[Editor’s Note] Of Truth and the Shortest Month

by Donna Ladd
February 2, 2011

I admit it: I've never been Black History Month's biggest fan. Let me put that another way: I don't like how media tend to treat Black History Month. Too often, it is a vehicle for selling ads on a special page to commemorate black history, usually with predictable images or talk of little-lady Rosa Parks suddenly getting tired and refusing to get up out of her seat. (No. She was a trained activist; the historic moment was planned.)

Even worse, many publications around the United States use February as the time to load diverse coverage into one month, or at least to provide some coverage of African Americans that doesn't involve crime, music or sports. As much as I know and respect why Carter Woodson started this tradition, it is too often an excuse for not doing truly diverse, educational coverage the rest of the year.

Black History Month also provides cover for educational institutions to give a cursory nod to civil-rights icons without teaching the hard stuff that we all need to know. For instance: that Mississippi had the most lynchings. That we had horrendous "Black Codes" after slavery and reconstruction officially ended. That white citizens in Mississippi voted in the 1960s to close the public schools rather than integrate them. That a state-funded spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, not only gathered "intelligence" on blacks who "stepped out of line" and the white "activists" who helped them, but reported on travesties like a white gas station owner in Neshoba County allowing a black man to use his station bathroom.

Why care about bathrooms? To scare decent white people into going along with maintaining segregation at all costs. And if they didn't, the upstanding members of the Citizens Councils--organized to prevent integration--would lead boycotts of their businesses, or worse. If all else failed, the Citizens Council and the Sovereignty Commission would join forces to get "intelligence" (like the license plate number of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner) out to local law enforcement, who were either Klan members or buddies with them. Then came the murders, harassment, even efforts to starve families into submission (in Greenwood, they cut off food assistance to poor blacks who tried to register to vote).

No, this history isn't comfortable, and it's not just "black history." It is all of our history, and we should all know it inside and out to prevent repeats of it (not so hard to believe since the last presidential campaign) and so that we all can understand why problems exist and, thus, how to cure them at their roots.

If you don't know, for instance, about the "red-lining" (Google it) and blatant economic discrimination by institutions including banks, landlords, health-care agencies, doctors and lending agencies until the early 1990s, you cannot comprehend why an entire race of people have had such a difficult time obtaining wealth, land, credit and connections that help level the playing field. If you do not know about the brutal criminal acts committed by whites against blacks in order to keep Jim Crow alive--often leaving dead men's privates stuffed in their mouths in lynchings documented on postcards with partying white adults and children smiling and pointing--you cannot understand the cycle of despair and violence in which American society has forced several generations of black men.

If you do not know that thousands of families (and their resources) fled the Jackson Public Schools when the U.S. Supreme Court forced us to integrate in late 1969, you probably don't get the need for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program or why public schools are struggling. You sure won't get that a disaster that took generations to create is going to take serious effort on our part to reverse. It sure as hell is going to take knowledge.

Of course, I write this in times that prove the point. Our governor, who is a serious candidate for president, recently downplayed the horrible Citizens Council and before that, made comments that his generation wasn't part of all the mess back then. (Right.) A state representative from Brandon, Rep. John Moore, wants to repeal legislation (ironically signed by the governor) to bring actual civil-rights education to our public schools. I hate to imagine what is, and isn't, being taught in many of the private academies, originally set up as "segregation academies." Really terrifying, there are efforts around the country by Tea Party groups to simply erase slavery and black oppression from our history books.

Then there's Rep. Mark Duvall, a Mantachie Democrat, trying to get the Legislature to force back Colonel Reb and the "From Dixie With Love" fight song to Ole Miss.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that Duvall and Moore just don't know any better. They may have been raised in households and schools where people just don't talk about "all that." Perhaps they come from the mentality that uncomfortable history isn't worth talking about; besides, "WE didn't do it." And so on.

It is exactly this level of ignorance--or intentional efforts to get the ignorant vote--that proves how desperately we need to get acquainted with our recent history. No, most of us did not go to Citizens Council meetings or send out postcards with a lynched man hanging from a tree or pour sugar on protesters' heads at the old Woolworth, but all of us are hurt by the legacy of this lunacy. The cycle of crime endangers us; the division pushed by politicians makes us vote against our own interests because we're scared of "them"; the shame of what our people did to our neighbors haunts us and hurts our state's economy.

One woman even stated adamantly to me on Facebook that the slavery of "entitlements" was worse for blacks than the slave trade (apparently not understanding where or when "entitlements" came about in the U.S.)

I've said it before: People don't know what they don't know. And when they've been told all their lives that black people (or, conversely, white people) are all violent, greedy, lazy, whatever, they will sometimes believe stereotypes without bothering to consider history.

Here's the good news, though: People who face the truth and embrace the lessons of history find a brave new world of love and understanding. When you find the courage to show you care about our shared, difficult history, and to listen and learn, suddenly the shame disappears. You form new relationships, and you know you're part of the solution.

The truth really will set you free. Try it.

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