NAACP Boston president: Scrutinize past to get real look at black history

LYNN – The history of African-Americans does not need to be rewritten, Michael Curry told a local audience Tuesday night, but it certainly needs to be carefully reread.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Boston president said Abraham Lincoln?s role in ending slavery and John F. Kennedy?s commitment to civil rights 100 years later appear flawed under close scrutiny – but he added – only close scrutiny reveals the roles of countless unknown people in freedom?s advancement.?It takes time for truth to catch up with history and though we say black history, it?s American history,” Curry told an audience of about two dozen people gathered at Community Brotherhood of Lynn.Community Brotherhood and the Lynn Community Health Center sponsored Curry?s appearance to mark their fifth annual Black History Month celebration.Curry talked about how his mother moved to Boston from Alabama and how he attended school in Boston?s Charlestown neighborhood during a time of racial unrest.?There were angry faces and racial slurs and kids caught in the middle,” he said.Curry said black history is “embedded” in American history, but he added that well-known accounts of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation do not tell a full story about slavery and the transition to a “Jim Crow southern caste system” that endured into the 1960s.He highlighted speaker and writer Frederick Douglass? mutual respect and sharp criticism of Lincoln. Douglass lived in Lynn from 1841 to 1845 and, in an 1876 speech, described Lincoln?s hesitation in fully striking down slavery and according slaves the same rights as whites.?We are, at best, only his stepchildren,” Douglass told his audience.Curry said Lincoln was “lobbied publicly and cajoled to become, eventually, the great emancipator.” It was a deadly 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois – a community linked closely to Lincoln – that started in motion the changes and efforts by dozens of people to form organizations that eventually became the NAACP.The organization?s Boston branch formed in 1910 even as African-American organizations struggled for equal recognition with railroad sleeping car porters fighting to end racism even as large American labor unions moved slowly to give African-Americans equal footing.Although former President Lyndon Johnson signed landmark civil rights legislation, Curry said Kennedy grappled only slowly with destroying racism. He said even President Obama?s election is set against the backdrop of decades-old inequalities that contemporary African-Americans and whites must shatter.?That struggle continues for African-Americans. There is often little access to care. We continue to feed the school-to-prison pipeline. Centuries of oppression are not easily erased by the election of the first black president: It requires willing and unwilling heroes,” Curry said.He praised the Lynn NAACP?s work and said long-standing “disillusionment” with government?s inability to change inequalities in American life makes it hard for organizations to get people involved in creating change.?Our job is to mobilize communities,” he said.