Black history is our history, period Lessenberry Ink

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 P...