March's arrival reminds us that another Black History Month has come and gone. For some, those 28 days of February were a revival, a re-excitement of sorts that celebrated the African-American community's rich history. For others, the month went by almost unnoticed. But for me, this past February raised doubt in my mind that celebrating black history for only a month is an effective means of fostering understanding. Dwelling on this, I came to question whether or not Black History Month still serves a purpose in its current form in twenty-first century America.
Wondering what in fact the original purpose of Black History Month was, I did a little research and came to an interesting finding. It actually began as a weeklong celebration in 1926 incorporating both the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The original goals were to help foster a sense of African-American community while incorporating black history into mainstream American history. "What we need is not a history of selected races or nations," Black History Month founder Carter G. Woodson argued, "but the history of the world, void of national bias, race, hate and religious prejudice."
When Negro History Week became Black History Month in 1976, it continued to foster this sense of community and promote an understanding of our American dual past. As Julius Bedford '12, Communications Chair for the Afro-American Society, told me, Black History Month has served "to inform us of our past, to allow us to form a sense of community around our collective past, and to influence our actions in the present."
But while we should recognize that Black History Month has served different purposes to different people at different points in time, we must acknowledge that since 1976, it has always been just a month long. As black history continues to grow richer and deeper, the amount of time most of us devote to studying black history stagnates.
When, I wonder, will we realize that the current relegation of black history to a month is detrimental to its case and cause? When will we realize that awareness could better be raised by different and better means?
Perhaps more importantly, when will we realize that the Month isolates and, in effect, segregates black history? While the current commemoration certainly creates a temporary Black sense of community for the month of February, it reinforces the boundary between black history and "other" American history in the remaining eleven the boundary that the celebration originally sought to destroy. Instead of strengthening the sense of American kinship, the month-long commemoration has bolstered a profound sense of cultural alterity.
In addition to dichotomizing, Black History Month serves as an outdated way to celebrate history. Negro History Week, after all, was created before Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier, before Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and of course before Barack Obama took the oath of office. While we may not have achieved racial equality yet, continuing to celebrate black history for only a month serves to prolong the process. At some point, we must recognize Black History Month, in its current form, takes us away from Woodson's noble goal.
One way we can steer ourselves back on course is to incorporate more black history into our school textbooks. Growing up, the only time I learned about African-American contributions to the country was during Black History Month. And year after year, I would hear the same contributions of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Repetition may pound the point home, but it severely limits the depth and breadth of what we can learn. Some worry that black history could get lost or overlooked among other material in a class's curriculum, but if teachers consistently taught this subject matter, it would afford us a yearlong study of black history as an integral part of American history.
Black history, we all can agree, is so much more profound than just the stories of two and so much more than can be acknowledged in just 28 days. A yearlong study of black history, incorporated into American history, affords us, like Woodson wanted, a history without "national bias, race, hate, and religious prejudice." That, to me, is something worth celebrating.
