Black History Month

Does It Still Matter?

A "Ridiculous" Month

Once upon a time, it might have been dangerous for TV networks and local stations to simply ignore Black History Month. But, I suspect corporate America—white and black—have gotten hip to the fact that we simply don’t care. Not about our history per se but about Black History Month. Black History Month is just as easily dismissed and overlooked by many blacks as it is by many whites.

We’re flat out not interested in our own history. Which is not nearly the indictment it sounds like because just as many white folk don’t seem to know anything about their history, either. History is boring. Xbox is cool. As a society, Americans, regardless of ethnic makeup, seem to be among the least informed and most intellectually lazy on the planet. Your average African takes great pride in knowing excruciating details of their nation’s history, as do many European and Asian nations. But stop any American kid on the street and ask him about Kasserine Pass and all you’ll get is a blank stare.

I personally think the television set, most especially those hooked up to cable and satellite, are really the Great Satan of an evolved society. While the TV can certainly provide quality programming and educational content, it is, far more often than not, simply the Boob Tube. That so very many in our community get up in the morning, turn on the TV, and burn it all day until they fall asleep in front of it at night, is a sad testimony to a squandered greatness. I know people who never turn their TV off at all. They fall asleep with it on. They get up and leave it on all day, even if they’re not watching it. I know grown men—grown men—who just sit there, hour after hour, playing video games. Video games. Like some blasted child. Grown men who never read a newspaper or watch a news broadcast but who squander 20, 30, 40 hours every week on violent and sexual fantasies.

We don’t read. We don’t study. Not unless we have to. Not unless we’re in school or there’s some penalty for not completing an assignment. If nobody is making us do it, we’re certainly not going to read anything on our own. And, since precious little television programming is at all concerned with us or our culture (beyond exploiting it with dumbed-down, brainless sitcoms on UPN and the WB), we know almost nothing of ourselves. Of our past. And, other than buying an Escalade with 24-inch chrome rims, we have no substantive plans for our own future. In that light, is Black History Month even relevant anymore?

Should we just do away with it? Academy award-winning actor Morgan Freeman raised eyebrows, this past December, when he called the concept of Black History Month “ridiculous,” noting that there was no white history month. “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” he asked, during an interview on 60 Minutes. Journalist Shay Stewart-Bouley wrote that, “Black History Month has become a packaged thing, like Christmas and Thanksgiving. Once the month is gone, so are the feelings it engendered — the way holiday decorations get tucked away.

Tuskegee Ground Men: George Washington Carver (front row, center) pictured with fellow teachers
and colleagues at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama Circa 1902.

Whose Story?

Canadian educator, Lennoxx Farrell states that BHM is irrelevant today because it fails to attract those who need it most. “Very few attendees of BHM activities are children of single parents living in public housing. They don’t include youths whose pants are draped below the lower buttocks and upper ankles who are most likely to be unemployed or in trouble with the law.” In short, there’s a message, but it doesn’t reach those it should. I tend to agree. I think the effectiveness of Black History Month has waned over the decades and now requires re-thinking. The problems BHM was created to address are still there and, in many cases, growing worse. So we have to fight smarter. Rather than “just a month,” as Morgan Freeman said, we should address the hypocrisy of many grade-school history books, which tend to emphasize a cleaned-up and classic American history, in gentle paraphrase, over the far less-glamorous reality of a nation whose greatness has long been hampered by its own intolerance.

The only way for us, as a nation, to mature beyond the kind of cruel ignorance bigotry represents is for us to not hide behind the heroic, brilliant General George Washington who conquered the British, but face the reality of a Washington whose army was being slaughtered all around him and who would have fallen in New Jersey to British General Charles Cornwallis if he hadn’t retreated. It takes nothing away from Washington’s greatness to say that we’d all still be bowing to the Queen were it not for Comte d'Estaing’s 1778 landing with 4,000 French troops to engage British Admiral Richard Howe’s battered fleet. Which isn’t to say this history isn’t taught but this history isn’t in our bloodstream the way George Washington crossing the Delaware is—which misses the point that Washington’s crossing was motivated mostly by desperation because his troops’ enlistment would be up at the end of the year and many would return to their homes—which would have, in all likelihood, lost America the war.

Also rarely appearing in children’s history books is the fact New Jersey's Militia Act of May 1777 permitted masters facing the military draft to instead send slaves as their substitutes. In October, 1780, an all black unit, the 2nd Company, 4th Connecticut Regiment, was formed. That company, some 48 black privates and NCOs under four white officers, existed until November 1782.

In January 1778, General Washington had given his approval to Rhode Island's plan to raise an entire regiment of black slaves. Over the next five years, 250 former slave and freedmen served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. Massachusetts' all-black unit, the Bucks of America, under Samuel Middleton—the only black commissioned officer in the Continental Army—probably also had its origins early in 1778. Similar to Rhode Island, the state bought and emancipated slaves willing to become soldiers.

The Virginia Legislature voted in October 1780 to grant every white recruit who enlisted for the duration of the war 300 acres of land and the choice between a healthy black male slave between the ages of 10 and 30 years or £60 in specie. The slave bonus would be raised by a special tax on planters who owned more than 20 slaves. The use of slaves as bounties later became known as “Sumter's Law,” after General Thomas Sumter, who began offering Tory slaves as enlistment bonuses in South Carolina in April 1781.

How Far We've Come: The president and Bo.

Black History Is American History

No culture—our own included—wants to focus on the unglamorous or unjust choices their society has made. No culture, our own included, will tell a completely unsullied version of its own history. But perhaps if there were, in fact, more balance, a more even standard, there’d be less of a need for Black History Month because black history wouldn’t be institutionally blurred from the cultural mindset. Unlike Irish history or Italian history, virtually all of black history is, in fact, AMERICAN history. But it is American history that is routinely marginalized or omitted, boiled down to the broadest and most whitewashed Crispus Attucks moments, while omitting the fact that Attucks was considered a Mulatto (he was the son of a black man and a Natick or Nantucket Indian), and that John Adams, who became the second American President, defended the British soldiers who killed Attucks and that those men were summarily acquitted of Attucks’s murder. Adams, serving as a lawyer for the British crown, reviled the “mad behavior” of Attucks, “whose very looks was enough to terrify any person.”

If these kinds of details weren’t routinely and capriciously omitted from our teaching, perhaps there’d be less of a need to call attention to specific history moments on specific days. But, until white America comes to terms with the fact that there really is no black history— it’s all American history—then, yes, I suppose any efforts toward a cultural awakening are useful.

The saddest thing about this minimizing and downscaling of Black History Month isn’t that white America, corporate America, has done it, but that they know they can get away with it. In the absence of any credible civil rights leadership in this country, black America no longer speaks with one voice. We are a cacophony of wannabes jockeying for position, and an epidemic of pastors only in it for the Cadillac and peach cobbler. Since our economic and political strength is rarely brought to bear in any measurable way, the majority culture has absolutely nothing to fear from us. And fear, not altruism, is the actual motivator for corporate America. It’s all dollars and cents, and there’s no real economic penalty for ignoring Black History month—we’re going to Walmart anyway, and they know it.

We’re no more interested in Harriet Tubman than they are, so why bother spending money on all of those useless Black History moments? Here, in Colorado, there’ll be no boycotting of the local media stations and they know it. Even if we were to boycott their stations, they’d never feel any impact from it because no local station here—with, perhaps, Fox as the exception—does anything at all for the black community or has any measurable impact on the black community (or vice versa).

Absent any compelling moral imperative for promoting Black History Month, absent any economic penalty for ignoring it, these media stations—which feature barely any black on-air talent and absolutely zero local programming for the black community—either feel free to ignore us completely or, just as likely, forgot it even was Black History Month. The black community, here, is demonstrably politically toothless and unengaged. There's no measurable outrage about, well, anything.

I’d like to summon up a head of steam to be ticked off at the media outlets for ignoring Black History Month and for the black community, here, for not much caring, but I’m not sure what good it will do. Actually, I’m not sure what would actually need to happen here in Ourtown to get black people up off of the sofa. I’m not even sure that’s possible anymore. Our values—both moral and spiritual—are virtually nonexistent. It’s all about who has the most money or drives the more expensive car. Who lives in what exclusive neighborhood and who works at Walmart. Most blacks here can describe, in exhausting detail, the features of a Lincoln Navigator but couldn’t tell you who John Rock (first African American to practice law before the United States Supreme Court) or Reverend Henry Highland Garnet (African American to speak before Congress) were even if you aimed a gun at them.

Until THAT changes, yes, I suppose we need to keep Black History Month intact.

Christopher J. Priest
27 February 2006
editor@praisenet.org
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Black History Month

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Black History Month, also known as African-American History Month in America, is an annual observance in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom for remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. It is celebrated annually in the United States and Canada in February and the United Kingdom in October.

Black History Month had its beginnings in 1926 in the United States, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February to be "Negro History Week". This week was chosen because it marked the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.[Woodson created the holiday with the hope that it eventually be eliminated when black history became fundamental to American history.[4] Negro History Week was met with enthusiastic response; it prompted the creation of black history clubs, an increase in interest among teachers, and interest from progressive whites. Negro History Week grew in popularity throughout the following decades, with mayors across the United States endorsing it as a holiday.

In 1976, the federal government acknowledged the expansion of Black History Week to Black History Month by the leaders of the Black United Students at Kent State University in February of 1969. The first celebration of Black History Month occurred at Kent State in February of 1970.[5] Six years later during the bicentennial, the expansion of Negro History Week to Black History Month was recognized by the U.S. government. Gerald Ford spoke in regards to this, urging Americans to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history."

Black History Month was first celebrated in the United Kingdom in 1987. This establishment of Black History Month is generally attributed to the work of Ghanaian analyst Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, as well as the Greater London Council.

In 1995, after a motion by politician Jean Augustine, Canada's House of Commons officially recognized February as Black History Month. In 2008, Senator Donald Oliver moved to have the Senate officially recognize Black History Month, which was unanimously approved.

Criticism

Black History Month sparks an annual debate about the continued usefulness and fairness of a designated month dedicated to the history of one race. Many people hold concerns about black history being delegated to a single month and the "hero worship" of some of the historical figures often recognized. Morgan Freeman, a critic of Black History Month, said: "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."

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