In the beginning there was Jim Crow and Jim Crow is the root of most evil.  Jim Crow made it necessary for Carter Woodson to create Negro History Week.  It’s purpose?  “…a means of undermining the foundation of the idea of black inferiority through popular information grounded in scholarship.”  In other words, to show that black people were as smart as white people and equal contributors to the world in which we live.  And I have no doubt that in 1926, the year in which Mr. Woodson created the week – it was an effective measure.  His original intent was that the week would be so successful that eventually it would not be necessary.  That black history would be so integrated into standard American history.  After all, most black Americans are direct descendants of slaves, slaves that built America and whose history was American as anyone else.  I wonder how he would feel to know that now the “celebration” lasts all month long.

In 1976, frustrated by the insufficiency of one week recognition, Negro History Week was expanded to Black History Month.  Six short years after the civil rights and the black power movements it was an important time to enforce and remind the country of Black America’s influence and impact.  History books had scarcely started covering black history separately and certainly not equally.  But today, as we sit at the beginning of the 82nd anniversary of Black History month, why the hell is black history still segregated from American History?  Why are there so many proponents of Black History Month keeping this tradition around?  Don’t they see how it is ruining the rest of the year? 

It was about three years ago when I started to notice this disturbing trend.  I woke up one morning and I started flipping channels.  I was shocked, because there was all this great programming on. Television shows and films that I hadn’t seen in ages or things that I’d always wanted to see, but never had been able to see.  A marathon of Good Times, All Day airing of Eyes on the Prize, The Color Purple, Boys in the Hood, A Spike Lee Movie Marathon, Oprah, Whoopi, and Dianne Carol specials on Biography, a documentary about slaves – Roots was re-airing later that week…What is going on!  It was like black people had taken over my television!  And then it occurred to me.  It was the last week of February.  The networks had to unload all of their “black” programming before February ended, before Black History Month was over.  If I ever wanted to see any of it, I’d better hurry up and watch it or it would be next February before I saw it again.  And guess when the next time I saw that Spike Lee Movie Marathon was…the next February.  It’s absurd.  

How can networks get away with this? Why can I only see Eyes on the Prize during February, but the rest of the year there is plenty of programming to remind me what criminals and thugs black people are?  Why, according to the Black History month columns and snippets and schlocky web specials, are the only black people that contributed to American History Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Sojourner Truth?  WHY is our history segregated?  Why is our history repetitive and as Negro History Week founder Carter Woodson put it in the 1950s why is our history “shallow and often inaccurate presentations that [do] not advance the public’s knowledge of Negro life and history”?   I’ll tell you why, because we allow it by continuing this archaic ritual of Black History month.  Even Woodson thought it would be something that would be eventually eliminated.

We’re making it too easy. Why aren’t we demanding that when kids in school learn about Paul Revere and the Boston Massacre, they’re also learning about Crispus Attucks.  We need to make sure that when we’re talking about union founders we remember to talk about A Phillip Randolph, the founder of the first Black labor union in the United States.  It isn’t enough to remember Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. We must also remember Septima Poinsette Clark, grandmother of the civil rights movement, a woman responsible for leading the workshops where Rosa Parks learned civil disobedience; NOT as part of some ridiculous commemorative month, on our televisions, in our films, in our books – everyday.  I mean, come on!  There is a black man with a real chance of being Commander and Chief and we still have to set aside a month to get people to include black history into their thinking?!  They will never include it on their own, and so we will have to make them. And it starts by accepting that “black” history IS American history and integrating it into the other eleven months of the year.

Now excuse me, I’m off to catch the end of Do the Right Thing, who knows when I’ll see it again on cable.  Oh that’s right, next year.