesn’t have to be pedantic or always painful, however; I prefer to see it as a giant detective story. Detroit has been a big piece of this story for a long time, and we should all know more about that.
In any event, it should be pretty obvious that we really can’t have any idea where we are going till we know where we’ve been.
.
