Black History happens 24-7, 365 days
21st February 2022 · 0 Comments
Over the next ten days, seminars, profiles, films, news features, documentaries, and retrospectives of the Black Experience, black culture, and black people will be featured during the remainder of Black History Month 2022. The curtain will fall on the celebration of Black history after February 28.
However, Black people are black year-round and make significant contributions to every aspect of American society daily. Although many remain unsung, the contributions of Black people enrich the nation.
America and African-Americans own a debt of gratitude historian Carter G. Woodson, who pioneered the field of African American studies in the early 20th century. Woodson, the son of enslaved parents who was born on December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, was the first Black graduate of Harvard University and the second African American to earn a Ph.D from Harvard.
Known today as the “Father of Black History,” Woodson’s inspiration for creating an organization to study Black life and history was the 50th anniversary of emancipation in 1915. Woodson noticed the lack of information about Blacks’ lives, accomplishments, contributions, and progress post-slavery.
Woodson joined four others in founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (A.S.N.L.H.) in 1915 to encourage scholars to engage in the intensive study of the Black past, a subject that had long been sorely neglected by academia and in U.S.
Woodson and Jesse E. Moorland founded The Journal of Negro History on January 1, 1916, as a quarterly research journal in 1916. The Journal covered Blacks on a global scale.
Articles published in the first volume included The Negroes of Cincinnati Before the Civil War, The Story of Maria Louise Moore and Fannie M. Richards, The Passing Tradition and the African Civilization, and The Mind of the African Negro as reflected in his Proverbs.
Two studies were included in the Journal’s first volume: What the Negro was thinking during the Eighteenth Century and letters showing the Rise and Progress of the early Negro Churches of Georgia and The West Indies. Additionally, book reviews gave readers current information on Black life and history: Steward’s Haitian Revolution, Cromwell’s The Negro in American History; Ellis’s Negro Culture in West Africa; and Woodson’s The Education of the Negro Before 1861. In 2002, The Journal of Negro History became The Journal of African American History.
In 1926, Woodson established “Negro History Week” during the second week of February. And why that week? Because it encompasses the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass—both men being great American symbols of freedom.
Under Woodson’s pioneering leadership, the Association also created the Negro History Bulletin in 1937, garnering a popular public appeal. In 1976, the celebration of Black life and history became Black History Month.
Today the A.S.A.L.H. continues to publish The Journal and other scholarly works and sells a wide range of books dealing with black life, history, and culture, including Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, with a foreword by Dr. V.P. Franklin. He edited the Journal for nearly 18 years.
Dr. Franklin is a retired college professor who resides in New Orleans. Franklin and Justice & Beyond, a local grassroots social justice organization, will hold a National Reparations Conference, March 12, 2022, at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
The Association coordinates events throughout the year but offers specific themes during Black history month. This year’s Black History Month Festival’s theme is “Black Health and Wellness.”
The Louisiana Weekly is celebrating 97 years of continuous publishing in October 2022. The Black family-owned newspaper continues to document Black history and culture every week. This Black History Month 2022, we are honoring and celebrating Black history makers whose words of wisdom inspire us and encourage us in the never-ending struggle for equality and justice. Some have traveled on; others are still here. Here, then, is wisdom:
If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. When you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions. The mere imparting of information is not education. As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.
– Dr. Carter G. Woodson
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
– Saint Augustine
I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.
– Harriet Tubman
Truth is powerful and it prevails.
– Sojourner Truth
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles that one has overcome.
– Booker T. Washington
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? “But what of Black women?… I most sincerely doubt if any other race of women could have brought its fineness up through so devilish a fire.”
– W.E.B. Du Bois
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. The enemies are not so much from without as from within the race. Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!
– Marcus Garvey
Freedom has never been free.
– Medgar Evers
Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.The girls and women of our race must not be afraid to take hold of business endeavor and, by patient industry, close economy, determined effort and close application to business, wring success out of a number of business opportunities that lie at their very doors. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there, I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there, I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.
– Madam C. J. Walker
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
– James Baldwin
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
– Alice Walker
Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it. I can accept failure; everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
– Michael Jordan
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
– Napoleon Hill
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated. Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe you must become its soul.
– Coretta Scott King
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
– Rosa Parks
If we desire a society of peace, then we cannot achieve such a society through violence. If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society. If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.
– Bayard Rustin
We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.
– Malcolm X
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
– Jimi Hendrix
We’re not a racist organization, because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism, and we know that racism is just – it’s a byproduct of capitalism.
– Fred Hampton
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
– Nelson Mandela
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
– Desmond Tutu
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain. If you’re going to live, leave a legacy, make a mark on the world that can’t be erased.
– Maya Angelou
The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.
– Ruby Bridges
Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continue.
– Harry Belafonte
This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.
– Amanda Gorman
This article originally published in the February 21, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
