Roots and Realities: Just What in the World is Black History?

The true and accurate history of people of Afrikan origin has been under attack for centuries. This assault started when our Afrikan Ancestors were kidnapped and attempts began to transform them into slaves. These diabolical kidnappers/enslavers understood what the late brilliant historian, John Henrik Clarke frequently said in his lectures, books and articles, “You cannot enslave a consciously historical person”.  Our Ancestors were brutally ripped from their true names, history and culture. And, this was done legally!
It was made illegal for the enslaved Afrikans to learn to read and write for centuries. Ironically, in today’s world, a law is not needed to keep AUSA from reading because many AUSA don’t/won’t read.

After the end of legal slavery, Afrikan legislators in South Carolina during Reconstruction (1865-1877) actually created the first state supported public schools for all students. In 1877, the United States government betrayed the formerly enslaved Afrikans and gave power back to the treasonous and vicious Confederates, their former enslavers who had fought a bloody war to keep them enslaved. Upon regaining power, in South Carolina, politicians like “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and Coleman “Cole” Blease made sure that the educational opportunities of the formerly enslaved Afrikans were severely limited and sub-par.

This attempt at inferiorizing AUSA schools lasted a long time, some would say until now. Yes, we had historians like David Walker, Martin Delaney, George Washington Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, and W.E.B. DuBois. Carter G. Woodson started Negro History Week which we now celebrate as Black History Month. We even had brilliant historians like John Hope Franklin who wrote a well-researched book entitled, From Slavery to Freedom. Dr. Clarke respected Dr. Franklin’s scholarship but frequently said that when we start our history with slavery, everything that follows seems like progress.

Then came the brilliant South Carolina historians John G. Jackson and Chancellor Williams who were contemporaries of Dr. Clarke along with Lerone Bennett, Jr., and Josef ben Jochannon. Dr. Clarke introduced AUSA historians to Cheikh Anta Diop the genius “Father” of Kemetology (the true study of ancient Egypt).

In the 1990’s, there was an attack on what was called Afrocentric history, which placed people of Afrikan origin at the center of their history rather than white people (Eurocentric history or multiculturalism). Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was paid to write a book in 1991, financed by several major corporations, called The Disuniting of America. In this book he attacked (without making any accurate points) scholars such as Molefi Asante, Leonard Jeffries, Asa Hilliard and John Henrik Clarke, who had thoroughly researched and documented their historical claims. He and others called Afrikan Centered history “feel-good history”. This is true to an extent because recent studies suggest that the positive self-image that accurate Afrikan and Afrikan American history promotes can be both preventative and therapeutic for many of the mental and physical maladies that AUSA suffer from. But that is another story.

The false, misleading history that has become standard is truly the feel-good history...for white people. The truth about how the people in Europe fought and slaughtered each other until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which led to the redefinition of Europeans as “white” is never told. The ghastly, grisly, appalling and horrendous things that Europeans have done not only to each other but to all other people in the world over the years do have the power to make them feel badly about themselves. This guilt is partially fueling the fierce resistance to what is perceived as Critical Race Therapy. Grandmothers who cursed and spit on children trying to go to school during integration don’t want their grandchildren to know the truth of what they did. The perpetrators and their children need to feel bad in order to prevent this unfortunate history from repeating itself.

The idea of black history that “they” want us to learn is not truly who we were and are but what “contributions” that we have made to white culture. They want us to concentrate on biography and not the meaning of what our history means to and for us. Even though many years ago (in the 1990’s), I wrote a newspaper article entitled, “Blacks Made Contributions, Too”, I realize now that the contributions that I spoke of were primarily the contributions of Blacks to white culture (even though we benefitted also). We need to see ourselves as formerly sovereign people whose sovereignty was violently taken.

We should know our history for what it has meant to us and what it has meant for the world. So much of our history has been denied, ignored and claimed by others. We won’t know it unless we look for it. The historians that I’ve mentioned are a good start.

Food for thought.