Black History Month

RBG Street Scholars Think Tank's Purpose:
This Educational Program and Research Project is Dedicated to Further Building the Hip Hop--Black Liberation Movement Connection by Integrating Conscious Digital Edutainment with A Scholarly Self Directed Learning Environment.

"BLACK HISTORY MONTH IS 24/7/365": 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.
Of All the Disciplines of Study History Is Best Qualified To Reward All Research.

There is no true separation between the past, the present and the future. Those who don't change change will be change by change. Help us continue to write our history in real time by making a contribution.
Please be sure to follow the curriculum format in your contributions.

-------------------------------------
By Daryl Michael Scott
for ASALH at www.asalh.org
The story of Black History Month begins a decade after the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. When he conceived of the ASALH in 1915, Carter G. Woodson believed that publishing scientific history about the black race would produce facts that would prove to the world that Africa and its people had played a crucial role in the development of civilization. As a Harvard-trained historian, Woodson, like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, believed that the truth could not be denied and that reason would prevail over prejudice. He thus established a scholarly journal, The Journal of Negro History, a year after he formed the Association. Scientific history, he believed, would counter racial falsehoods, and the community of white scholars would alter its view of the black race. Eventually the truth would trickle down to the public, and the race problem would gradually disappear.

A decade into his labors, Woodson began to think differently about the inherent power of scholarship, the importance of the scholarly community in promoting the truth, and the place of the community in the Association's mission. Scholarship had not transformed race relations, and most white historians had not come to recognize the truth when it was placed before them.

As early as 1920, Woodson had urged black civic organizations to promote the achievements that researchers were uncovering. That year he prodded his fraternity brothers at Omega Psi Phi to take up the work.

In 1924 they responded with the creation of Negro History and Literature Week, which they renamed Negro Achievement Week. By 1925, Woodson decided that the Association had to expand its program. Henforth it would be an organization dedicated to discovering and popularizing the truth. The Association had to re~educate blacks as well as whites, and its doors had to be opened to all interested in history, not just historians and other scholars.

When the Association announced Negro History Week for 1926, Woodson was overwhelmed by the response. Black history clubs sprang up, teachers demanded materials to instruct their pupils, and progressive whites, not simply white scholars and philanthropists, stepped forward to endorse the effort. Woodson and the Association scrambled
to meet the demands of public history. For teachers, the Association published photographs and portraits of important black people. It published plays to dramatize black history. To serve the desire of history buffs to participate in the re~education of black folks, ASNLH formed branches to bring them into the organization.

Woodson selected the week of February that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two giants in the history of African Americans. Lincoln, of course, had issued the Emancipation Proclamation that moved the nation away from slavery, and Frederick Douglass had been the greatest leader of African Americans. Symbolically, the selection of Lincoln's and Douglass' birthdays as the week to study Black history reflected Woodson's belief that the history of African Americans was American history.

When Woodson passed in 1950, the Association continued the celebration of Negro History Week. By the time of his death, Negro History Week had become a central part of African American life and substantial progress had been made in bringing more Americans to appreciate the celebration. At mid~century, in cities across the country, mayors issued proclamations noting Negro History Week.

The Black Awakening of the 1960s dramatically expanded the consciousness of African Americans about the importance of black history. The Freedom Schools established during the civil rights era all included the study of Black history. As African Americans entered into mainstream colleges, they demanded Black Studies and Black history became a central feature. Increasingly there were cries for more than a week to study Black history.

The Association, the center of the study of Black life and history, underwent its own changes, including a recognition of the need to devote more time to Black History. In 1976, fifty years after the first celebration, the Association held the first Black History Month. By this time, the entire nation had come to recognize the importance of Black history in the drama of the American
story. Since then all American presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike have issued Black History Month proclamations.

In keeping with tradition, the Association, now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, believes that Black history, like American history, should be studied 365 days a year. Yet as the Founders of Black History Month, ASALH continues to view February as the critical month for carrying forth the mission.
By Daryl Michael Scott
for ASALH at www.asalh.org

Write an Article

RSS

Why Black History Month 24 / 7/ 365? To Combat Negroization: A RBG Tribute to Dr. Carter G. Woodson

Written by RBGStreetScholar on

Why Black History Month 24 / 7/ 365? To Combat Negroization

Why Has RBG Street Scholar Chosen to Design and Entitle a Zine

Anyone with half a brain knows that there has been a commercialization of black history month. For example during the Super Bowl this year we were reminded that February is Black History Month. Coca-Cola ran 30-second spots cycling through a timeline of achievements by the black community. This "revere" for Black folx comes only seven years after the company agreed to the largest-ever settlement ($192 million) for a race discrimination lawsuit. So now we're suppose to believe that Coca-Cola is a changed man. So as to the question, Why has RBG Street Scholar chosen to design and entitle a Zine Black History Month 24 / 7/ 365? To counter the rapid commercialization of Black History Month as it is the wrong meaning and direction to a noble subject (history). The Zine is an effort to correct. Efforts to investigate and understand the world around us are invariably dependent upon the information that is made available about the world's reality.That means knowing the history. The truth about every current "shit-uation" is rooted in it's history. The establishment is trying to co-opt our use of history as a weapon and make us believe everything is stright now. So history is censored in our public schools and is told from the prespective of our oppressor everyday. They give our childern, youth and adults information that constantly undermines our efforts to understand, to predict, and to act - leading to white supremacy/racist upholding inferences and misguided efforts at real socio-political change.

Negro His-Story Month is slowly but surely transforming the opportunity for our real education into a perfunctory corporate whore. The value and substance of our history can't simply be paid off with TV spots and the same features in newspapers year after year. Just like 40 acres and a mule, itâ€™s simply not enough to address 500 years of slavery, suffering and death; superimposed on our ongoing political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation and socio-cultural degradation.

The reducing of our rich and painful history of resistance and struggle for freedom, justice and equality, which we as a people still have yet to achieved, to a celebration of trivia pursuit is disrespectful to Dr. Woodson's contribution and the sacrifices of our ancestors. Corporate sound bites one month out of the year are another trick to co-opt ahistrorify and minimize the Black Power of history. We have been duped into thinking that the most instructive subject of all should be relegated to February cheerleading. Dr. Carter G. Woodson envisioned Negro History Week as an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of African-Americans and to demonstrate to the world that people of African descent in American had made significant contributions to history. For it to be necessary to do such speaks volumes to the racist sickness of the white people of that time. It tells us that they were invested in systematically hiding the truth from us, them and the rest of the world to maintain our de-Afrikanization, dehumanization and inferioritization. Of all the disciplines of study history is best qualified to reward all research. When you know the history of a topic / subject or people you understand that topic/subject or people best in their current manifestations. Why is this RBG? Because there is no true separation between the past, the present and the future. What happen yesterday determines what we see and experience today-positive and negative. Eighty-one years after Dr. Carter G. Woodson was inspired to establish Negro History Week, which was later expanded to what we know today as Black History Months we have lost sight of the intent of his work and the progress we have made resultant to it. Dr. Woodson did a great thing given the racist nature of America in 1915, but today that we designate a specific month to celebrate the contributions blacks have made to society at the expense of drawing lessons from the deep well of activism and scholarship year round is convoluted at best and white brainwashing at worst. Our history should be a part of our daily instruction, focused on a search for the answers to the problems that we continue to face today. Is it not our responsibility to expand on and evolve the trailblazing contributions of our ancestors in order to continue our development as a people, rather than simply romanizing the past for 28 days? Everyday is Black history day, every week is Black history week and every Month is black history month. So I say let us leave the celebrating to the shortest month in the year and be about the business of making a Nu Afrikan history everyday. Let our history of struggle and resistance be our weapon and educational guidepost.

The "Black Studies Movement" has worked to include courses on the African American experience in the curricula of American colleges and universities. Beginning in the late 1960s, they began one of the most important endeavors in American education: the creation of departments, programs and courses in African American studies. In their efforts they have continued the work begun eight-one years ago by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Now many of them have been watered down to humanist-integrationist inbetweenity, ie multiculturalism. RBG Street Scholars Think Tank is offered without the restraints of traditional academia, as for the most part they too have escrowed any real use of our history to being about revolutionary change for the people. Except for very few, they treat the subject as an objective sterile discourse with no relation to using it as a weapon to fight. At RBG Street Scholars Think Tank â€œBlack History Month 24/7/365 means we must use history to fight for our freedom 24 hours a day, 7 days a week , 365 days a year.

ICE BREAKER VIDEO PLAYERS

(Me)

right click> view image for full size poster

FEATURED VIDEO LEARNING SERIES:

Slave Catchers/Resistors:
Ten Clips, including Deal with the Devil, Stono Rebellion, Poor Whites, Am. Revolutionary War, David Walker, Nat Turner,White Terrorism, The Free North, Civil War and Reconstruction and Jim Crow

TEXT / IMAGE / LINK OUT LEARNING:

Part I:

The largest slave rebellion in U.S. history

Text and links that comprise this part are from J.B. Bird, First published June 5, 2005

The only known nineteenth-century photograph of the Black Seminole Scouts mounted on their horses

Following are Extracts from "Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery"
Look at any standard reference to American slave revolts, and chances are, the Black Seminole rebellion of 1835-1838 does not even make the list. Below are some representative sites that can be readily checked online:
Chronology on the history of slavery and racism from The Holt House.
Major revolts and escapes from AFRO-Americ@: Black resistance.
Slave Revolts and Rebellions from The African-American: A Journey from Slavery to Freedom.

The oversight is not unexpected given that the major scholars of American slavery, on whose writings the reference works rely, have likewise missed or misinterpreted the Black Seminole slave rebellion. According to John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, Stanley Elkins, Kenneth Stampp, Herbert Aptheker, and the many scholars who have relied on these giants in the field, the Black Seminole maroons joined Indians to fight the U.S. Army in 1835, and some of the maroons may have been runaway slaves. But the scholars seem unaware that nearly 400 plantation slaves, and possibly hundreds more, joined the maroons and Indians in an uprising of slaves that had no peer for size and longevity in American history…

From: Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery

(A RBG Street Scholar recommended, must see, extension for scholars, researchers and general learning audiences alike)

http://www.johnhorse.com/

Part II:

To take part in the African revolution it is not to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves. ... In order to achieve real action, you must yourself be a living part of Africa and of her thought; you must be an element of that popular energy which is entirely called for the freeing, the progress, and the happiness of Africa. There is no place outside that fight for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with and completely at one with the people in the great battle of Africa and of all suffering humanity.

Sekou Touré

Part III:

Slave Rebellions

From: The African Diaspora, By Richard Hooker and Washington State University

Very few, if any, African-Americans accepted their status as slaves. Most, if not all, slaveowneres were completely aware of this and, in general, they lived in fear of the African-Americans under the control. Not only did slaveowners expect slaves to run away, letters and diaries give strong evidence that slaveowners (and even non-slaveowners) in the south believed that rebellion was imminent. They had lived with this fear since 1792 when the Haitian Revolution proved unambiguously that slaves were ready to revolt and could do so with a passion that was awe-inspiring. Added to this mix was the fiery rhetoric of abolitionists, both black and white. The most frightening, to the slaveowners, of these abolitionists was Henry Highland Garnet who had escaped from slavery at the age of ten. In 1843 he called for a slave strike and suggested that it escalate to a slave revolt. By this point, the south had been rocked by three slave revolts which had struck fear to the very hearts of slaveowners.

Gabriel Prosser

Further study link out: Gabriel's Conspiracy 1799 - 1800

The first major slave revolt in the south was led by a twenty-four year old slave named Gabriel Prosser. All of the major slave revolts in the south were led by people like Prosser, who were deeply Christian and were fired by religious indignation against slavery. Prosser was the first. In 1800, he began to lay plans to take the city of Richmond, Virginia, by force. He planned to invade Richmond, attack the armory, and arm his rebel slaves. By August of 1800, he had thousands of slaves enlisted and had stored up an armory of weapons, including guns. He was betrayed by two followers and, on the day of his revolt, with over a thousand followers ready to attack Richmond, the bridges into Richmod had been destroyed in a flood. The state militia attacked him the next day and he and his followers were hanged. Althought Prosser's revolt ended in defeat, it terrified slaveowners throughout the south. Prosser had come very close to taking Richmond. If he had not been betrayed and if the bridges had not washed out, it is almost certain that he would have successfully taken the city of Richmond with his slave followers. Prosser's revolt was the closest America came to a revolution on the same scale as that in Haiti.

Denmark Vesey

Futher study link out:http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/denmark_vesey.html

Denmark Vesey, like so many other African-American leaders of the nineteenth century, came from the "upper class" of slaves: the engineers and craftspeople who were given a high degree of independence and self-actualization, as opposed to field workers or house slaves. He purchased his own freedom and settled down as a carpenter in Charleseton, South Carolina. Despite the surface placidity of his free life, he was fired with anger over slavery and the situation of black slaves. Throughout his entire free existence, he planned and thought about freeing his fellow slaves. He was so full of anger that companions say that he could not even remain in the presence of a European-American.
Like Prosser, Vesey was also deeply inspired by Christianity, in particular, the Old Testament. An integral aspect of slave and free Christianity was its emphasis on the delivery of the "children of Israel" from bondage in Egypt. This story was perhaps the most powerful religious and cultural influence on the world view of nineteenth century Americans. While most historians stress the passive nature of the Israelite deliverance, that deliverance was also yoked to the Israelite invasion of the land of Canaan. While this invasion was barely successful, the Old Testament books telling the history of the Canaan occupation and its aftermath are ruthlessly violent and present a warrior god with no mercy towards non-Israelites. All evidence we have suggests that slaves understood that these two events were connected and that deliverance along Israelite lines would be bought with human blood. Vesey, who went around quoting biblical texts to slaves to inspire them to revolt, particularly loved to quote Yahweh's instructions to Joshua when he demands that Joshua kill every occupant of the cities of Canaan including women and children.

His task, as he saw it, was to incite slaves into revolt. In 1821, that focus changed dramatically and he began to organize his own revolt. He organized a working group of lieutenants that included Gullah Jack, a sorceror considered absolutely invulnerable and Peter Poyas who was one of the great military and organizational geniuses of the early nineteenth century. Poyas organized the revolt into separate cells under individual leaders. Only the leaders knew the plot; if any slave betrayed the plot, they would only betray their one cell. By 1822, almost all the slaves in the plantations surrounding Charleston had joined the revolt. His and Poyas's plan was brilliantly simple. The rebels would all station themselves at the doors of European-Americans and, late at night, a group of rebels would start a major fire. When the men came out their doors, the rebels would kill them with axes, picks, or guns. They would then enter the houses and kill all the occupants. Like Prosser's revolt, they almost won. They were betrayed early in the game, but the cell structure prevented officials from finding out the plot itself or identifying any of the leaders. It was only the day before that a slave, who knew the entire plot, betrayed Vesey. He and his co-leaders were hung, but only one confessed.

Nat Turner

Further study link out:www.asante.net/articles/Real-Nat-Turner

Vesey's revolt was immensely frightening to southern slave-owners. Not only was it difficult to crack the plot, despite the fact that thousands of slaves were involved, but the sheer thoroughness of the violence planned chilled the hearts of even the most confident slaveowners. That so many slaves would be willing to exterminate any and all European Americans regardless of gender or age brought home the depth of feeling, anger, and resistance that surrounded slaveowners all day long. Neither Prosser's nor Vesey's rebellions actually succeeded; despite their fear, European-Americans believed that, in the end, God had protected them. This would all change, however, when a man that slaves simply called Prophet, Nat Turner, led a short revolt in which God did not protect slaveowners.
Turner, like Vesey, was from the "upper class" of slaves. He had grown up deeply hating slavery; his mother, an African, so hated slavery that she tried to kill him when he was born in 1800 to prevent him from living the life of a slave. He, too, was religious, in fact, far more than Vesey and Prosser. His Christianity was a religion of visions and mystical experience. By the time he was a young man, Turner had become unofficially the major religious leader in Southampton county in Virginia. Unlike Vesey, Turner's Christianity emphasized not the Israelite deliverance, but the latter days of Christ in Jerusalem and the apocalyptic promise of a New Jerusalem. His rhetoric had a place as well as a spiritual meaning: Jerusalem, Virginia, which lay nearby.

All his disciples, seven of them, were fired by anger and religious passion. One, Will, had been so abused by his master that he was covered with scars. On the appointed night on Sunday, they left Turner's house and entered the house of his master where, with only one hatchet and one broadax between them, they executed all the members, including two teens, with the exception of an infant. They then moved from house to house throughout the night and executed every European-American they could find with the exception of a white family that owned no slaves; Will chopped up his master and his wife so passionately that Turner called him "Will the Executioner." As they went from house to house they gathered slaves and weapons. By Monday, they were approaching Jerusalem but were turned back by a regiment of European-Americans. Turner dug a cave and went into hiding, but when troops arrived they scoured the countryside and executed slaves by the hundred. Turner, however, was never caught for over two months; during all this time, Virginians were seized with panic. Hundred fled the county and many left the state for good. Turner, however, was eventually captured and hung. This was the last straw; from this point onwards, no slaveowner lived comfortably with slavery now that they understood the anger, the resistance, and the vengeance that boiled beneath the burden of slavery.

The Amistad

Cinque, Leader of the Amistad Captives

Further study link out : Famous American Trials /Amistad Trials 1839 - 1840)

Although no significant revolt occurred after Turner's death, his passion and success escalated the conflict between the states over slavery. One more revolt, however, would seriously change the entire issue of slavery and slave revolts: the Amistad incident. In general, Amistad is overlooked by historians in favor of the more lurid and more deliberate revolts in Haiti and in the southern United States. The Amistad incident, however, dramatically changed the European-American idea of slave revolt and the moral constitution of slave revolts. The year is 1839. Slave traffic is officially illegal in every country in the world. Despite this, a Cuban boat, the Amistad, is still trading in human lives kidnapped from Western Africa. On this trip, however, led by a powerful African, who speaks no European language, named Cinque, leads a revolt against the crew and kills everyone except the captain and first mate. He demands that the Africans be returned to Africa but instead the captain sails to New York. Claiming that the Africans are Cuban slaves rather than Africans, the United States put them on trial for murder and revolt. The result, however, was a stunning reversal in European ideas of slave revolts. Defended by no less than John Quincy Adams, the court declares the African revolutionaries to be justified in their murder of the crew. For the first time, Americans applied to slaves the same right to revolt as they believed they had. The southern revolts, from Haiti to Turner, suddenly shifted in the minds of many Americans as representing what they really were: freedom wars. To many Americans, it was becoming increasingly evident that the answer to slavery in the south had to be violent.

RBGz New Afrikan Education Course Link Table: