Black History Month

Honoring Black History Month

When I was a child, I did not like history very much. From across the decades, I now believe that is because I did not see myself in the pages of what was being reported. History was, in the 1970s, evolving. While we weren’t meant to do as much rote memorization and yet most of the view was still the “Great Man” approach to history. The narratives were about a level of privilege and power that I could not relate to as a young mixed-race “mutt” being raised by a single mom.

Yet as we have extended our arms to be able to include the histories of many peoples, I have found myself more and more intrigued by history and what it tells us about the resilience of others—and about ourselves. I particularly like reading about those whose stories I understand less. Black history was not taught when I was in grade school. So this month I will be delving in. I am going to crack open some books I have had on my shelves for a while. The first I plan to peruse is “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell University. I choose this because it seems particularly timely right now as we watch the interplay between hyper-capitalism and the rise of a strong fascist element in our nation. Here is an excerpt that speaks of what evolution comes from our on-going interaction with history:

“The way Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power, I the years between World War II and the 1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude. Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collection of self-assertion that developed into first t civil rights movement and later, Black Power….Thus even after historians of Civil Rights, Black Power and multicultural ers rewrote segregationists stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told… [that] slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North…

…All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in Us growth, success, power and wealth.”

And that just from the introduction—I read on….

Of course, slavery is only a small part of the annals of Black history in this nation. I am also intrigued by the biographies of cultural icons, Black scientists and movement leaders. If you would prefer to glimpse history through the eyes of historical fiction, consider Ta Nahesi Coates’ Water Dancer which is a fine novel with a vivid telling of what enslavement cost.

In all the flurry of this time, I am determined not to let the change to celebrate Black History pass me by. Because now I find I not only appreciate history, I think it essential to understand these difficult times in which we traverse.