There I was in third grade onstage in front of the whole school, wearing a tank top, sweatpants and boxing gloves. I don’t remember my speech now, but a few weeks before this day, I recorded it on a boombox radio and played it on loop to help me memorize it. I threw a few punches for emphasis at the end of the speech.
I was Muhammad Ali.
A year before, I was on the same stage in my church suit, holding a gavel explaining how I became the first Black man on the Supreme Court.
I was Thurgood Marshall.
This was a yearly ritual at Bunker Hill Elementary School during Black History Month. Students didn’t just hear about the heroics of Black people that looked like them, we got to be them. But this was back in the 1980s when all my teachers looked like members of my family. Back when America finally cleared its eyes from the teargas in the 60s and 70s. Before white supremacists started carrying tiki torches, shouting, “You will not replace us.”
There is currently an assault on the history of America by domestic terrorists who cannot stand the awful truth that the forefathers of this country stole, beat, sold, raped and killed Black people. There is a collective cognitive dissonance in the retelling of America’s past by some white people who no longer want to be bound to the history of this country.
Those folks have bastardized “critical race theory” to the point that the initial meaning is lost. CRT was intended to look at how systemic racism didn’t just hold Black people back, it kept them in the starting blocks. And this isn’t a conspiracy-theory-laced rant on malt liquor companies’ targeting of Black neighborhoods (although that was part of it, too), CRT examines how every aspect of Black life, from the air that we breathe, to the way that we bank, to the neighborhoods we live in, has been directly affected by racism.
This isn’t debatable.
There have been countless studies, federal bills and more studies that prove it so. But that doesn’t matter because the attempts to include race and, subsequently, the effects of systemic racism in the discussion of American history crossed a tenet of white Americana: “Whatever you do, don’t offend white supremacists.”
So, we come here today to send Black History Month off into the great by and by. Because although Black History Month isn’t dead, it’s on its last leg. But whatever Black History Month does, it’d better not take a knee.
So let’s imagine, if we will, that this is the last Black History Month; what do we lose?
We lose everything.
We’d lose all the work that Carter G. Woodson started in 1926 when Negro History Week — which would later become Black History Month — was created. And I know all the jokes around BHM being recognized in the shortest month of the year, but Woodson chose February because it held the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln (Feb.12) and Frederick Douglass (Feb.14), two of the pillars in the abolitionist movement.
“I’d only expect America to continue to drink from the well of Black invention without ever acknowledging the person behind it.”
We’d lose Crispus Attucks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Chisholm and Sojourner Truth, names that are only given their flowers during this time, names that I don’t believe would be brought up without a month of celebration behind the work they did. We’d lose the inventions of George Crum. Oh, you don’t know about George Crum? Well, he only invented the potato chip. We lose ice cream and popsicles. While Frederick McKinley Jones didn’t create the tasty treats, he is responsible for the refrigerated air cooling units in the trucks that carry them. We’d lose Madam C.J. Walker and all her contributions to Black hair.
Because I don’t trust America to care enough about these people to give them their just due in the context of American history; I’d only expect America to continue to drink from the well of Black invention without ever acknowledging the person behind it. See, America has this thing of taking Black excellence and cozying it up next to whiteness to make it more palatable. Granville T. Woods would hold more than 50 patents and become the first Black mechanical and electrical engineer. His work would revolutionize the train industry, and in 1885, he would patent a device called “telegraphony,” which would allow users to send voice and telegraph messages through Morse code. Woods even had a nickname given to him by people who thought he was a genius — they called him “Black Edison.” Yes, that’s right, he was the Black version of Thomas Edison. Edison could’ve had a nickname as well. He could’ve been called “White Latimer,” considering the inventor received huge amounts of help from his Black apprentice, Lewis Latimer. But America would never have it this way.
But that’s the point of Black History Month; to unearth these stories so that generations of children are shown that their legacy is rooted in creation. So that can see that they are also a part of the collective American dream, and their lineage is woven into the fabric of America. I wouldn’t trust these stories in the hands of teachers without a designated month, but who are we kidding?
As it stands, Black voting rights are currently under attack, Colin Kaepernick is still without an NFL home for protesting the killing of unarmed Black men, women and children by police (which is still happening), and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) doesn’t believe that Black people are Americans, too.
And I know that the commercialization of Black History Month and the lip service paid by companies that barely employ, spend nominal advertising dollars with, or even care for Black people (looking at you, Facebook) feels patronizing, but that’s what happens when a well-meaning month gets lampooned by corporations. But that is to be expected; corporations are going to corporate.
So we might have to say goodbye to the one month that reminds the rest of America of all of the contributions Black people made to this country despite being treated as interlopers. The one month that asked America to look at what grew from the seeds the coutry gave up on. It was the one month that ensured that schools with no intention to teach Black history had to hang up the wrinkled poster of Martin Luther King Jr. and perform his “I have a dream” speech. And it matters. Black children need to see themselves in people who came before them. While I grew up in Chocolate City — where almost all of my teachers were Black until I went off to college — most Black kids can spend their entire school years without a Black teacher.
Why is that important? Well, a study found that Black students who have at least one Black teacher — just one — are more likely to go to college.
But remember, I didn’t say that I played Thurgood Marshall and Muhammad Ali — I said I was Thurgood Marshall and Muhammad Ali, and that matters. It has to.
Because for Black children to be someone, they need to see someone. They need to know their history matters, even if the CRT fights put Black History Month forever in jeopardy.