Not Thinking Straight
Friday,
March 18, 2005
Volume 33,
Issue 11
Sat, Nov 07, 2009
IN THE SGN
SECTION ONE
Front Page
MORE/ALL
SECTION ONE
STORIES
SECTION TW0
Arts & Entertainment
by Madelyn Arnold |
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| Ten-Percent of Black History Month | ||
| SMALL VICTORY - BIG WAR
February is Black History Month. Im ashamed to report that only a few years ago it took a great deal of effort to get a Martin Luther King day, and as for Black History Month ! Every now and then I hear some individual express, like: theres no National White Month, or Caucasian History Month and I manage, um, generally the first 12 years of schooling teach Caucasian History, and that all the other months are white, and that A country which manages to have a National Pickle Week (May 16-23 mark your calendars) ought to be able to devote a month to a large segment of its population. Particularly a segment it has wronged. Thanks to the push for Black History, most Americans at least know the names Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; most have heard of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Still, some dont know there is history they werent taught it was tradition until late that little Americans learn that Crispus Attucks was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre, but not that he was an escaped slave who had become a sailor. AN ALL-AMERICAN GIRL I cannot trace my lineage to John Brown, that man of whom I first heard as a small child in one of our loud, bloody hymns. I was probably in the first grade when I learned to sing John Browns body lies a-mouldring in the grave/his truth is marching on.... I probably asked my parents who John Brown was, and whatever they said, I received a confused impression of a fiery-eyed saint who, with the help of Harriet Beecher Stowe, began and won the Civil War, freeing millions of people from a horror known as slavery. Those slaves were supposed to be dark-colored people who, perhaps because of their suffering, wore a patina of saintliness. I was in awe of their suffering, and I was in awe of John Brown, dead on the gallows at Harpers Ferry. The old hat man (whom I understood later was a minister) whose giant truck patch adjoined our backyard did not strike me as a saint, although he was certainly Black, and the quiet children in the back of our classrooms didnt seem particularly saintly, but there you are. It is hard to apply standards appropriate to Heroes to the people one sees every day. I should probably add that I was in grade school about the time of Brown v. Board of Education (integrating our schools, at least in spirit). Perhaps 20 percent of our county was black, though I did not talk to any black person (except one) until I was in junior high. I saw them every day in school, at the store, on the street; our milk man was black and I think one of our postmen was too, but there was only one Afro-American human being I remember addressing when I was very young. And it left a vivid impression. I very much wanted to be thought a polite child, a good child; so when my father introduced me to an elderly acquaintance, he was dumbstruck at my: good morning, Uncle. The man lost it a furious stranger, screaming in my face, raging among other things that he was no uncle of mine soon my father was screaming I had insulted his friend (somehow) with slavery and confederacy and the hated Civil War. I was terrified. I was all of four years old. My grandmother had taught me Aunt and Uncle were polite. MY SHORTENED LIFE WITH THE NAACP Time has a way of twisting us toward facts. My father was concerned with the Civil Rights efforts of the fifties and sixties; throughout Junior and Senior high school (Selma, voter registration, the march on Washington) I was vocal (no doubt, ineffectually) about the movement. I knew and counted as friends black kids who were with me in the A-track. I joined the NAACP as soon as I could. We leafleted and argued (in very safe places....) And one day a national speaker came to discuss something regarded as very serious: people like me. White people? No. Certainly not. If you are homosexual. If you are a communist, or even if your neighbors think you are a homosexual or a communist, please leave the NAACP. We are already too vulnerable, and we cant afford to have known perverts and communists our enemies can point to. |
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QUOTE/UNQUOTE |
