“Why do we need a Black History Month?”
This is a question that is asked every February. This is a question that should not be asked as frequently as it is.
Here is the simple answer. Black History Month teaches students from all races and backgrounds about the contributions of African Americans that have been forgotten and neglected throughout U.S. history. Black History Month also serves the purpose of changing the discussion about Black history from neracism and slavery to stories that highlight Black leaders and their accomplishments. In school, they only tell us the negative side of Black history, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and Martin Luther King’s speech and assassination.
Even now, history teachers gloss over those events and do not truly paint the picture of how detrimental they were to the Black community. What they don’t tell us are the positive sides of Black history, such as the Harlem renaissance, Black Wall Street, the Tuskegee Airmen and Brown V. Board of Education. We learn so much about George Washington, the first president, but hear nothing about George Washington Carver, a black agricultural scientist who was the brain behind the invention of peanut butter (everyone loves peanut butter!). It makes you wonder why these things are rarely told when talking about history.
Black history is U.S. history. Thanks to Black History Month, we get to hear these stories and many more.
This month is personally very important to me. Ask any African American student what they learned in school about their people and they’ll tell you all the aforementioned negative aspects and more. All we heard growing up was that our ancestors were slaves and were segregated, but rarely did we hear about our accomplishments or hear about people who looked like us in positions of power.
This has a strong psychological impact on young black students. When all you see is your people being shown negatively, or only hear your people on the television as entertainers (athletes, music artists, etc.), it creates a mindset that if you’re not an entertainer, then there is no hope for your future and that you have no value. We did not learn about our people doing anything else.
Black History Month helps solve this problem, which is why it is important to me, and why it should be important to everyone. It creates a sense of hope, it lets us know that we are more than entertainers and reminds us that we were more than slaves. We are doctors, scientists, inventors, psychologists, pilots, entrepreneurs and business owners. We were even kings and queens!