Black History Month (1976) in America is February. It is the month when schoolchildren write reports about famous black Americans and when big companies notice Black America in their ads. It is the month when Google gets a fourth of all of its searches for “Rosa Parks”.
It started out in 1926 as Negro History Week, the second week of February when the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln fall. It was started by Carter G. Woodson, who is best known for writing “The Mis-Education of the Negro”. In those days black men were being hung from trees and blacks appeared in history books only as slaves.
In 1976 the week became a month: Black History Month.
America is not the only country with a Black History Month. Canada has it too. In Britain it is in October.
On Oprah’s talk show a white woman once asked why there should be a Black History Month – there is no White History Month after all. Well, that is because every month is White History Month. Instead of being the shortest month of the year, White History Month is the month that never seems to end.
It is not just whites who do not see the need for it. So do some blacks. The Nation of Islam is against it. Some blacks argue it has become an empty act.
In 2005 on “60 Minutes” Morgan Freeman, a rich and famous black Hollywood actor, said that Black History Month was “ridiculous”. He said: “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.” And then he went on to say that the way to get rid of racism is to stop talking about it. The month, it seems, helps to keep racism alive by playing up people’s differences.
History tells us who we are, where we have been and where we are going. It is a map of time. American history cannot be properly understood without first understanding race. To do otherwise would be like trying to understand India without caste or Nazi Germany without anti-Semiticism. For Americans to understand their history in a colour-blind way would mean being lost, it would mean not knowing who they truly are.
And it would mean that racism would go on, like a cancer that silently eats away inside your body till the doctors find it and cut it out.
Black History Month as currently practised is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough.
Black History Month is like the black weather girl: a token – something that whites can accept that will satisfy blacks for the time being.
Black History Month is like a ghetto – a place to put black people so that whites can pretty much forget about them otherwise.
Black history is more than a march of Exceptional Negroes. Freeman was right when he said Black history is American history. But American history as currently told is largely a whitewash that keeps racism in place.
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Abagond 
I’m of two hearts about BHM. On the one hand, I agree that it’s a token, like so many other things done in this nation with respect to black Americans. On the other hand, at least it exposes kids in whitebread America to some information about our history with respect to black Americans and, in some instances, might even get them thinking about the bigger issues. Any chance to do this is a good thing.
Now that I have kids in elementary school, I’ve been interested to see how their textbooks treat the history of black people in America. For the most part, the stuff in the textbooks of today isn’t much different from what I was taught back in the 1960’s. This surprised me, frankly. I’d have expected a significant evolution from those days. The modern books are a bit more frank and graphic about the horrors of slavery, but aside from that we see little or nothing about things liks (a) contributions (science, engineering, etc.) by black Americans (other than a few favorites like the cotton gin), and (b) the way in which adapting to life as a free people in a hostile land forced black people to be creative with respect to social structures, linguistic semiology, etc. As a musician, another glaring omission is the description of how this creative force also lead to the creation of jazz music, which is arguable the only significant contribution to high art and culture to have come from the United States since its inception.
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That is interesting. I looked at my 11-year-old son’s American history book:
The index has 42 black people in it – pretty good. They seem like Black History Month imports. Phillis Wheatley and Colin Powell are there, but not, say, Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael.
The index has entries for parkas, polio vaccine and pemmican, but not for jazz, lynching, Jim Crow or racism.
There are no pictures of slaves, of slave auctions, of Washington and Jefferson with their slaves, no picture of lynchings, the Klan, burning crosses, “colored only” signs or Rodney King. There is no Crispus Attucks in the picture of the Boston Massacre. All that imagery is completely missing.
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“Freeman was right when he said Black history is American history. But American history as currently told is largely a whitewash that keeps racism in place.”
I feel exactly this way about BHM. As a future educator (English/Literature) I am particularly frustrated by the blatant segregation of black history and literature in American classrooms. I’m actually more than frustrated. I’m thoroughly pissed. I feel like I’m crashing repeatedly into a brick wall. I’m pissed that BHM being the only time black anything is heralded is ok. I’m pissed that this was meant to be a satisfying answer to desegregation and making things “equal.” I’m pissed that black history classes are optional and almost never taken by white kids but no one ever asks blacks if they feel like learning white history.
I’m pissed that when I discuss my intentions of teaching my classes ONLY the literature of blacks and any other prevalent “minority” group in the area I’m living by then – without calling it an “African-American Lit class”, that someone ALWAYS tells me how racist that is. What is so racist about it? It’s not like the next English class they take won’t drown them again in white literature which has decidedly been valued by white people and created the canon for which we base ALL literary value on. And when I bring that up, Black History Month ALWAYS comes up as though those 4 weeks of the 52 in the year makes it fair.
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I think it’s safe to say, most of White America is completely comfortable with history being taught exactly like it has been for decades (missing black contributions). However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More importantly, who wants to be reminded of all the injustice, racism and bigotry that is so deeply engrained in our history. It’s ugly and most sane people would like to forget it.
The more black history is down played the easier it becomes to label blacks as socially and economically inferior today. Historically there have been major contributions to this country’s greatness by African Americans. The accomplishments themselves are something to marvel, but the obstacles these wonderfully talented people had to overcome to achieve their greatness is the real testiment to their historical significance. Tell the story! Tell the whole story and I don’t personally care what month! If we don’t have a specified time to make sure it gets done, it’s not going to happen and soon it will be forgotten. Even with Black History Month, high school students are lost when it comes to even a superficial understanding who did what in African American history. Don’t believe me, ask any high school student if they’ve ever heard of Ida Wells?
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George Speck aka George Crum in the 1850’s created the potato chip.
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