Is Black History OUR History?

Recently, the Philly school board decreed that students in the public schools in the City of Brotherly Love would study African-American history. The rednecks and their ilk are in full cry against this crime against White America. In the days when single-cell organisms were emerging from the primordial ooze, your faithful blogger wrote a dissertation that surveyed the history of the black people of Texas from the Great Depression to the Brown decision of 1954. I was bedevilled with a lot of redneck questions back then: "Why are you doing that?" Or, "I didn't know they had a history." Groan. I wrote my mammoth (550+ single-side pages) study when African-American studies was "hot." However, there was another method in my madness. At Texas Technique, where I matriculated as a doctoral student, I was preceded by two other grad students in the pipeline from Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU or Enema U) to Texas Technique. The earlier of the two had been my first college history teacher at Enema U. That pioneer wrote a dissertation that surveyed the history of black Texans following Reconstruction to the turn of the 20th century. The middle man in the series picked up the historical narrative from 1900 to the beginning of the Great Depression. For me, the choice of a dissertation topic was a no-brainer. Pick up where the last guy stopped. The first of the studies was published as a monograph by the LSU Press. The remaining two in the trilogy were never published. Each of us gleaned several articles out of our respective, unpublished dissertations. All of which brings me to the point (at long last) that I — unlike my predecessors at Texas Technique — never passed myself off as a specialist in black or African-American history. If push came to shove, I would describe myself as a Texas historian. The history of African-American people in Texas is the history of Texas. To quote my dissertation abstract:

...Black people in the Lone Star State have not had a progressive history, and while there have been important steps toward a more egalitarian future in Texas, they have been vitiated by tokenism, gradualism, and the persistent racial insensitivity in the attitudes of the majority of white Texans. The traditional American pattern of progress upward through striving, success, and victory was not found in the history of black Texans during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Postwar Era. For the black people of Texas, the glorious age was in the future.

When both U.S. Senators from Texas — Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn — recently refused to join the majority of their colleagues in voting for an apology for federal inaction over lynching black victims for more than 100 years, it is apparent that persistent racial insensitivity among white Texans is alive and well in the 21st century. If this is (fair & balanced) disdain, so be it.


[x Miami Herald]
History courses lack the truths we learn to hide
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Mark was surprised at his own ignorance.

He's a reader who e-mailed me in response to my recent column about lynching. ''If someone had asked me to estimate how many people were lynched between 1865 and 1960,'' he said, ``I think I would have guessed around 75.

``I am struggling with getting my brain around the number 4,700 in your column . . . . Appalled and disgusted doesn't come close to describing my thoughts.

``But astounded as I was to see that number in your column, I am also stunned by my ignorance. . . . Most people would consider me fairly well-informed. I went to college; I read the newspaper. The mainstays of my TV diet are PBS and the History Channel. . . . Yet I was completely ignorant of 4,700 lynchings.''

I thought of Mark when I heard about John Perzel. He is speaker of the Pennsylvania State House and a critic of the Philadelphia School District's recent decision to make African-American history a required course.

Perzel has questioned the idea of singling out this history over that of other groups. The schools, he said, would be better off concentrating on ''basic reading, writing and arithmetic. Once we have them down pat,'' he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, ``I don't care what they teach. . . . [Students] should understand basic American history before we go into African American history.''

Which suggests that not only should there be a required course in African-American history, Perzel should sign up ASAP.

UNIQUE EXPERIENCE

To begin: Can we dispense with this false equivalency between the African-American experience and that of other American ethnic and racial groups?

I hate to play ''my ordeal was worse than yours,'' because I think that demeans all our ancestral passages. But the fact is, nobody -- with the singular exception of the American Indian -- suffered in this country as African Americans did. Our experience here is unique and uniquely telling.

So the notion that a black history class requires a counterbalancing class in Irish American history is but a diversionary lie.

What's most vexing, though, is the inference that black history is not ''basic American history.'' It's an unintelligent idea, probably unintentionally bolstered by Black History Month, which while bringing attention to that which would otherwise be ignored, also fosters the notion of a history separate but unequal.

For the record: America's economy was once balanced on the free labor of African-American people. America's most ruinous war was fought for the freedom of African-American people. America's greatest social movement was to secure citizenship rights for African-American people. America's wars, its culture, its science, its struggle to vindicate its founding promise, have always featured -- often in prominent roles -- African-American people.

PAINFUL PAST

So how is the history of African-American people not ``basic American history?''

The problem is, black history leads us places we don't always want to go, shows us things we don't always want to see, teaches us lessons about the capacity for arrogance and inhumanity that we don't always want to learn.

This is not the American history of Iwo Jima and ''one small step.'' It is a more painful, more complete and truer American history. Small wonder some of us find it easier to turn away. For centuries, we've turned away. Turned away so much till even some black people think they have no history and even an educated man goes about without knowing that at its peak, the rate of lynchings was almost one every two days. These are truths we've learned to hide -- and hide from.

Perzel's objection says a lot about his -- and our -- cowardice and irresolution. Without African-American history, you can never truly understand ``basic American history.''

And maybe that's the point.

Leonard Pitts was born and raised in Southern California. Since 1995, he has lived in Bowie, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D. C., with his wife and five children. Pitts joined The Miami Herald in 1991 as its pop music critic. Since 1994, he has penned a syndicated column of commentary on pop culture, social issues and family life. Leonard Pitts received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

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