Is Black History Month already history? Well, it depends

[The Straight Story]

Is Black History Month already history? Well, it depends

Once again it is Black History Month, a time when Americans of all colors increasingly ask, among other questions, whether we need to have Black History Month.

Or maybe we don't remember well enough to ask. In New York, for example, four years after the state created a commission to promote the teaching of black history in public schools, The New York Times reports that the commission has never met and several positions remain unfilled. Is the commission already history?

Other states like Illinois, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan and Colorado have adopted similar legislation, often by requiring black history be taught with a variety of other ethnic experiences. In fact, that sounds a lot like what black scholar Carter G. Woodson had in mind when he founded "Negro History Week."

"We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history," he said in 1926. "What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race, hate and religious prejudice."


If ever there was a month when African-American history was significant, it is this one. Abraham Lincoln—You remember "the Great Emancipator"?—was born 200 years ago on Feb. 12. A hundred years later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, was born on Lincoln's birthday. A century later we have our first biracial president. What a country.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0215pagefeb15,0,6843545.column