Gregory Freeman: Setting Apart A People's Story Isn't Doing Much For Inclusion, P-D 2/3/2000

Headline: SETTING APART A PEOPLE'S STORY ISN'T DOING MUCH FOR INCLUSION
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Thu., Feb. 3, 2000
Section: METRO, Page: B1, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

Black History Month
  It's celebration time again.
  Time to celebrate Black History Month. Time for television to air its dramas that feature black folks. Time to pull out the posters of Martin Luther King Jr. Time to recognize the contributions that blacks have made to America.
  Until March 1. Then we'll pack everything away until next year.

This isn't to knock Black History Month. The celebration does exactly what it was designed to do when it was established as Negro History Week in 1926: bring to life that history that had been ignored.

But does history really come in colors?
If so, where do you put someone like Eleanor Roosevelt, who outraged the South by supporting black schools and who was great friends with Mary McLeod Bethune, the black educator? In 1939, the first lady delivered a blow against segregation by resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution after it refused to allow black singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington.
Or where do you put someone like Alton's Elijah Lovejoy? Lovejoy was a white newspaper publisher who railed against slavery before the Civil War. His printing press was seized and destroyed by angry white men three times. He was shot five times and died defending his fourth press.

Do these folks and others fall into the black history box or the American history box?
   Does it matter? It shouldn't.
   In fact, the idea of marginalizing either Roosevelt or Lovejoy as only subjects to be studied during Black History Month is ridiculous. One could make a credible argument that their accomplishments are part of black history.
   But a greater argument could be made that their achievements are more a part of American history.
   It points out the problem with the idea that the accomplishments of blacks should be recognized only during February.

In many ways, Black History Month is a reminder of how far we have not come.
   We continue to put American history in one basket and black history in another.
   But by doing so, we may inadvertently contribute to a segregated society, if only by segregating black history in the mind of the public.
   It says to blacks and nonblacks alike that this group's achievements are not part of American history. Instead, blacks are part of that other group, the one whose achievements we note once a year.

All of this is made necessary, of course, because black history is not included -- except marginally -- in most of today's history books.
Despite all the clamor made over this issue in the last 35 years, very little has changed on the history front.
Textbooks aren't nearly as inclusive as they should be. Students are more likely to know about Ralph Kramden than Ralph Bunche (the former U.S. representative to the United Nations who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1950); about John F. Kennedy Jr. than John Russwurm (co-founder of Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States).

Over the years, we have taken a segregationist approach to history, an approach that's strained at best.
   When whites show up so often in black history, and blacks make up such an integral part of American history, the idea of trying to separate those histories seems foolish. Our lives in this country are too intertwined to try to separate. The influence each has had on the other points out the folly of that idea.
   If we could just learn to include the contributions of all Americans -- regardless of color -- as part of our overall American history, we wouldn't need Black History Month.
   It would go the way of the old "Brotherhood Week" or, as I dubbed it, "Adopt-A-Negro" week.

It would be beneficial to us all if Black History Month were to vanish, replaced by an incorporation of black history into the overall history of this nation.
Now that would be worth celebrating.

Daniel Schesch - Webweaver

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