Alice Walker:
I did not always appreciate Black History Month. In fact, that it attempted to compress all of black history into a single month, seemed the ultimate segregation. I felt this way about Mother’s Day and Indigenous People’s Day, too, among others. However, now I see Black History Month as an opportunity to, in a sense, double down on our efforts to learn who we as Americans actually are, shorn of the myths too many have spun about us.
In this regard, here is a story I have never told (I think): When I was a sophomore at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, I was blessed to have two of the greatest teachers of history perhaps in the world: Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn. Yes, that Howard Zinn: author of A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. One assignment, I don’t recall from which teacher, was to read W.E.B. DuBois’ BLACK RECONSTRUCTION. The failure of Southern reconstruction after the Civil War had been laid on newly liberated black people, who had been formerly enslaved. All the newspapers and politicians (white of course) colluded in this deception. Countering this, DuBois wrote about what had happened from a principled and highly documented black perspective.
His book about what really happened to the South after the Civil War was not to be found in all of Atlanta. I was finally permitted to see the one copy that remained, battered and torn, and under glass, in the rare books room at my school.
Somehow my teachers managed to make copies of this great book and give them to our class. Reading it changed the way I saw the North, the South, electoral politics, rich and poor people, and the power of the media to shape people’s thinking and their lives.
…
Who do you believe?
The liar, racist who paint himself/herself as superior, who shoots first before anything, who never say sorry, who thinks he/she has the right to decide who you are?
