This Black History Month is the most important one since its inception on February 7, 1926, when it was called Negro History Week. Not until 1976 did this Week become a Month.
Carter G. Woodson, historian, author and journalist, launched Negro History Week. Woodson was the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, and is rightly called the “father of Black History.”
Woodson placed people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience. I remember, during my early explorations of Black history on my own, that it dawned on me that something was missing from my formal education. As a descendant of Africans in the Americas, my roots are deeply planted in Southern soil, where my father (and his father, and his father and his father) was born, in the same year Woodson launched Negro History Week. I have traced and dug up those roots from Southern soil tilled with the sweat and brawn of Black folk, and fertilized with black bodies and blood, landing in North Carolina in 1805, where my oldest known ancestor is recorded on the 1880 Census as being born.
Digging up and discovering my “roots” was a revelation, although there are still truths to unearth, e.g., beyond the European geographical areas where 11% of my DNA is situated. In other words, who are these white people missing from my family tree?
In my educational exploration, though “excavation” is a better way to frame it, I learned that I had purposely been miseducated, contrary to the fundamental purpose of education. The first lesson of the Humanities is to “know thyself.” Education begins with self-knowledge, learning about your people, putting that experience at the center of your studies. The second lesson is to learn about others, and how you and your descendants have lived and interacted with those “others.”
Black folk, or the descendants of Africans in America, have been looked at as “the other,” despite the fact that, if we look at 1619 as a starting point of the Black experience in what would be called the Americas by Europeans, have a history in the Americas as long as Europeans, and much longer than the later waves of Europeans fleeing their home countries and coming to America.
“America, America! God shed his grace on thee…”
America has tried but been unable to deny Black folk their grace, but she has denied Black folk the blessings of liberty. Perhaps a greater crime is denying Black folk their history, mythologizing (whitewashing) American history and excluding Black folk and their contributions, and packaging the education of Black folk in what can mildly be called miseducation.
Woodson published The Miseducation of the Negro in 1933, the year my mother was born, a first generation American. (Note that both my maternal grandparents are classified as “Africans” when they arrived at Ellis Island, though they both were born in Barbados. Classifying them as “Africans” is straight from white folks’ Divide and Conquer Playbook. My maternal grandparents were part of the African Diaspora, but they were categorized as Africans, when they came to America to distinguish them from America‘s homegrown Negros). To my knowledge, no one has, but a book could be written and entitled, The Miseducation of White Folk, which continues to this day, evidenced in attacks on Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, and the laughable accusations of some white people of “cancel culture” because they can no longer say and do anything, including killing Black people, without being held accountable. The idea of the melting pot was more about making the “other” conform to aspects of “whiteness,” in mind, body, and soul, than it was stirring up the pot, including the ingredients of all the cultures that have contributed to making America what she is, and no group is more important in making America what she is than the descendants of Africans and their gifts of the spirit, of sweat and brawn, and of story and song.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…
Lyrics from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem.
As we reflect on the lyrics of this song of hope, lest we forget, the importance of Black History Month, every month, and how current political winds have stirred up the tempest of theories of white supremacy and violence and putting everything at stake, even the soul of America, embodied in Black folk!
Black history is American history! Lift every voice and sing this!
Easy Waters 
Brother Eric, right out of the gate on DAY 1, you challenge us to reframe the issue: Black History is American History!!! Indeed it is!! But most white Americans (and sadly, some Black folk) don’t see it that way because they have been…MISEDUCATED. There is NO understanding of America, it’s history, culture, politics, economy, religion, ect. without RACE being at the very center. So yes, I too am waiting on that book, The Miseducation of White Folk. When that book is written and becomes REQUIRED reading in public school curriculum in EVERY state across the country, then we will be able to sing along with James Weldon and his brother J. Rosamand Johnson the true “harmonies of liberty.” Thank you for this thought provoking post. I look forward to the ones to come!!
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Thanks, Brother Mark. I was just reading something about Fox “News,” how it has created a “bubble” around its viewers, enclosing them in a narrative of “untruth.”
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In my travels through corrections I had a young African American come up to in Mohawk and say : “Are you the one they call Greek?” “Yes I am “ , I replied. He then informed me his name and said he was from the Fort Green Projects and that he was also Greek. He told me of his family history, about his father being a Greek born in Greece and that he worked on a ship and met his mother in the United States and that they had married and had him. He also informed me that he went to Greece , his fathers village. I stopped him right there holding my hand up. You see he was instructing me of his linage before his peers also from the same projects all serving time for various low level crimes.
I interjected, when you went to your fathers village how did the people in the village treat you? He said they all welcomed me as one of their own , offered me food, had me in their homes , and asked me of my family and my life. This comment raised a few eyebrows for he was brown skinned and didn’t appear like me.
I said to the group that the Greeks have a social history and all they cared about was you were one of their own, a son of a native son. They cared not for you skin color because in their history they have encountered their own kind every race and color.
America lacks such a social history and the cohesive bond that develops as a result. There has also been a concerted effort to divide people among racial, social, political, and economic lines from the beginning. The Constitution as enlightened a document as it is needed time to reach fruition that truly all men are created equal and given the respect of their human dignity, would foster a more perfect union. This enlightened ideal is still a work in progress.
I also remember pointing out, as I often do a moment of Greek history on the shores of this land. The earliest Greeks to arrive here landed in Saint Augustine Florida. A thousand families were brought here by a British man named Turnbull. They left the Ottoman occupation of Greece and arrived here as indentured servants who labored and died clearing swamp land out and receiving the harsh hands of their twenty year overlords upon them. Most never made it the full twenty years but many of their children did. I point this out because many consider the Greeks part of the colonial expansion akin to the British but that is an incorrect assessment. Lastly I was building with a group of brothers the other night sharing a bit of society and one of the fellas said slavery messed us up. I then listened with libations freely flowing and then stated, in the book All Gods Children it was shown that the physical abuse from colonial masters fostered physical abuse from slaves and descendant’s of slaves upon their children. The trauma became engrained and institutional . Add to that the politics of racism , divide and conquer plans for the people as a whole. The people you see rise to the top that become Gods and are immune to it , they sell their soul to be Gods of the earth like the devil. As it is above so it is below. They make their pacts by exercising their free will and everyone says they are the shit, but in their mind, their subconscious they know where their final destiny will bring them, the true price of fame. The masters will always seek to control and enslave on all levels . Until deliberate stratification is recognized on all levels especially spiritually the glass ceiling will remain and the work in progress of the Republic will continue.
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