Black History Month in America

Published : 6 Feb 2010, 04:55 PM
Updated : 6 Feb 2010, 04:55 PM

February is Black History Month in America. In campuses across the nation, African-Americans who risked or gave their lives for freedom, justice and racial equality are remembered and celebrated with films, documentaries and poster-displays. Barack Hussein Obama acknowledged their sacrifices when, after winning the presidential election on November 4, 2008, he said: "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible … who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

At a California college campus that I recently visited, a varied and informative display about Black leaders, activists, inventors, musicians, writers, poets, soldiers, airmen, and sportsmen drew large crowds.

Some names in the display were familiar. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), whose "I Have a Dream" speech in the summer of 1963 in Washington D.C. electrified Americans and gave new life to the Civil Rights Movement. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood … I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Malcolm X (1925-1965) – later to become Al-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz – took a militant attitude toward whites. "We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society … which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary". Later, however, he gave up his hard-line ideology after witnessing the universal brotherhood of mankind while performing the Hajj.

Muhammad Ali (1942 – ) lifted the spirits of African-Americans with his courage and audacity. From "I have seen the light and I am crowing" to "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," Ali spoke truth to power, opening raw wounds in the psyche of America that provoked anger and revulsion but in the end proved cathartic for the nation.

Rosa Park (1913-2005), whose refusal to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. A popular slogan during Obama's run for the presidency was: Rosa Park sat in 1955, Martin Luther King walked in 1963, Barack Obama ran in 2008 that our children might fly.

There are, however, many more African-Americans who are not as well known but whose achievements and sacrifices were as consequential. The Black History Month display educated me on them.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was an outspoken advocate of women's rights and black freedom. During the Civil War, she helped recruit black troops for the Union army.

Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) fought slavery throughout her life and was a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, helping hundreds of slaves escape. She became known as "Moses of her people." The Underground Railroad was neither a railroad nor underground. It was a secret system of routes used by runaway slaves to escape the South before the Civil War. Most routes led into northern states and Canada. It began in the 1700s when Quakers and abolitionists fed, hid and guided runaway slaves to escape slavery. Historians estimate that about 40,000 slaves used it successfully. There were about 4 million slaves in the South in 1860. Levi Coffin was an outspoken white abolitionist who became known as "President of the Underground Railroad." He and his wife opened their home in Indiana to runway slaves and helped them escape to freedom.

Harriet Jacobs grew up as a slave and was repeatedly abused by her owner. Eventually she managed to escape. Her "Incidents in the life of a slave girl," published in 1861, was the first slave narrative written by a black woman.

Frederick Douglas (1818-1895) was a leader in anti-slavery and women's rights movements and was the first black to hold a high rank in the U.S. government.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was a poet who wrote almost exclusively about the moral necessity of equality in America. Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) was a top artist of the Harlem Renaissance.

W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963) was a noted scholar, writer, educator and activist who dedicated his life to improving the social and economic conditions of blacks. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) was a key figure in the civil rights struggle. He played a leading role in destroying the Jim Crow, or the racial caste, system and was the first African-American to serve in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jackie Robinson (1919 – 1972) broke the colour barrier in Major League baseball in 1947 by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In Ralph Ellison's (1914-1994) landmark novel "The Invisible Man," the narrator rejects the expectations of other people — black and white — defiantly refusing to be a cardboard martyr embracing his own individuality.

The Tuskegee airmen were a distinguished group of black combat pilots trained at a segregated base in Tuskegee, Alabama, who served with great distinction in World War II. In 1943 they were stationed in West Africa and flew hundreds of escort missions for allied bombers over North Africa and Europe. Grateful crews called the Tuskegee group "Red-Tail angels" because of red markings on the tails of their aircraft. They earned 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses and 744 air medals. 66 Tuskegee airmen died in aerial combats. Before the Air Force shattered the sound barrier, these airmen shattered the race barrier.

Elizabeth Eckford (1941 – ) was one of nine African-American students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. The students were initially prevented from entering the school by the Arkansas Governor. President Eisenhower responded by sending in Federal troops and made it possible for the students to attend. The image of the fifteen-year-old Eckford, walking alone through a screaming mob in front of Central High School, brought the crisis into the nation's living rooms. It is considered a watershed event in the Civil Rights Movement.

To put the achievements and sacrifices of these (and there are many more) African-Americans in context, it is worth noting that although the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, segregation ran rampant for a hundred more years. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, outlawing racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment. Johnson followed it up with the National Voting Rights Act in 1965, empowering African-Americans to cast ballots without fear. (A movie called The Secret Life of Bees, based on the best-selling novel of the same title by Sue Monk Kidd, gives viewers an idea of lives lost and shattered before African-Americans could actually vote.)

With so much history of tragedy and triumph, where do African-Americans stand today in America?

One year into Barack Obama's presidency, it is clear that their expectations, perhaps extravagant, have not been met. Certainly the United States is not what it used to be but neither is it the "Perfect Union" it aspires to be.

In a speech on the centennial celebration of NAACP in July 0f 2009, Obama acknowledged that "even as our economic crisis batters Americans of all races, African-Americans are out of work more than just about anybody else … We know that even as spiraling health care costs crush families of all races, African-Americans are more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance than just about anybody else. We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a prison."

The grim status quo gets grimmer everyday and President Obama seems incapable of doing anything about it. College-educated black men today are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed than their white college-educated counterparts. While ordinary Americans – blacks and whites – suffer, Wall Street executives and unscrupulous bankers responsible for the financial meltdown are still making out like bandits. The richest 1 percent of Americans now holds close to 40 percent of all the wealth in the nation and exercise power far in excess of their numbers. A true democracy cannot be sustained when a nation is beset by such glaring social and economic inequities.

In his "I Have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King spoke of the "fierce urgency of now" in demanding that America's leaders abide by the constitution so that "all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Forty-seven years later, in a changed America where unequal distribution of power and wealth have become as cruel and unjust as slavery and segregation, the same "fierce urgency of now" must animate its citizens and leaders. Only then can the quest for a more perfect union, the essence of the Black History Month, be crowned with success.