Black history should focus on events, not people

I'm old enough to remember when African American History Month was Negro History Week. Other than the duration, not much has changed in how the occasion is observed. Schoolchildren still write essays, draw posters, recite poetry and speeches, and participate in dramatic or musical productions that draw attention to African Americans who made an important contribution to this country.

Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas are among those who in recent years have been added to the pantheon of achievers that includes Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Charles Drew, James Weldon Johnson, Percy Julian, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

You could easily spend a school year studying these individuals, their signature achievements, and the context of other historic events occurring at the same time. In other words, you could incorporate their stories into any otherwise generic American history course and likely achieve the same results. But 90 years after Carter G. Woodson began Negro History Week with that goal in mind, it still hasn't happened.

Howard University history professor Daryl Michael Scott, in an essay written for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, says Woodson looked forward to a time when an annual black history celebration would no longer be necessary. But Woodson, who died in 1950, would likely agree that time has not yet come. Too many history courses today — other than paying the requisite homage to slavery and the forced dispersal of Native Americans — are almost as lily white as they were when I attended segregated schools in Alabama.

In his 1933 book, "The Mis-Education of the Negro," Woodson criticized the American public education system for helping to keep African Americans oppressed. "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions," he said. Woodson wanted African Americans to be proud of their history and proud of themselves. He also believed that if whites learned more about the contributions of African Americans it would engender respect.

Overly emphasizing individual achievements rather than significant events has helped to limit the incorporation of black history into regular history courses. For example, here are two names from black history that most students probably don't know: Hiram Rhodes Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey. The Mississippi legislature in 1870 chose Revels to be a U.S. senator, making him the first black member of Congress. That same year Rainey became the first directly elected member of Congress when South Carolina voters sent him to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Five years after the Civil War, black people were in Congress representing Southern states. How did that happen? And what happened that no blacks were elected to Congress for decades after 1898? Teaching students about the 1877 compromise that made Rutherford B. Hayes president would yield the answers. It would also provide an opportunity to study laws passed to diminish the black vote that sent African Americans to Congress during Reconstruction and compare those statutes with voter-ID laws and other repressive rules being enacted that appear to be aimed at achieving the same result.

There's no good reason to exclude black history from traditional American history courses. But shifting the emphasis from individuals to important events would also provide more opportunities to consider some of the positive roles whites have played in black history. For example, you never see Harry Truman's face on posters depicting important people in black history. But Truman's 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces should rank with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as one of the most significant civil rights achievements in American history. Truman made it possible for African Americans to use the military as a means to advancement that typically didn't exist in private businesses. Without Truman's order, Powell would have never become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If any individual should be recognized during African American History month, it should be Woodson, who believed teaching blacks and whites black history would lead to the mutual respect needed to ensure racial amity.

Six months after his death, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History met at Spelman College in Atlanta. Because her plane was late, a speech by Mary McLeod Bethune, the association's president, was read to the assembly. In it she said Woodson had "left behind the strongly burning torch of his hard-won and ever-increasing knowledge of our past." That torch, placed "high into the crevice between the rock of prejudice and discrimination," she said, had opened "the eyes of many who have scorned or pitied us as a people without a past save that of savagery and slavery."

The need for that torch has not subsided. There are still eyes that need to be opened. But the better way to do that is by incorporating the achievements of black men and women into comprehensive history courses for high school and younger students that put those stories into proper context with how this country evolved into what it has become today.

That would be a real American history course, one that by acknowledging the achievements of African Americans would make weekly or monthly celebrations of black history unnecessary. That was Woodson's goal. I'd love to see it reached in my lifetime.

Harold Jackson is editorial page editor for The Inquirer.