Why We Celebrate Black History Month

America is like a quilt tightly woven of so many cultures that stretch from borders to homes. Within these threads? Great figures who upheld the very meaning of American freedom. Former president Gerald Ford best described this month as, “...the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” 

As a symbol of power, Harriet Tubman was a Black woman who ran the Underground Railroad to help enslaved people escape to freedom. She had once said, “I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had the right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.” Powerful words for even the modern day, especially when considering Tubman passed away only in 1913. 

This is one of the many reasons why this month is still celebrated. Reflecting on the timescale, it was only seventy years ago when Rosa Parks had refused to give her bus seat up to a white man. Many people from Parks’ time are still alive today. 

Similarly, many people are still alive to describe what happened on Bloody Sunday: 600 civil rights marchers walked from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, protesting Black suppression. In response? Police blocked and brutally attacked innocent humans. 

Black History Month exists not only to honor great accomplishments, but the things our fellow man had to persevere to be recognized as human. The very issues that America still runs into today. While former president Ford’s words were powerful, so, too, are an even more powerful leader’s: Booker T. Washington in saying, “In all things purely social we [Blacks and whites] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” This was not a call for division, but an acknowledgment of social inequality and the reality of racial injustice, and of the brutality other humans had to face to exist in this country. 

Black History Month is a reminder of how hard people fought only because the color of their skin was different from the majority. It is a memorial to women like Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, to men like Booker T. Washington, to the people whose names this country never got to learn because it was too busy burning them from the history books. 

And just as Booker T. Washington called upon? Black History Month is not just about remembering the past; it is about deciding what kind of future we are willing to build together. 

 

References: 

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/harriet-tubman 

https://www.history.com/articles/civil-rights-movement-timeline 

https://www.history.com/articles/black-history-month 

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/prologue.html