Black History Month – Say It Loud!
February 5, 2010 by Brian Jenkins
Filed under Be Risen, Featured
People fear what they don’t know. That is just a fact, but what is also a fact is that it is easy to break down the barriers of prejudices and misconceptions by spreading knowledge about who you are. That is the principle behind Black History Month. A month set aside to increase the understanding of a people, by the people.
Many of us African Americans grow up with no sense of what our culture really is. It is often glanced over in history books in school, and reduced to two paragraphs on slavery. So, when confronted with challenges to our race, the fall back is often a perpetuation of the images of us that appear on music videos. The cold hard fact is that MTV and BET don’t represent me. I in fact call music videos the new millennium minstrel show. The new painted face, where all of the women are promiscuous, and the men dance around throwing money and not conjugating their verbs.
That is why a month out of a year is so important to a comprehensive and diverse people who do not have a direct identifiable mother land, past a continent comprised of many countries. Black History Month began in Chicago during the summer of 1915 when Carter G. Woodson, an alumnus of the University of Chicago traveled with several friends from Washington, D.C. to participate in a national celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation sponsored by the state of Illinois. This event attracted many African Americans from across the country to come and see the exhibits highlighting the progress their people had made since the destruction of slavery.
Inspired by the three-week celebration, the Harvard graduate with a doctorate, Woodson decided to form an organization to promote the scientific study of black life and history before leaving town. On September 9th, he met with A. L. Jackson and three others and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).
Carter G. Woodson believed that publishing scientific history would transform race relations by dispelling the wide-spread falsehoods about the achievements of Africans and people of African descent. He started with “The Journal of Negro History” in 1916, which evolved into Negro History and Literature Week in 1924, which they renamed Negro Achievement Week. In February 1926, he sent out a press release announcing Negro History Week.
February wasn’t arbitrary, but was selected to include the birthdays of two great Americans who played major roles in shaping black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th and the 14th, respectively. Since Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the black community and other Republicans had been celebrating his birthday. And since the late 1890s, black communities around the country had been celebrating Douglass’. Negro History Week was built around traditional days of commemorating the black past. He was asking the public to extend their study of black history, not to create a new tradition.
The Negro History Week spread throughout the nation’s schools, and soon required Woodson to come up with annual themes and materials to give out. As early as the 1940s, blacks in West Virginia started to celebrate February as Negro History Month. In Chicago, a now forgotten cultural activist, Fredrick H. Hammaurabi, started celebrating Negro History Month in the mid-1960s. He used his cultural center, the House of Knowledge, to fuse African consciousness with the study of the black past. By the late
1960s, as young blacks on college campuses got more conscious about links with Africa, Black History Month replaced Negro History Week pretty fast. In 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, the Association used its influence to institutionalize the move from a week to a month and from Negro history to Black history. Since the mid-1970s, every American president, Democrat and Republican, has issued proclamations endorsing the Association’s annual theme.
This was one intellectuals dream to bridge the divide between races by introducing the races. What started as a Journal, moved to a week, then to a month of the rich history of a strong people. But what is even more important was that each generation expanded on the tradition. Instead of turning their backs, they saw the importance of the outreach. I only hope that this generation will see it the same way. That we too will be able to “say it loud!”
- Brian Jenkins
Twitter: @Brian_Jenkins
I actually learned something new concerning How Black History Month came about. I remember hearing someone complain about black History Month being in February (the shortest month of the year) but now that I know its origin, I can’t see a viable reason to complain since, I am assuming, it was Blacks who chose the month in the first place.
I learned a lot too in doing the research for this blog. And you are right, the whole complaint about February being the shortest month just seems uninformed now…
Very informative blog. We need to understand our history in order to establish positive paths for our future. Not only should we celebrate and embrace Black History month, but we should know the origin of the celebration and share with our children. Thank you.
Very true, this is the one thing that isn’t taught, and should be taught during black history month!
I’d like to get feed back on a issue I encountered on Face Book. I am new on FB. I found all of my nieces & nephews on FB W/recently poked by my step sister. I have a journalistic educ & had been listening to radio & internet videos on Black History Month (BHM) & decided to post the bus ride video from this yrs Sundance on my FB wall…so I got this great idea, so I thought..to post several shakers, milestones, Harlem Renaissance entertainers, & some of the continued struggles (clips) & clips from YouTube in a Celebration of BHM..I thought it would be educational for my young family members…Well, most are in interrac marriage, love relationships, & work friends…and I can’t believe that I was snubbed, & everyone removed me as a friend!?..maybe this was the wrong forum…but I adjtd privacy to just friends only, then created a membership groups…and no one joined. I just cant believe the reaction. It appeared my nephew & cousin w/caucasion spouses got into arguments, they all seemed ashamed to have this come across their walls…I suppose it is a forum only for shout outs & parties. My mother’s family is from Mississippi & my grandpa movd his entire family (adlt childr) out (to Ohio) in 1950..& my grandma told us to never go there, as none of us have…their education was lacking, though were able to have finacly stable lives, & managed to get us all college educated, as we have our nxt genrtn. I created prvt grps (Celebr Grp, Bus Grp, Inspirn, etc) that reqd request to join (on my FB) no one joined!
Maybe I should have used a blog, but I will never be ashamed of our past.What are your thoughts on this…I am distraught! You may email me.
We are funny about our own culture because of how too many of us are taught it or told what it is. We are mad to seem angry, or just former slaves, and slavery is made to seem “not that bad”. So we are taught that it is an old conversation and not our culture.
After writing this particular blog, I got some push back, but hardly as much as the push back that I got after writing a blog about Kwanzaa. To many there is a fear of anything black, or that if we start to recognize our culture in the positive then people will realize that we are black and we will lose something. Its an “old” way that still carries on.