Black History Month
When Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week, his purpose was for the history of African Americans to become considered a more significant part of American history as a whole. According to historian John Hope Franklin, Woodson “continued to express hope that Negro History Week would outlive its usefulness.” The purpose of Black History Month is to promote awareness of African American history to the general public.
It is arguable that despite the opinions of several critics, Black History Month has several advantages, and to an extent, Woodson’s hopes were realized. During Black History Month, African American history is taught to thousands of students at the elementary, high school and university levels respectively. African American history is an extremely important part of American history, and it is almost impossible to find an American History textbook that does not include passages about black history.
Black History Month Matters
BYSALIM MUWAKKIL
Some critics contend Black History Month is irrelevant because it has degenerated into a shallow ritual.
While reading an interesting story in theNew York Observerabout the overwhelming whiteness of the magazine industry, I noticed the prevalence of the phrase “people of color.” This term has become ubiquitous among progressives as an inclusive nomenclature for non-white people. Ironically, it’s a variation of the now discredited term “colored people,” once used to identify African Americans.
These days, of course, a person of color could be anyone of non-European stock. Were magazines inspired to take affirmative action and employ more people of color, they could end up with not a single African American on staff.
On one level, this blurring of affirmative action categories may seem to be a good thing–a merging of difference. But in real world America, this practice has allowed us to postpone addressing the lengthening legacy of our racist past and provides another example of why Black History Month still matters.
African Americans, as a distinct ethnic variation in the African diaspora, were created by slavery. Millions of Africans wound up in America only because they were kidnapped to fill the needs of a slave economy. This process forged a new people, who became American by necessity, and included 12 generations of chattel slavery. For nearly 250 years, American culture dehumanized those it enslaved and, more insidiously, socialized generations of African Americans for enslavement. The nation’s economic reliance on slavery mandated a rigid and pitiless racial hierarchy.
The century of official Jim Crow segregation that followed slavery’s abolition did little to end African Americans’ social isolation or alter reigning cultural biases. Because of this unrelenting social hostility, the hyphen that connects African to American connotes dueling as well as dual identities. Slavery’s damaging legacy includes the social implications of that internal duel.
A thorough examination of this history would help clarify how the past influences our present of African-American disparity. Affirmative action is a compensatory program designed to begin that process. By blurring people of color into one mass, those complicated historical distinctions get lost.
President Lyndon Johnson zeroed in on the program’s focus in a famous 1965 speech at Howard University. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Johnson made this speech urging affirmative action a year after passage of the Civil Rights Bill had done little to weaken resistance to equal employment.
But since many Americans lacked a perspective informed by blacks’ peculiar history, other groups had to be included to gain political support for affirmative action. Instead of a program focused on the descendants of enslaved Africans, as originally designed, affirmative action became a comprehensive attempt to offset discrimination against all “minorities”–a term so fuzzy, it includes even white women.
Any program seeking broad remedies for unfair biases is worthy, but the original rationale for affirmative action was much narrower and justified by African Americans’ unique history. Black History Month is an outgrowth of Negro History Week, established by black historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926. He designated the second week in February to mark the birthdays of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The week was expanded to a month in 1976, as part of the nation’s Bicentennial commemoration. The intent was to feature the racial aspects of our common history.
Some critics argue that sanctioning a racially distinct observation moves Americans away from a common history. African-American actor Morgan Freeman expressed this sentiment in a recent interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” when he said it was “ridiculous” to have a month dedicated to black history. “I don’t want a black history month,” he said. Freeman’s objection is common, although not often expressed by African Americans–at least not publicly. I have no hard poll numbers, but I suspect most black Americans feel the monthly observation has symbolic importance, even if it has little practical application.
Some critics contend Black History Month is irrelevant because it has degenerated into a shallow ritual. But that problem is one of execution not design. If treated seriously, the monthly observation could conceivably trigger more concern for the accuracy of traditional school curricula.
In fact, that already has happened in Philadelphia where, starting this September, public school students will be required to pass a course in African-American history before they can graduate. Knowledge of that formative history is so essential to understanding the nation’s character, we should utilize all public institutions to ensure all Americans know from whence they came.
Phenomenal Woman
BYMAYA ANGELOU
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need for my care.
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
Still I Rise
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Langston Hughes
Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the eighth and last child of Willie Lee and Minnie Lou Grant Walker, who were sharecroppers. When Alice Walker was eight years old, she lost sight of one eye when one of her older brothers shot her with a BB gun by accident. In high school, Alice Walker was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a "rehabilitation scholarship" made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965.
After finishing college, Walker lived for a short time in New York, then from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, she lived in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during which time she had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. Alice Walker was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, and in the 1990's she is still an involved activist. She has spoken for the women's movement, the anti-apartheid movement, for the anti-nuclear movement, and against female genital mutilation. Alice Walker started her own publishing company, Wild Trees Press, in 1984. She currently resides in Northern California with her dog, Marley.
She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple. Among her numerous awards and honors are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.
Before you knew you owned itby Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American poet to garner national critical acclaim. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, Dunbar penned a large body of dialect poems, standard English poems, essays, novels and short stories before he died at the age of 33. His work often addressed the difficulties encountered by members of his race and the efforts of African-Americans to achieve equality in America. He was praised both by the prominent literary critics of his time and his literary contemporaries.
We Wear the Maskby Paul Laurence Dunbar
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Sympathyby Paul Laurence Dunbar
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!
Etheridge Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1931. He dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and joined the military. While serving in Korea, he acquired a drug habit that followed him back to the states in 1951. In 1960, he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to eight years in the Indiana State Prison. It was here that Knight began writing poetry. He corresponded with other African American poets of the time like Dudley Randall and Gwendolyn Brooks.