In 1976, President Gerald Ford called upon the American public to “honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” Every American president since then has recognized the month, now more commonly called “African-American History Month.” Gerald Ford’s proclamation was an official recognition of African-Americans, and an expansion of what historian Carter G. Woodson began in 1915 with an acknowledgement period called “Negro History Week.” Each year’s celebration has a theme, and for 2023, the theme is “Black Resistance,” an exploration of how African-Americans have “resisted historic and ongoing oppression … especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms and police killings.”
Sometime in 1984 I purchased a Black American historical calendar and diary for the year of 1985. Each day and week of the year has a highlight of accomplishments by African Americans. I also have a slim informative device called “Brain Quest: Black History.” The 2 ½” wide by 7” long chart poses 850 questions about Black history on one page, with the answers on the following sheet. I have Post-It brand stickers on what I found to be interesting questions. One the questions was about the United Nations. Liberia was the first Black republic in Africa, and a founding member of the United Nations. My grandson is in his first year at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is majoring in engineering, though I don’t know which branch of engineering. I told him that Benjamin Banneker was one of the surveyors who helped in the layout of Washington, DC, but I did not mention that Cheney University in Philadelphia, founded in 1832, is the oldest historically Black institution of higher learning in the country, and that Banneker was the Black mathematician who was a surveyor in the team that planned the District of Columbia. (I did not remember that fact until I decided to use the Brain Quest for this column.)
There are those who argue that history should be taught without cultural or ethnic considerations. In 2016, President Barack Obama gave an “unconditional pardon” to my sister’s friend, Sala Udin. Udin was convicted of having an unloaded shotgun and moonshine in the trunk of his car when he was arrested in 1970. He was returning from civil rights activities in Mississippi, one of the “Freedom Riders” who attempted to register Black voters in a state that restricted or forbade those registrations. The April 1944 ruling in Smith v Allwright held that states cannot limit a person’s right to vote in primary elections, but some Southern states ignored that ruling. (When I said to my sister that she had never told me that Sala was a Freedom Rider, she responded, “You never asked.”) Sala’s ride into and out of Mississippi was history, and the events that preceded the moment were ethnically and culturally significant. My Oxford English Dictionary defines “history” as “1: A narration of …incidents…” Stuff happened. But some of that stuff happened because of, and to, and while.
One of my very good friends, a Caucasian woman who was an elementary school teacher, would often amuse me by correcting my language. When I would say “Black people,” she would correct me: “African-American.” She once told me that she did not “see color,” but I am an artist, and I laugh at people who say that. I see color, I use color to create, and I have no colors that I find to be less than useful on my palette.
As Cyndi Lauper sang, “Your true colors … are beautiful … like the rainbow.”
cjon3acd@att.net