We celebrate Black History Month not only as a focused teaching point, not only because the contributions of black Americans have been largely ignored otherwise, and not only because it is important to highlight the great achievement of persons often in the face of great adversity but because knowledge of black history is integral to a complete understanding of our society and its history.
Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier suggested the following passage from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “A Testament to Hope” at the service celebrating his life in Memorial Church last week: “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws. They [Negro demands] are shattering the complacency that allowed a multitude of social evils to accumulate.” King goes on to say that Americans who value our national ideals will embrace these demands because they force America to reexamine its very foundation. He adds that a failure to do so will lead to social catastrophe.
King argues that the black struggle is indeed representative of America’s struggle. One can readily see the many ways in which history of blacks has influenced and led the history of others. The Black Pride movement sparked numerous other Gay, Asian American and Native American Pride campaigns. Civil rights for Blacks were the start of civil rights for all. For instance, the gay rights movement has mimicked many of the tactics pioneered by civil rights activists during the 1960s, such as legal challenges to unfair laws, civil disobedience in the form of “sip-ins” to protest discrimination in bars and the “rights” rhetoric. Before there was the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, Title IX of 1972, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, there was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Furthermore, a discussion of affirmative action programs designed to ameliorate the historical plight of Black Americans would be incomplete without pointing out their great positive effect on women’s opportunity in the academic and corporate spheres. Black History Month itself, initiated by Harvard graduate Carter G. Woodson, who received his doctorate in 1912, has led to similar celebrations of Hispanic, Irish, Jewish, Asian Pacific, German, Italian, Polish and Native American heritages as well as Women’s history.
Here at Harvard, there were very few Asian American, Latino or Native American students before there were black students. Among others, the Black Students Association led the fight for the inclusion of these groups in our academic community. Black students pushed for the creation of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies department, a model for cross-discipline study of ethnicity, and opened the door for other forms of ethnic study.
More fundamentally, a failure to study black history is a failure to study history (or most other subjects) in any meaningful way. In politics, for instance, one cannot understand the rise of the Democratic Party after the Great Depression, the switch of the South from Democrat to Republican in the past 40 years, the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and most recently the ousting of Trent Lott from his party’s leadership without analyzing the impact of Blacks on American politics.
One cannot study patterns of immigration, migration and subsequent economic assimilation without examining the relationships between blacks and other ethnic groups. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark example of judicial activism, an activism that shaped the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade. A thorough understanding of urban and suburban housing patterns and education policy cannot be reached without considering the impact of race. Even American pop culture is influenced by Hip-Hop culture, which is in turn influenced by jazz, the blues and spirituals.
Despite the necessity of studying black Americans when studying science, health-care, economics, law, literature and the arts, many will still question the relevance of black History Month and the programs that have been designed for the Harvard community in the coming weeks. Some critics will claim that focusing on black history during February marginalizes it. But Black History Month does this no more than a holiday such as Veterans’ Day makes us forget during the rest of the year the great contribution that servicemen have made to our country. To the contrary, Black History Month is when all of us pay extra attention to our rich history. Black history is all of our history. This is why we all should engage it; this is why we all should celebrate Black History Month.
Charles M. Moore ’04 is an economics concentrator in Dunster House. He is President of the Black Students Association.
