The Challenge of Black History

Black History Month poses a number of dilemmas for me.

On the one hand, I resist the notion that black history should be relegated to a single month, rather than being an ongoing pursuit. Of course, this is not the intent of Black History Month, but it is often the effect. More than once, I have encountered a museum or historical society that would, each February, set up an exhibit honoring black history that would be dismantled and mothballed come March, when the usual business of “white” history resumed.

But this is also one reason why I support Black History Month. Without it, many historical societies might not even do that much.

By saying this, I am not leveling a charge of racism, although that may sometimes be a factor. Rather, I believe that the tendency to focus on white history has much to do with the availability of material.

This leads to my second dilemma: Black history is difficult to research because the verifiable records are scarce.

For instance, genealogists use census data as a primary tool for determining lineage. This is fairly easy to do. From 1850 on, the federal census, taken every 10 years, lists the names and ages of each household member. Slaves, however, were enumerated separately, and their names were not recorded. Since slavery in the South ended in 1865, the 1870 census is the first one to record the names of most African-Americans.

Newspaper records don’t provide much more. Journalists writing before the 1960s didn’t seem to find the doings of blacks to be newsworthy unless they pertained directly to matters involving whites. Examining archived copies of The Marietta Daily Journal dating from before 1900, Tom Scott, professor of history at Kennesaw State University, found that blacks of that period were mostly portrayed as subjects of humor or objects of ridicule.

Political and economic disparity perpetuated this. The Civil War left the South financially ruined, and Reconstruction did very little to help, serving mostly to line the pockets of Northern businessmen. The South’s economic recovery was slow, confined to urban areas, and decidedly uneven. With little access to education or capital, Southern blacks seldom had the means for rising to positions of prominence, so they seldom left a mark on the public record.

Yet black history was being lived, and black history was being written. Marginalized by mainstream publications and historians, black history was preserved as folklore, as family history, and as a matter of record within the oldest continuing black institutions–traditionally black churches.

This leads to a third dilemma: While blacks and whites have been living out their histories alongside each other, their recorded histories diverged long ago. There still exists a tendency to write these histories separately, and while heritage preservation is a vital movement in both communities, it has seldom seen them intersect.

This is a source of frustration for Dan Cox, founder of the Marietta Museum of History. “We’ve tried to reach out to the black community, to get them involved here,” he says. His efforts have not been as successful as he would like.

This may be because the two communities view events of the past in a very different light and have been unable to reconcile these views.

The hurt still runs deep. Many African-Americans equate the Old South with an evil regime, akin to Nazi Germany. White Southerners, on the other hand, tend to be proud of their Confederate heritage and want to preserve it in a manner indicative of their pride, something that many African-Americans find unacceptable.

Black History Month itself is a politically charged event, as demonstrated by the . The mind-set behind it sees public history as a platform for social and political change. This mind-set is valid; some would argue it is essential. But blacks and whites in the South often disagree strongly about where and how such change should take place.

In light of this, speaking frankly about the past is a very delicate undertaking, and people understandably have a difficult time keeping emotions in check.

“There are so many things that people still can’t seem to talk about,” says Amy Reed, the museum’s curator.

“I hope that the younger generations will have enough distance on these issues to be able to sit down and talk about them truthfully and objectively,” Reed says. “I really hope so.”

I hope so, too. In the meantime, I hope that we can at least share our histories across racial boundaries and do so in a spirit of mutual respect, honesty and openness. We just might discover that we have more in common than we think.