Many Afro-American history professors groan when Black History Month comes around. It's not that they don't appreciate the importance of the subject. They do, and for that reason they get impatient with the demand for instant sound bites and the assumption that black history need only be thought about once a year.
Black History Month has its origins in Black History Week, a commemoration begun in 1926 by the prolific African American historian Carter G. Woodson. Racial discrimination and segregation had made black people all but culturally invisible to the general public of that era. When African Americans were featured at all in the mass media or entertainment venues, it was nearly always as clownish stereotypes or criminals. That African Americans had a distinctive history was unknown to most whites and many blacks as well.
Woodson set out to alter this scenario. He was less concerned with changing the minds of whites than with helping blacks understand and appreciate their heritage. An institution builder, Woodson founded the Journal of Negro History, the Negro History Bulletin and the organization now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. Woodson did not want black history to be only a collegiate enterprise and made sure that the public was well represented in the association, which it is to this day.
Black History Week was celebrated in predominantly black public schools and historically black colleges and universities for generations before it hit the mainstream. Woodson chose the week in February that included the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. During its heyday in the 1930s and '40s, programs and activities took place at union halls, public libraries, churches and lodges in African American communities.
The gradual end of legal segregation did not mean automatic incorporation of African American history into the general curriculum. To some blacks and whites, integration meant that blacks were now supposed to \forget"" the past in their efforts to acculturate to life in the mainstream. The idea of an America where everyone was the same seemed to make black history irrelevant.
The 1960s witnessed the influx of more black students into predominantly white colleges and universities than ever before. Their growing numbers coincided with civil rights insurgency and the emergence of the Black Power movement. Woodson's week of appreciation morphed into a month. Students soon realized that the conventional campus did not reflect America's diversity in the established curriculum. As a direct result of student activism, institutions of higher learning all over the country began establishing courses, programs and, in many instances, departments devoted to Afro-American studies.
These moves installed black history in the academy, but outside it often remained a haphazard affair. Marketers have seized on Black History Month as an opportunity to promote schlock of various kinds: Beer companies sell wall posters of African kings and queens; big-name public intellectuals make thousands in honorariums for delivering a few words of wisdom. This has led some people to abandon the whole idea in disgust.
This is a mistake, however. Despite the ways in which it has been exploited, Black History Month provides an opportunity to continue a much-needed national dialogue on race and on the relationship of African Americans to U.S. society. This is all the more important as we venture into the 21st century carrying the racial baggage of the 20th. History is implicated in all of this, from the debate over slavery reparations through the disfranchisement of black people in the last presidential election and the United States' problematic behavior at the 2001 international conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. However Americans resolve these controversies, they hinge on our understanding of the country's past as well as its future. Black History Month provides an opportunity to engage significant issues of our time and constitutes a valuable tool for growth and change.
