Still Relevant: Contemplating the importance of Black History Month in today’s society – By Rob Montana editor@ithacatimes.com

While the origins of Black History Month date back to 1926 — when historian Carter G. Woodson announced the second week of February would be known as “Negro History Week” — it’s only been since 1976 that the federal government officially recognized it as a month-long celebration of African American history.

Now, 37 years later, we have an African American president in Barack Obama just starting his second term in office and times have changed. Amid claims of the U.S. being in a post-racial society, the question has been raised whether Black History Month is still necessary.

That very question will be addressed at “Black History Month: Is it Sill Needed, Where Do We Go From Here?,” a community conversation and panel discussion at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16, at the Tompkins County Public Library. It will take place in the BorgWarner Community Room. It is free of charge and open to the public.

Moderated by Eric Kofi Acree, director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, the panel also will include Cornell professors Margaret Washington and Robert Harris.

Acree generated the idea for the panel after a conversation he had with community member Ken Glover.

“He approached me and we had a conversation about what we feel and many people feel, that we are losing sight in terms of people thinking Black History Month isn’t really needed any more,” Acree said. “Especially when you see young people, college students and even younger than that, they seem to not have the same appreciation of black history.

“There’s this idea of being in a post-racial society — why do we need to celebrate this stuff?” he added. “That’s the other piece I want to get across to folks on the 16th.”

Acree said Black History Month wasn’t created to spend just a week — as it started out in 1926 when historian Carter Woodson proclaimed the second week in February as Negro History Week — or a month talking about the history of African Americans in the U.S.

“It was to begin a dialogue and engage in conversation about the place of African Americans in history in general,” Acree said. “There’s a lack of understanding of history in general.”

Carrie Wheeler-Carmenatty, public programming and community relations coordinator at the Tompkins County Public Library, said she’s been working with Acree for the past five years regarding Black History Month programming at the library and gave him full credit for bringing the idea for the discussion to the library. The library is a good venue for such a conversation, she said, because it is a “community equalizer.”

“It’s a place where there are no barriers on ethnicity, socioeconomic status,” Wheeler-Carmenatty said. “It’s a place where everybody can come and have a place to talk. It’s an ideal place for a conversation like this because it brings all sorts of groups together and strengthens the conversation.”

It’s a conversation she’s looking forward to.

“I think it’s fascinating, it’s an outstanding topic. I think it will generate a lot of conversation,” Wheeler-Carmenatty said. “My personal opinion is we’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go.”

The panel discussion will start with Acree discussing the origin of Black History Month and how it has evolved from a week in 1926 to the month that we celebrate now. He will follow that with a set of questions he has for Cornell University professors Margaret Washington, who is a 19th century historian, and Robert Harris, who is a 20th century historian.

“Given that it is now the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington and the 100th birthday of Rosa Parks this year, with all this stuff happening, let’s revisit the importance of Black History,” Acree said. “It’s not just for black folks, either. It’s really kind of a whole piece where we want to get the significance of black history out there to everyone.”

The plan is to open the dialogue up to the audience in attendance as well.

“I came in a generation in the ’60s where this was exciting stuff,” Acree said. “We hungered for this stuff, especially coming out of New York City. We went to programs, but I think some people got burned out and some people resented it. The importance is for us to recognize that now a lot of young people out there don’t know about black history.”

He gave a historical tidbit about Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, who famously broke the color barrier in the majors when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. In doing so, Robinson became the first African American to play professional baseball in the modern era of the sport — he was the first since the 1880s — when black players were relegated to the Negro Leagues for 60 years and helped end segregation in the majors.

“Many people don’t realize that when Jackie Robinson was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, in 1944, he faced a court martial for not recognizing the Jim Crow laws (after an incident when he refused to move to the back of the bus while he was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas) and it took him off of the officer track he was on,” Acree said. “Had he not gone through that, we may not have had the Jackie Robinson we all know.”

“These are cool facts to know and it fits into the fabric of Americana,” he added.

Given that Harris and Washington study the history from two different centuries, Acree expects a “really rich conversation will happen” about Black History Month and where our nation stands in terms of whether we really have a post-racial society. In his opinion, Acree doesn’t believe the U.S. is a post-racial society.

“It’s not true; I hope many people don’t think that, because it’s not true,” he said. “Michelle Alexander, in her book, ‘The New Jim Crow,’ talks about that. We have had great strides in regard to laws and people, but when the laws and employment are not equal for people of color, we are not in a post-racial society.”

Robert Harris

Harris is a professor of African American history, former vice provost for diversity and faculty development at Cornell and was the former director of the Africana Studies and Research Center. A contributor of more than 60 articles and chapters to academic journals and books, including “The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939,” he serves as the national historian for Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and was the past president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Harris is a recipient of the Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony at Cornell, the Woodson Scholar’s Medallion from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Cook Award for Commitment to Women’s Issues at Cornell.

He decided to take part in the panel to help clear up some misconceptions about Black History Month. Having served as past president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization founded by Carter G. Woodson in 1915, Harris has strong opinions about the designation.

“One of the misconceptions, and I was just reading a piece where they talked about the 60 Minutes interview with Morgan Freeman in which he said he didn’t want a Black History Month, he didn’t want a month devoted to his history,” Harris said. “Basically, it showed a lack of understanding on his part. Carter G. Woodson didn’t think black history should be confined to a week, not was it suggested black history should be confined to a month when it was expanded in 1976.

“The idea behind Negro History Week, and now Black History Month, is to promote a theme each year which the organization recommends each year. The idea is to promote the experience, the accomplishments and the experiences of black people globally,” he added. “It’s done in February to mark the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, but it doesn’t mean we should think about black history only one month a year. Look, you’ve got National Dairy Month, all sorts of months, but that doesn’t suggest people think about milk only one month of the year. That’s one issue I want to be sure people are clear on.”

Harris also stressed that Black History Month isn’t meant to only focus on African American experiences and accomplishments in the U.S., but all over the world.

“Individuals basically see this as confined to the experience of black people in the United States and that’s not the case. In 1926, when Carter G. Woodson first announced Negro History Week, people still had a very jaundiced view of Africa,” he said. “Africa was still being viewed as the so-called dark continent, a place from which came no contribution to world civilization.

“Woodson wanted the U.S., white Americans, African Americans, indeed the world, to understand that black people hadn’t been a negligible factor in world history,” Harris added. “This was to look at achievements, accomplishments and the experiences of black people globally.”

As to whether Black History Month is still needed, he is certain it is.

“From my vantage point, of course it is definitely needed,” Harris said. “I teach African American history and in my class, just last week, a student said black people are basically imitative of whites, without looking at the accomplishments of black people and their contributions to the civilization of the United States and the world.

“W.E.B. DuBois, the great African American historian, asked, ‘Would America have been America without her Negro people?’ If we look at art, music, architecture, cuisine, every area of life in this country, black people have made a mark,” he added. “If we look at the history of world civilization, black people have made a mark.”

Educating all people in the world, especially the younger generations that have not been through the Civil Rights movement and the generation that followed that era, is the basic premise of having Black History Month.

“What Woodson had in mind is that individuals in this country, white and black, would recognize the role black people played in world civilization, they would understand the many myths and misconceptions that had been built up around black people and what they had done, and also wanted to inspire greater accomplishment,” Harris said. “Something I use when I talk to young people is that there are more black cardiologists in the U.S. than there are black members of the National Basketball Association.

“Most young people know LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Carmelo Anthony, but the don’t know the name, Ben Carson, who is one of the world’s top neurosurgeons,” he added. “If you ask them who LeBron James is, they know immediately. If you ask them who Ben Carson is, they look at you blankly.”

As for the question of whether we are living in a post-racial society, Harris is blunt in his response.

“When someone at the Republican National Convention can throw peanuts at a CNN camerawoman and say, ‘That’s how we feed the animals’ – it’s not a post-racial society,” he said. “Barack Obama, himself, in his speech in 2008, in Philadelphia, talked about slavery as being America’s original sin, as something we have not gotten past. He said in that speech, that one election cycle would not solve all the problems we face in this country.”

Harris said basic information shows that the U.S. is not a post-racial society.

“If you look at the data, if you look at the wealth gap in this country, if you look at the education gap, the health gap, the unemployment gap where African Americans are unemployed at twice the rate as the country as a whole, the incarceration gap when African American men are imprisoned at a rate eight times the whole country is,” he said. “If you look at the studies that have been done, recent studies, where a black man and a white man go out with basically the same resume, where the white man has served some prison time, now you would think the black man would get the job, given the same resume and having not been convicted of a crime. Yet, who gets the job offer? The white man does, so we have a long way to go.

“Barack Obama’s election is a step in the right direction, but, as Condoleeza Rice said, ‘America was born with a birth defect,’ and we’re still trying to cure that birth defect,” Harris added. “The residue from the enslavement of a people, the denigration of a people, the segregation of a people, the discrimination of a people, we’re still living with that today.

While the election of Obama to the presidency did represent a major event, Harris said it didn’t end the racism in the country.

“I personally did not think I was see an African American elected as president in my lifetime,” he said. “Barack Obama’s election was a major marker in looking at progress in race relatons in this country, but it wasn’t a magical cure for, as Condoleeza Rice said, this country’s birth defect.”

Harris is hopeful people will understand more clearly just how important Black History Month is after they attend the discussion.

“I hope they will understand Black History Month is needed as much today as when Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week in 1926,” he said. “That Black History Month is something that should appeal to and involve the country as a whole. It’s not just a month for black people, it’s something that is important for this country, especially if we’re going to look to advance competitively within the global society.

“It’s important to recognize that although a great deal of progress has been made – more than 50 percent of the black population is in the middle class’ it’s still not as much as the white population, but it shows we have made progress,” Harris added. “At the same time, though, about 25 percent of the black population is in what we consider the underclass, very much mired in poverty, lacking opportunity in poor schools in segregated neighborhoods.”

Margaret Washington

Washington, who came to Cornell University in 1988, specializes in African American history and culture, African American women and the American South. She has been a fellow at National Endowment for the Humanities and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, and a senior fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities.

She has published numerous articles and books, including the only edited and annotated editions of the “Narrative of Sojourner Truth” and “Sojourner Truth’s America,” which received the Letitia Woods Brown Award for the best publication on African American women from the Association of Black Women Historians, and won the inaugural Darlene Clark Hine Award for the best book in African American women’s and gender history from the Organization of American Historians.

Washington said she believes strongly in Black History Month, especially since discussion has sprung up about it’s relevance in the world in 2013.

“I think, given the fact there’s been some discussion about whether or not we need it, it’s important for people in the profession to espouse the need for it, the continued need for it,” she said. “It’s history. It’s like asking, ‘Why should people teach American history? We are surrounded by American history, with African American history, it has been pretty much submerged. Black History Month is a way for us to remind our nation of the contributions we have made. This is the case not only for people of African descent, but people of Latino descent.

“This is a nation of immigrants. We all came from different parts of the world and we all have made contributions,” Washington added. “As far as African Americans are concerned, we are the only ones who were enslaved, which should be remembered. I definitely don’t think Black History Month is something whose time has passed.”

As for comments made by Freeman regarding not wanting a Black History Month, Washington said the actor’s sentiments were unfortunate.

“I think that’s a mistake. For someone as prominent as he is to say it, I think it’s unfortunate. He also added, which was equally unfortunate, ‘I’ll forget you’re a white man if you forget I’m a black man.’ I don’t see why we should forget who we are,” she said. “I’m comfortable with being black and I don’t want people to forget that I’m black. It’s part of me and my identity, and it doesn’t mean they’re looking at me in a denigrating way.

“We believe, the people who celebrate African American History Month, people who celebrate Latino History Month, we believe in celebrating. I don’t want to give up collard greens, I’m sure my Latino friends don’t want to give up tortillas,” Washington added. “It’s part of our general overall culture, beyond our identity, because it isn’t all about race, it’s about cultural aspects of being an American.”

She noted she’d done some work on a film series, “Africans in America,” with one of the themes noting that it’s not African American history, but American history.

“It’s part of our past,” Washington said. “It’s easy to forget it if you’re not reminded. I’m all in favor of remembering the past, commemorating the past and, in some cases, celebrating the past.”

It’s clear to her, based on incidents that take place every day in the U.S., that this is not a post-racial society.

“If we live in a post-racial society, we wouldn’t have the racial issues we have. The most obvious incident to point to is the Trayvon Martin situation, and there are numerous cases such as that, where this young teenager was targeted because he was black, he was wearing a hoodie and that made him a suspect,” Washington said. “If we lived in a post-racial society, the person who killed him wouldn’t have targeted him. That’s just an obvious example. I think it would be wonderful if we lived in a post-racial society, but we don’t and I don’t think we will in my lifetime.

“And I don’t think having a black president means we’re living in a post-racial society,” she added. “It does speak to the idea that people can come together and vote on someone who is the best person for the job as chief executive of the nation who is black. That’s progress, but progress does not mean it is a post-racial society.”

Washington is hopeful people in attendance will be part of the discussion and let their opinions be known to create a fuller conversation about the topic.

“One of the things I like about Ithaca, in doing things like this, people like to come together and talk about issues affecting them as a community and a larger society,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk going around about the concept of a post-racial society and that this is the 21st century and we don’t need these commemorations, and this is a chance for people to air their feelings.

“It’s a chance for me as a historian of the black experience to share how I feel, why I think it’s important and hopefully change some minds of people who don’t,” Washington added. “That’s why I do it. I like to engage people in our community; it’s how we bring change and how we understand each other.”

Discussions of racial issues can create situations where people may not be as open with their feelings, especially in such a public setting. Nonetheless, Washington thinks the discussion can be a good venue for such dialogue to take place with members of the public in attendance.

“I think so, as long as people do not behave or speak offensively. I think that’s what gatherings like this are supposed to do, to let people talk about their feelings. That doesn’t mean we’re necessarily going to agree, but I think dialogue is extremely important to get at what we think are some of the root causes,” she said. “Race, as an idea, has been with us in this nation for a long time. As long as it is a presence in this society, we need to talk about it.

“I think dialogue and conversation and action are the ways to solve things. There are answers, but I don’t think, as a society, we have pursued many solutions. But, I think they are possible and talking about them is one way to do that,” Washington added. “The thing is, not everybody wants to talk. Usually the people harboring attitudes that they should not are the ones who don’t want to talk. People who are willing to engage, if they do have preconceptions or misconceptions, I will need to change them.”

As is true with many situations, an individual’s personal experience with racial issues creates the backdrop for future perceptions and attitudes.

“People come into situations with a lot of baggage and that baggage becomes very personal. Sometimes it’s the way people are raised, sometimes it’s an experience they had with a member of another group that colors their perspective from then on,” Washington said. “If you think about it, African Americans, Latinos, indigenous people, we have these kind of experiences with whites consistently. I, for example, cannot hold my negative experiences with white people against all white people.

“I think it’s the same case with whites. If a black person steals your purse, does that mean all black people are thieves? If a white person calls me the N-word, does that mean all white feel that way?” she added. “You have to judge content of character on an individual basis, and that’s something we really do have to learn. I think commemorating this other groups – indigenous peoples, Latinos, African Americans – is a good route to opening up society to the positive contributions other people have made. It’s important in terms of mitigating experiences you possibly may have had that were negative.”