It's here again. Black History Month. "Roots" will be played over and over and over again. The Black Heritage Movie Network will show films like "Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song." And we'll be blessed with all those precious Black History Moments: "Madam C.J. Walker was the first black female millionaire," says the smiling local news personality. Why is that remarkable thing significant only in February? Answer: It's not.
Next question: Why would African Americans chose a single month to try to explore a 500-year-old history and a culture rooted in a place as ancient as time? It's too deep. It's too wide. It's impossible. And if your answer was Carter G. Woodson, you're wrong about that, too. But he is the point where this whole thing began.
Woodson couldn't even begin high school until he was 20. Supporting himself by working in the Kenturcky coalmines, he sailed through in two years; then he received a B. A. from Berea College in Kentucky. He received a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and in 1912, became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard.
He was angry that Africans' contributions were totally disregarded or distorted by racist scholars. He believed that history was not just about reporting events, but interpreting them, and he believed that black people had to know their history, and that other cultures had to acknowledge it. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915; then he did something that would change the way the contributions of Africans were dealt with in academia, and eventually the rest of the world: He published what became one of the most prestigious scholarly publications in the country dedicated to black people, "The Journal of Negro History." This work and the 30 books, plus numerous articles he wrote, forced the overdue recognition of the contributions of black Americans and Africans throughout the world.
Woodson reached out to public libraries and schools. In 1926, he initiated Negro History Week to urge black Americans to study their own history, despite the fact that it was being left out of history books. He chose the week in February, not because it was Fredrick Douglass' birthday or because it was the shortest month, but because it was when slaves began to get the word that they had been set free, even though Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January.
He hoped Negro History Week would eventually be unnecessary; instead, it became Black History Month.
Continuing to celebrate black history only in February is dangerous. It gives people an excuse to do exactly what inspired Woodson to initiate the celebration in the first place: ignore the contributions of Africans the rest of the time.
And technically, there is no black history. There is only the history of the universe. To segregate the history of any culture marginalizes it. George Washington Carver has to be mentioned in the same breath with Thomas Edison. When great composers are celebrated, Duke Ellington and William Grant Still have to be in mix.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a great physician, performed the first open-heart surgery. And just as it would be absurd for doctors to perform open-heart surgery only in February, it's absurd to reduce the remarkable career of this man, who is, among other things, black, to a trivia question asked in February. Williams also started the first black-owned hospital in the country. His accomplishments should be put into the context of medical history.
If you pull out the strands of what is called "black" history, the history of the world unravels. How do you study the Great Migration as a "black" phenomenon when it shifted the country's population, forever changing the North and South, the country's workforce and American culture? How do you cast the Civil Rights Movement as a "black" thing when it reverberated across continents? The whole world watched to see how America would handle the "race question"—that is, the struggle between blacks and whites. It affected everything from foreign trade to foreign policy.
We have to put things into context. I say we should stamp out Black History Month once and for all. Try this: Buy all the Black Heritage stamps you can get your hands on. Use them year round. Let them be a constant reminder to you and whomever you write that African and African-American history is history.
Do whatever you can do to move things to the next level, whether that is insisting on the use of righteous history books in schools or encouraging black children to become historians. And instead of celebrating black history in February, let's honor the "Father of Negro History" by calling it Carter G. Woodson Month.
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