Black History Month is coming to a close. This is that time of the year when we celebrate the Black achievements most history books have ignored for the past 400 years. Well, except for a few carefully lifted quotes from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a few missives on the roles of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, and obligatory shoutouts to descendants of the enslaved people who managed to overcome their three-fifths personhood and become educated, articulate, and part of the American capitalist dream.
Does this sound cynical? There’s absolutely no shade for Dr. King, Ms. Tubman and Ms. Parks, but there is a lot of shade to those who believe their “wokeness” on the Black experience ends at 12:01 a.m. March 1st, not to be examined or even thought of again until around February 1st next year.
If you went to school in this country, were you taught Black history? When did you learn about Dr. Charles Drew, the surgeon and medical researcher who researched the field of blood transfusions, improved blood storage techniques, organized America’s first large-scale blood bank and trained a generation of black physicians at Howard University?
He bled to death in 1950, because he had to go to a “colored” hospital. Blood was still segregated by race back then. But if you’ve ever had a blood transfusion, or have given blood, you know the contribution of Dr. Drew shouldn’t be squished into one month.
You probably have heard of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice. As an attorney, he argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the case that ruled that separate but (un)equal education was unconstitutional. The laws are on the books, but American schools are more segregated now than they were in 1954 when the court handed down a unanimous decision.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was the first physician to perform a successful open-heart surgery in the United States in 1893. Surely you heard about him in biology class when you were schooled on dissection, right?
You may already know Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947. But did you know that it wasn’t until 1968 that the National Football League had a Black quarterback start a pro football game? That was Marlin Briscoe, playing for the Denver Broncos. That was the same year Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to the House of Representatives. For some of us baby boomers, some of these aren’t old history stories, they’re the timeline we grew up in.
And Black history didn’t just start in 1619 when a Dutch ship brought the first kidnapped African people here to enslave them for unpaid labor.
Black history started in the motherland of Africa and those 54 countries are more than thatched huts and half-naked starving children.
Before colonizers came to ravage and pillage the rich African countryside, African nations had their own civilizations, with science, art, and forms of commerce.
If you’re fortunate, as I was, you grew up in a house where your parents made sure you had knowledge of all the Black achievements of the time, through books like Famous American Negroes. If you were even more fortunate, you had Black teachers, like my eighth grade teacher Mrs. Jacqueline Berry, who taught us about African history, and then African American history, long before that was popular. And it wasn’t just during February. We knew Benjamin Banneker was an early inventor, whose early accomplishments included constructing an irrigation system for the family farm and a wooden clock that reportedly kept accurate time and ran for more than 50 years until his death. In addition, Banneker taught himself astronomy and accurately forecasted lunar and solar eclipses.
But many may not know the thousands of contributions of African Americans if school curriculum only mentions a few people over 28 days (less weekends).
This dearth of information will reoccur beginning March 1, when we celebrate women’s history month. There will be more tributes to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the women’s suffrage movement of 100-plus years ago. There may be a Madame Marie Curie or Sojourner Truth thrown in, but the many contributions of women will be shoved into 31 days, and then never mentioned again for another year.
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month is the month of May. Hispanic Heritage Month is from September 15 to October 15, Native American Indian History month is November. We can do better than this. American history, world history, all history, was made by many people of many ethnicities and genders and should be part of the regular teaching and celebrations, not shoved into a corner to pull out once a year.
This is not to say these specific months shouldn’t be celebrated. This is to say the celebration should come because we’ve already learned the history of all of us — for all of us.
Cheryl Charles can be reached at [email protected].
