Our stories can’t be erased. They’re part of America’s history that children must know | Opinion

As we begin the annual commemoration of Black History Month, I am more concerned than ever about the banning of books that tell our story, and in some cases, completely erasing our history.

It was Carter G. Woodson who first thought there should be a designated time to celebrate the contributions and achievements of African Americans. Born in 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson’s parents had been slaves.

As a youngster, he worked as a sharecropper and miner to help support his family. When he was 20, he finally was able to enroll in high school; he graduated in less than two years.

Woodson left home to attend Berea College in Kentucky. While there, he accepted a job in the Philippines with the U.S. government as an education superintendent. After leaving the Philippines, Woodson moved to Chicago and enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

In 1912, he earned his doctoral degree in history from Harvard University, becoming the second African American, after W.E.B. DuBois, to attain a doctorate from that institution. He became a professor at Howard University in Washington, rising to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

A man who was proud of his heritage, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. A year later, he started the Journal of Negro History to shed light on the achievements of African Americans.

The author of more than 20 books featuring the history of Africans, Woodson launched Negro History Week in the second week of February 1926, timed to the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

But he decided a week wasn’t long enough to celebrate the lives of Black Americans. In the early 1940s Woodson started toying with expanding Negro History Week into Negro History Month. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1950 at age 74, the idea was catching on.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford became the first U.S. president to recognize Black History Month, saying the celebration enabled people to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

President Ronald Reagan, in his first proclamation honoring Black History Month said, “… understanding the history of Black Americans is a key to understanding the strength of our nation.” And in 2016, President Barack Obama honored Woodson’s association, which is now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Banned books related to Black history

In researching Woodson, I wonder what he would think about the movement today by some people to strip our history from the history books. I imagine he would be perplexed that, after his years of work promoting the history of our people and trying to establish a permanent place in the history of America, it would come to this: The teaching of Black history is so offensive that many want to demolish it. Completely.

It is downright scary to think that one day in the near future, if some people have their way, there might not be any historical records available for my great-grandchildren to know about people like Woodson.

They may not learn of Ruby Bridges, who as a brave 6-year-old in November 1960 faced an angry mob of whites as she and her mother walked into history by integrating William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans. Four federal marshals — two ahead of them, two behind — escorted her and her mother to the school every day. It was an ugly scene as whites hurled racist slurs at little Ruby.

Bridges wrote a children’s book about her brave stance. But the book was banned in some schools because one white parent thought the book (I am paraphrasing here) made white children feel bad because it depicted whites as evil.

Other books have also been banned. They include Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” which Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. She also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her work. Her book tells the story of “Sethe,” a former slave who is haunted by her traumatic past.

Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” is also on the banned list. Her book depicts how “Sophie” was brutally beaten by white men, snatched away from her children, and thrown in jail because she stood up to a white woman.

So was Brandy Colbert’s book, “Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.“

“The 1619 Project” was developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times to tell the untold history and consequences of slavery in America. Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 2020 for her work. The Florida Board of Education has barred school lessons about critical race theory, including “The 1619 Project.”

READ MORE: Florida rejects AP African American Studies course, claiming it ‘lacks educational value’

Like me, Morrison and Walker are descendants of slaves. Stories about our ancestors were passed down from generation to generation. And, like me, Morrison and Walker lived through the Jim Crow laws that made it legal to treat Black people like non-citizens. And to lynch them, often for sport.

The stories are not pretty. But they are stories that are worth being told because they give us a glimpse of American history. And they teach us that we can never go back, that the oppression of our people must never happen again.

I remember watching Alex Haley’s “Roots” on television. My sons were in high school at the time, and during the week the series ran, there were no date nights. The assignment was for us to watch the historical series together. At first, Rick, my older son, thought sitting home, watching television with his mother and younger brother would cramp his style. But after the first night of watching, he was hooked.

I admit, there were scenes in the series about the brutal life of the slaves that I couldn’t watch. More than a century after slavery was abolished in 1865, it still hurts to remember the pain my ancestors endured as slaves. Yet, as ugly as it was, slavery is a great part of our American history and my sons needed to know. Thanks to Haley’s “Roots”, snatches of that dark time in American history unfolded in my living room and millions of other living rooms.

So, during this Black History Month, and during all the months to come, let’s be about the business of teaching our history. Our stories are peppered with the glory and gloom. But they are our stories. Let’s tell them.

If we shut up and ignore our past, history is destined to repeat itself. Already, I can see the signs of that happening.