After the American Revolution, most of the defining moments in American history involve or revolve around Black people.  Black folk were even involved in the American Revolution, fighting on both sides – the British promised Africans and the descendants of Africans their freedom if they fought with the British, and those who fought with the British were in fact granted their freedom and relocated to Canada.  Crispus Attucks, a Black man, is traditionally regarded as the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and thus the first American killed in the American Revolution.  In part, this is why I have written that Black history is American history, and that there is no American history without Black history.

Black history in America begins long before the American Revolution, when in 1619 Africans were forcibly brought to what we now call the United States of America.  The African presence in America would come to define America in ways that we need to acknowledge, unto this present age.

No age defined America more than the 1960s, called the Decisive Decade by Samuel Yette, the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek (1968).  The Decisive Decade brings us to the Black Arts Era (1960-1975).  This era moves me in ways unlike the Harlem Renaissance (1919-1940), perhaps because I was born at the very beginning of the 1960s.

The 1960s was unlike any period in American history: the Reconstruction Years (1865-1877); the Roaring Twenties (1920-1929); the Harlem Renaissance; and the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968).  Although all of the above-mentioned eras held promise, the 1960s held the greatest promise and possibility for changing the warp and woof of America.  Note that leaders, both white (JFK and RFK), but mostly Black (MLK, Malcolm X and many others), were assassinated in the 1960s.  In no other Decade were more American leaders assassinated.  Without going down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, it seems clear that reactionary white forces in America did not appreciate the possibilities of Camelot and made it myth with JFK’s assassination, and if there were any thoughts that his brother would take up Excalibur, he, too, was assassinated.  In this, the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK and RFK are connected.  Lincoln, the “Great Friend of the Negro,” was assassinated during America’s Civil War, which revolved around the issue of slavery.  JFK and RFK, not necessarily “great friends of the Negro,” found themselves in a Decade in which America could not ignore her Black citizens, because they took to the streets (in the Civil Rights War) while the world watched live in black-and-white on their TVs the heights of American hypocrisy, proclaiming herself the citadel of democracy and freedom to the world when democracy and freedom did not exist for Black citizens in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  During Camelot, affirmative steps were taken toward the illusive “perfect Union.”  With the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, LBJ tried to make America great, with the Great Society, long before Trump could even imagine occupying the Oval Office.  Trump, the quintessential Ugly American, has revealed how morally bankrupt American politics have become.  And there are lessons here if we would just pause and take a timeout.

…the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists.  A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms.

Larry Neal

There was a time when America could boast that her leaders were among “the best and the brightest” – operating within the Decisive Decade – that they were looking to rise to meet the moment, to be better, to live up to her ideals.  This is especially true of JFK, the youngest president in American history.

This Black History Month, embrace Black history, that is, American history.  Read the literature of the Black Arts Movement to see how Black artists forged an aesthetics that spoke to Black people, that put Black people at the center of the universe.  This aesthetics, though, was not meant to put white people down, only to uplift Black people.  There is something absolutely empowering for all Americans in both of these revolutions, the American Revolution, and the Black Arts Cultural Revolution.