Today is the first day of Black History Month. I’ve looked forward to this brief space on the calendar ever since I was a young man, eager to learn more about my culture.
I longed also to see that rich, deep and complex culture recognized and shared and appreciated by a society that for the rest of the year seemed organized to misrepresent, denigrate and oppress it.
Part of the lived history of many of us is the very reclamation of the word black. For much of U.S. history the very word itself was a pejorative. When I was a child, to call a black person (of whatever hue) black was about the worst insult you could bestow. To use black as an adjective was to make whatever you were talking about worse, a lesser quality, undesirable, more evil.
People whose heritage could be traced to the continent where life and civilization as we know it were born, were once so reviled that to have even one drop of blood attributable to African heritage made you an outcast. You were outside the pale of decency in America. You were three-fifths of a person, at best. The Constitution said so until passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Almost half the country went to war to keep black people “less than” everybody else. And when they lost the Civil War — they called it the War Between the States — they surrendered only militarily. Their hearts and minds were not changed by defeat on the battlefield. In fact, they rebounded less than two generations later to erect monuments to those who had led them in defeat.
And the victorious Northerners were quite charitable in victory, readmitting their brethren into the Union after some token paper promises and a few winks and nods.
The rebels quickly developed new tools and methods to preserve and reclaim their way of life: Jim Crow, vigilante terrorism, the White Primary, literacy tests, hostile public officials, segregation, discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations (separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains, toilets, etc). Ostensibly to avoid the condemnation of blackness, even the taint of it.
Later on the entire nation got into the act with redlining, discrimination under the G.I. bill, moving with “deliberate speed”.
Who did this?
The Founding Fathers institutionalized much of this from the beginning. They made difficult compromises. They kicked cans down the road. And when the contradictions embedded in many of those compromises proved untenable — the nation could not endure half-slave, half-free — there came the rupture of Civil War.
The rebels were mostly in the South, though there were always Northern sympathizers and profiteers. Those 19th century Southerners were mostly called Democrats. Now, thanks in large measure to Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, Lee Atwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich, they march under the flag of the Republican Party and claim to be descendants of Abraham Lincoln. They would not even be avowed by Eisenhower.
The American history so universally taught throughout the land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thanks to the marvels of public education (of which black people have been the most fervent proponents) gave us all righteous appreciation for the words and ideals so marvelously expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and Tom Paine’s Common Sense.
But there have always been some woke folk in these United States who resisted the mythology and propaganda that accompanied the truly laudable parts of the history of an imperfect union founded on ideas and ideals.
And it was a vanguard of such folk who began in the 1960s to reclaim and redeem the words black and blackness.
America’s Baby Boomers came of age during that era. By and large they have some understanding of the transition of the sons and daughters of Ethiop and the Dark Continent from imported forced labor, indentured people, slaves, niggers, colored people, freedmen, negroes, nigras, Negroes, to say-it-loud-I’m-black-and-I’m-proud African Americans.
But there’s more than a fair chance that Millennials, and Gen X’ers and Z’ers have much less appreciation for the who we are and the how we got here that explain so much of the why-we-are-the-way-we-are.
Which is, when you think about it, the principal reason we all need to know our history, and each other’s: to figure out what to cherish and what to keep, what to discard as unhealthy relic, and how we might build a better future upon our legacy. For the children who are our future in hopes they might enjoy the shade of the trees we plant in the soil we inherited, without ingesting any strange and poisonous fruit.
Here’s to a Beautiful Black History Month!
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