Our History Month

There’s a story about a young southern man who was about to go off to the Confederate Army and whose mother was wishing him well, telling him that the war would be quick and she would see him soon. He asked his mother whether she would really be willing to sacrifice her son rather than give up her slaves. The old Mistress reiterated that the war would not be bad and urged him along his way.

There are those people, including Cynthia Tucker, of the AJC, who think that Black history Month has run its course. I sometimes agree, but then I run into tidbits like the story above and realize that, even though I have spent most of my fifty-two years studying history, I still have a lot to learn. Imagine those who do not seek this knowledge. And then there are the children who have yet to begin their learning journey.

I hear from white people that it is about time that Blacks get over slavery. I generally imagine that those who make such comments need more information about exactly what the condition of Black people was in this country, before the Civil War, in the remainder of the 19th century and then the last hundred years.

Recently I read Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War. It is based on hundreds of interviews, diaries, memoirs and letters from the end of the 19th century. It reveals a world that lies below the surface of what we have been taught, and I include what Blacks have been taught, about the slave years and Reconstruction.

Imagine that you are a man who can no longer impregnate your wife, for whatever reason. Your master determines that your wife still has many child-bearing years left and therefore sells you off and puts a young buck with her, so that she can continue having children.

It was not uncommon for slave women to be made to have twenty children, like so many calves, born to send to market.

My own people, a blend, had their tough histories too. Ethnic cleansing in the Highlands of Scotland that didn’t end until twenty years after the American Civil War, Austrians, known here as “The Salzburgers” ostracized and outcast in the early 18th century and rescued by James Oglethorpe who allowed them to come to Georgia, Geordie coal-miners who emigrated from northern England to the Pennsylvania coal country and later to Alabama mines, finally settling in Florida phosphate. One great-great grandmother was born on a ship from Spain, as her family tried to escape their desperate condition there. With all that history, I am still boiled down to “a white guy,” with no opportunity to learn the details of my ancestors’ history in school. They never told us about the coffin ships from Scotland, about executions of Salzburgers for their religious preferences, no mention of the deadly slave conditions of the coal miners whose pay went to the company store.

So, I say, viva Black History Month. Long live the incentives to learn about history. Let’s not get rid of Black History Month. Let’s add to it. How about just History Month, in which broadcasters, newspapers, magazines and web sites dig deep to help us understand from where we all come, so that we can better plan a path to our common future.