Black History and the Struggle for Justice

What Is Black History?

I want to suggest that it is useful to think of Black history as having four aspects.

(Here, I would like to add a cautionary note. Vindicationist history is important, but there is a danger. Sometimes, this mode of Black nationalist history simply becomes a reverse discourse—a mirror image of the elitist and racist discourse that it endeavors to oppose. For example, it may replace a history of European kings and tyrants with one that sings the praises of African kings and tyrants. This kind of history, which implicitly suggests that the lives and struggles of ordinary people are not worthy of recognition and study, should be avoided—even when it makes us Black people feel good.)

There is a tendency among some people to see BHM as an opportunity to recognize the achievements of “important people” or “Black heroes”—and/or to recall the glories of ancient African kingdoms. I understand why some may wish to do this. But I want to remind you that this is an elitist mode of history—one that even most mainstream historians would now reject.

It is important to produce histories of Black people who are properly inclusive. When considering plantation slavery, for example, it is important not simply to foreground the slave leaders and insurrectionists but to remember the millions of ordinary slaves (like my ancestors on the Jordan plantation in East Texas), who worked from sun up to sun down on the sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations. In my view, the most valuable Black history is also social history—history that takes seriously the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Black history has parallels with other movements in the field of history—in particular, it has an affinity with people’s history and women’s history. Like women’s history and people’s history, Black history sees itself as involved in a struggle to insure that marginalized voices and experiences are no longer neglected but brought to the fore. People’s history is often referred to as “history from below”: Black history is also history from below and from the margins. It is, therefore, unashamedly, a mode of cultural–political intervention.

(We might also note that, for some people, Black history is the history of all oppressed peoples of color—not simply the history of peoples of African descent.)

As some of you may know, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, was one of the leaders of the négritude movement—a Black nationalist literary and political awakening that flourished in Francophone nations of West Africa and the Caribbean in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Seventy-four years ago, in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, a central text of the négritude movement, Césaire (1939/2013) wrote,

My mouth will be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those that break down in the prison holes of despair. (p. 30)

In 1883, long before the French Caribbean poet penned that powerful passage, the pioneer African American historian George Washington Williams (1883) poignantly wrote,

I have tracked my bleeding countrymen through the widely scattered documents of American history. I have listened to their groans, their clanking chains and melting prayers until the woes of a race and the agonies of centuries seem to crowd upon my soul as a bitter reality. Many pages of this history have been blistered with my tears. (p. iii)

Many scholars who research, write, and speak about Black history seek, like the négritude poet, to be the mouthpiece for those whose voices are never heard, whose experiences and memories are never recognized.

Some of us wish to go further—not to be the mouthpiece for silenced Others but to enable their diverse, polyphonic voices to speak for themselves. And we recognize that, when we do this, the pages of the histories that we produce may contain both their and our own tears.

Doing Black history, in a rigorous, honest way may lead us to sorrow and tears—at least as much as it leads us to celebration. But that is no reason to shirk away from the task.

Origins of BHM

On December 19, 1875, just 10 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, Carter G. Woodson was born in Buckingham County, Virginia. His father, James Henry Woodson, and his mother, Anna Eliza Riddle, were former slaves. Neither could read nor write. Their son, nonetheless, would earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and would also receive a PhD in history from Harvard University in 1912.

Carter G. Woodson is often referred to as “The Father of Black History.” He deserves the title. In 1915, with like-minded colleagues, he formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; and in 1916, he founded the Journal of Negro History—both of which, incidentally, still exist. A decade later, in 1926, Dr. Woodson founded Negro History Week, which was celebrated in February.

Why February? Because February 14 was the birthday of Frederick Douglass, the charismatic African American leader of the 19th century who freed himself from the shackles of slavery and tirelessly campaigned for the freedom of others; and February 12 was the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the American president who, in 1865, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which emancipated African American slaves from legal bondage.

For decades, from the 1920s, Black History Week was celebrated in mid-February. Sometime in the early 1970s, increasingly across the United States, the week became a month.

Why? Because “Black Militants,” like me, in universities and other educational institutions throughout the United States began to ask the question: Why should we only have 1 week out of the year to celebrate our history and culture? The logic of our argument at the time was this: Given that White people had all year, every year, to promote and celebrate their history, why should we be ghettoized to a week? We rejected the idea of being confined to a week; we insisted on a month—and began organizing speeches, symposia, performances, exhibitions, and so on, throughout the month of February.

So, that is the American side of the story. The British story is related.

Sometime in the 1980s, inspired by their brothers and sisters in the States, people of Caribbean descent in the United Kingdom—and also in the West Indies—began celebrating BHM as well. (The first official celebration occurred in the United Kingdom in 1987.) February was rejected because that month did not have a particular meaning for Black people from the Caribbean.

But October did. On October 11, 1865, Paul Bogle led 200 to 300 armed Black men and women into the town of Morant Bay in East Jamaica. They came to confront the power of the White planter class—and they hoped to ignite a rebellion throughout the island. By the end of the day, the rebels had overwhelmed the White militia in Morant Bay and assumed control of the town. In the days that followed, the rebellion continued in the Jamaican countryside, involving perhaps 2,000 armed rebels. Ultimately, the rebellion failed: It was ruthlessly suppressed by troops loyal to Governor Edward Eyre. According to official figures, 439 Blacks were killed in the initial repression and 354 were executed after so-called “trials.” Paul Bogle, the leader of the revolt, was one of those hanged.

To celebrate BHM in October is, at least in some small way, to pay tribute to a group of Caribbean people of African descent, oppressed in the land of their birth, who dared to take up arms in pursuit of freedom. To celebrate BHM in October is, hopefully, to recall that our ancestors struggled and died for freedom that we enjoy today.

Let us never forget.

Why Does Black History Matter?

My preceding comments have already partially addressed this question. Here, in brief, I want to offer three cogent reasons why Black history matters:

I want to end this brief discussion of why Black history matters by reading a sentence from a little book called The Souls of Black Folk, which was published in 1903. The Souls of Black Folk has come to be regarded, deservedly, as one of the seminal texts on race and culture in the African diaspora. In it, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois (1903/1989), the eminent African American scholar (who had received his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1895 with a PhD thesis on the suppression of the trans-Atlantic slave trade) wrote,

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line. (p. 1)

That passage, written by DuBois at the dawn of the 20th century, proved to be extraordinarily prophetic. The challenge for those of us now living at the beginning of the 21st century is to struggle to ensure that issues of race, ethnicity, and culture do not continue to be key lines of division between people.

Our challenge is that posed by Dr. Martin Luther King who said that we must bring about a world where people are no longer judged by the color of their skin—or, we might now add, by the nature of their culture or religion—but by the content of their character. Through BHM activities in Wales, we seek, in our own small way, to realize Dr. King’s dream.

Thank you.