Dear Progressive Reader,
Since 1976, every U.S. President (even Donald Trump) has designated February as Black History Month. The idea of a month-long celebration of Black History was proposed by Black educators and the Black United Students at Kent State University in 1969, and was first observed there in February 1970 (just three months before the tragic shooting of four students on that campus during an anti-war protest). The first national observation was proclaimed by President Gerald Ford during the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. Ford urged people in the United States to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
But the national recognition of a time to learn about, and learn from, Black history came about through the work of historian and journalist Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History in 1916, and in 1926 pioneered the celebration of “Negro History Week” during the second week of February. “It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week,” he said. “We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in History. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hatred, and religious prejudice."
The second week of February was chosen because it encompassed the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. As a month-long celebration, however, it also includes, among others, the birthday of Rosa Parks. It was Parks’s December 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, segregated bus that for many sparked a movement and catapulted the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. Following Parks’s death in 2005, U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr. wrote in The Progressive, “She was very humble and soft-spoken, but inside she had a determination that was quite fierce. . . . She showed that one citizen’s voice—a soft and determined voice— can be heard, saying simply: ‘Love justice and despise oppression.’ ”
But far from being a lone action, that choice to remain in the bus seat was a part of a larger, organized movement. As Jeanne Theoharis writes in her 2013 biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, “In August 1955, Rosa Parks attended a two-week workshop at Highlander Folk School on implementing school desegregation. Founded in the 1930s by Myles Horton as an adult organizer training school, Highlander sought to build local leadership for social change. Parks arrived at Highlander in low spirits, ‘tense and nervous’ following years of political activity that had produced almost no change.” Parks later said “I was forty-two years old and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people.” As Theoharis explains, “Spending two weeks alongside forty-seven others strategizing for school desegregation began to lift her spirits.” It was just less than four months until Parks would put that collective spirit into action.
In February 1990, I had a chance to briefly speak with Parks during a national press conference on the afternoon prior to a celebration of her seventy-seventh birthday at the Kennedy Center. She spoke to the importance of that collective spirit of action, saying “people had suffered so long and suffered so much that they were willing to take whatever action that they could to make it known that this type of treatment was entirely foreign to freedom and equality and justice.” The Highlander Center, founded in Tennessee in 1932, continues its work of organizing and empowerment today. In March 2019, the Center was partially burned in a racist attack. Following the attack, Director Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson wrote in The Progressive, We “carry a spirit of resistance and resilience: the legacy of abolitionists and the New Left, relationships with elders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party . . . . And it’s with this inheritance that we continue our fight.”
This week, on our website, cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the efforts to ban certain books (and ideas) from classrooms around the country. “The biggest naughty word for the right this time around,” he says, “is a certain four letter word: race.” Rann Miller writes that the study of U.S. history is incomplete without addressing the period of Reconstruction and the backlash that followed. “It’s difficult to understand today’s racial injustices without knowing about the radical decade that followed the Civil War,” he explains. And Ed Rampell reviews the new documentary film Love & the Constitution, about Congressmember Jamie Raskin, that premiers tomorrow on MSNBC. The Progressive also interviewed Raskin in November. He argued that, “We’re living in a time of extreme propaganda and deception and brainwashing of people by Fox News and other even more extreme news outlets. We have a responsibility to defend science, reason, logic, data, and then real news, against the waterfall of propaganda coming from Donald Trump and his supporters.”
Finally, editor Bill Lueders continues his reporting on the national crisis of elder eviction with a report on the miniscule fines levied against law-breaking institutions, and a nationally-distributed op-ed noting, “Our seniors deserve better than to be tossed out of their homes because a provider has decided they have become too much work.” Lueders’s full investigation is the lead article in the latest issue of The Progressive, but you can also download a special PDF edition now to share with friends, colleagues, and perhaps elected officials.
Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S. – If you missed our online evening with journalist John Nichols discussing and reading from his new book: Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability For Those Who Caused The Crisis, you can still see it in its entirety on our YouTube channel. You can also get a copy of the book with a donation to The Progressive at this link.
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