When historian Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week in 1926, African Americans were just a blip in the pages of official American history.
The accomplishments of such people as Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman were known by few whites - and few blacks. The story of America was a simple recounting of how white Europeans came to the New World and overcame war, hardship and Indians to create a freedom-loving country. Woodson wanted the full story known.
But that was nearly 70 years and a civil-rights movement ago - before Negro History Week became Black History Month, before angry students took over
college buildings demanding the creation of black-studies courses, before raised fists and "black pride," before Afrocentrism and Roots.
Today the country stands near the end of a century in which African Americans have overcome adversity to achieve prominence in the judiciary and the military, in education and politics, in entertainment and the arts. So as schools and cultural institutions across the country prepare again to celebrate February as Black History Month, a question arises:
Is this month still necessary?
"I don't think there's any question about the necessity for it," said
Judith Thomas, head of the education department at Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Chester County.
Thomas points to the frightening and maddening host of problems facing the black community: African Americans are disproportionately represented in the
criminal justice system and among the homeless. Infant mortality is twice as high among black babies as among white ones. Homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men.
At a time when blacks are suffering so disproportionately, Thomas said, remembering, acknowledging and celebrating the individual and collective accomplishments of African Americans is crucial.
"We don't know where we stand," she said. "That's why so many African American men and women you find on drugs, in the streets and homeless.
"They don't know who they are and where they came from. . . . If you don't know that, it's very difficult for you to project where you need to go."
She said that African American history still was not fully infused into the basic curriculum of most public or private schools.
"In universities, it's an elective for you to take, which means the ones who take it are already miles beyond everyone else," she said. "The ones who really need it don't get it."
