By accident of birth, I'm a product of the 1960's. I read, studied, and observed the social and racial movements of my day. I experienced the 1990's, so I know about being PC -- politically correct -- and have been bombarded about being a white male in a white-male society.
Black History Month became a part of the social landscape during my lifetime, even though C. G. Woodson organized the first Negro History Week in February, 1926. So I must be informed and sensitive about today's key issues, especially race. Right? Not really.
It's funny, given all the books I read back in the late 60's and early '70's, such as Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and others whose titles I can't recall, I thought I fully appreciated how blacks contributed to our history. Hah! Not even close.
I don't lack for much and have been quite successful. I've pulled myself out of a lower-middle class socioeconomic strata to an upper middle-class one. My family didn't own a car until I was 10 years old and that was only because my father took a new job in Pennsylvania and he, my mother, and I didn't think we could make the trek from Connecticut with all our household goods strapped on our bikes. But I did lack for an adequate knowledge of blacks in the United States. This didn’t become apparent until I read Lerone Bennett, Jr.'s Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. This work was published in 1962 and deals comprehensively with the role of blacks in this country ever since 20 blacks arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in August, 1619, 244 years before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Bennett said that the European slave trade started in 1444 and continued for more than 400 years. That explains it. I heard that 400 year figure before, but couldn't imagine from whence it cometh. I assumed that it was exaggeration by the black community designed to heighten white guilt. During these 400 years, some 40 million Africans were taken from their homes and half were brought to the New World.
But dare I say slavery is passe. At least, to those of us who didn't remember or practice it or who didn't bear any responsibility for its creation, maintenance, or ultimate abolition. Besides, there’s much more to black history in this country than slavery. Slavery can almost be viewed as small potatoes contrasted to the resiliency of the Negro spirit and its indomitable drive for a better life.
I’m not as sympathetic to past wrongs and their effect on people as I probably should. What’s past is past: recognize it, value it, and learn from it, but move on. No matter how much injustice people have suffered, the world doesn't want to hear it. Sympathy and empathy have limited life spans.
So why am I writing about bicycles, James Baldwin, and slavery?
I'm not one for seeing a racist under every bed, but I wonder whether I have just discovered an example of that nameless, faceless beast called institutional racism. In reading Bennett, I realized that it was, at the very least, very bizarre that during my life I was never exposed to this book or, most important, to the people and events in it.
Before the Mayflower should be required reading for all school children. George Washington Williams, Ohio's first black state representative, wrote an exhaustive two-volume work in 1883 entitled History of the Negro Race From 1619 to 1880, a highly comprehensive and scholarly work from which Bennett obviously received many of his early accounts and references.
Why hadn't I heard about him? Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps I wasn’t as serious a student of history or the world as I thought. Or perhaps it was because "my" society chose to ignore this information.
Do you know Charles Beard and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr? Beard was a U.S. historian and I heard about him in high school. Of course, I don't remember what he wrote, but I recall that he was a respected historian. Same goes for Schlesinger. Both men appear in my humongous Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. It is strange that neither Lerone Bennett, Jr., nor George Washington Williams appears in this humongous book, especially since even the slang word humongous appears in this dictionary.
History is history, or should be. We hear about how other countries alter world events to fit their paradigms. Well, it looks as though the U.S. has done the same, at least in recounting the black contribution. If our history had been more complete and objective, perhaps our race relations would be in a far better state.
Do we realize that the blacks' drive for public education in the South after the Civil War was the engine that created this country's concept of public schools? Or that Crispus Attucks, a black man, was a Boston patriot who was just as instrumental as other patriots in thwarting British colonial rule? Do we know that Desire was the first slave ship to arrive in this country, in Massachusetts, in 1638?
It would be futile to try to adequately summarize Bennett's and Williams' histories. Suffice it to say, reading their works provide a new perspective on black history. It’ll also answer questions about the reasons behind black rage.
Perspective. It explains a lot.
++++
Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 910 words.
© 1995