Black History Month’s lessons should focus more on tying the sins of the past to the ills of the present | Opinion

Black History Month is almost over, which makes this a good time to admit the longtime rite of February isn’t what it used to be. That doesn’t mean we should pull the plug on the annual observance, but it desperately needs a serious reboot.

Instead of focusing our interest on trailblazing people, from Harriet Tubman to Barack Obama, we need to place more emphasis on significant events, from the Hayes-Tilden Compromise to the Pullman Porters’ Strike. And if you don’t know what those are, please look them up.

A survey published in 2018 by the Southern Poverty Law Center showed only 8% of America’s high school seniors knew slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Nearly 70% didn’t know the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t formally end slavery; it took a constitutional amendment to do that.

There’s no reason to believe those statistics will improve amid current efforts by conservative zealots, aided and abetted by what I want to think are manipulated parents, who are burning books and criticizing history lessons that detail the abuses African Americans have suffered by calling it “critical race theory.”

It was historian Carter G. Woodson’s idea in 1926 to celebrate the seven days that included the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12) and Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14). He called it Negro History Week. Initially, only North Carolina, Delaware, West Virginia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., signed on to the idea — and only for their Black schools, but that’s all Woodson wanted.

» READ MORE: It’s time to bring more humanity to Black History Month

Most schools were segregated by law in the South and by tradition in the North, so Woodson’s concern wasn’t white students learning Black history. He wanted Black children growing up with the yoke of inferiority that white people insisted they wear to know why they should take pride in their ancestors.

Woodson later explained in his 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, why America’s bigoted education system didn’t provide a thorough understanding of Black history. “If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself,” he said.

Inspired by the Black Power movement, students at Kent State University organized the first Black History Month in 1970. Six years later, President Gerald Ford made Black History Month part of the nation’s bicentennial celebration.

Formerly all-white schools also began observing Black History Month. But the lessons at both those schools and traditionally Black schools have largely focused on important dates and personalities without paying enough attention to context and relevance.

It’s shameful that nearly 100 years after Negro History Week was first observed, schoolchildren still aren’t being given a more complete understanding of the African American experience.

That could happen if more school districts followed Philadelphia’s lead, which in 2005 began requiring all high school students to take an African American history course to graduate.

» READ MORE: Debate over critical race theory shows why we need Black History Month | Jenice Armstrong

If schools are instead going to continue to limit any focused instruction of Black history to one month, they need to do more with that month than teach children what a laundry list of Black people did to become famous. Schools need to connect the dots between slavery and segregation and the poverty found in too many Black communities today.

Visiting Germany several years ago, my family took a sightseeing trip to the Birkenkopf war memorial in Stuttgart, a city bombed relentlessly by the Allies during World War II. After the war, the people of Stuttgart piled tons of bricks, stones, concrete, and plaster from the bombings on the tallest hill overlooking the city, raising its peak to about 1,500 feet.

Attached to one huge piece of the rubble is a plaque with an inscription that roughly translates as: “This mountain piled up after World War II from the rubble of the city, stands as a memorial to the victims and a warning to the living.” Instead of denying their history, the people of Stuttgart embraced it.

So, too, did people in my hometown, Birmingham, Ala. After decades of cringing at TV film footage and old newspaper photos of snarling police dogs biting civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s, the city’s cultural, educational, religious, and political leaders decided it was better to accept Birmingham’s anguished history than try to deny it. That led to the creation of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum and learning center that opened in 1992.

“For too long, too many of America’s schools have used Black History Month to go through the motions of teaching children about the African American experience.”

For too long, too many of America’s schools have used Black History Month to go through the motions of teaching children about the African American experience. They have been leaving out the context needed to make the connection between all those dead Black people their students are learning about and what is happening in this country today.

Let’s reboot. Let’s shift Black History Month’s focus from people to events. Let’s give students, Black and white, what is typically missing from their American history books. History should never be watered down to make our children feel good. They need thorough lessons in America’s history to help them understand why racism remains this nation’s most persistent illness.

Harold Jackson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a former editorial page editor of The Inquirer.