It takes many hours to click one’s way through the New York Times online, especially on the weekends. And with this being African American History Month, there is a treasure trove of articles and profiles to explore. One can burrow down a warren of links and prompts through literary riches.
A series of Times articles, coupled with live events, have captured my attention. Black History Continued explores pivotal and transformative moments and figures in the culture. The series follows the lead of Toni Morrison and Middleton T. Harris. They, with a team of collectors, combined images, artifacts, and documents into “The Black Book,” the seminal work published in 1974.
That work curated slave auction notices, work song sheet music, fugitive slave trial transcripts, Hollywood film posters from the last century, patents by African American inventors, all illuminating a history both revealing and poignant.
Black History Continued encompasses an even fuller story of who we are today. Like the bricks of the Great Pyramids, crafted with an integrity rendering nails superfluous, “each story is a building block of possibility.”
The series spotlights us as civic leaders (African American women are mayors of eight major US cities this year); as environmentalists (park rangers, gardeners, surfers and foragers); the new wave of comic superheroes whose Africanness is the soil from which their superpowers arise; the architects and artists who are reclaiming and reshaping the built landscape; the darkening skin tones on the covers of fashion magazines; the rise of the Black Nerd.
There are also group articles on what we ask of our leaders and heroes, why African American History Month matters, and much more.
What makes its timeliness so resonant is the current onslaught against a more accurate teaching about the role of African Americans in the history of this country in the academy of elementary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. This attack is being waged on several fronts – in local legislatures, school boards, libraries, textbooks, and the media.
What I most love about the series is the ways it lifts up and stretches out the vast canvas of African-American culture. I’m also looking forward to enjoying the podcasts, graphics, emerging technologies, and live events being engaged to tell these stories.
As Veronica Chambers says in the introduction of the series, “Our project didn’t start on Feb. 1 and it won’t end on Feb.28.”
Our history is far longer than the few centuries of enslavement that mark our recent past. Its roots and reach extend beyond these shores, deeper within and farther outside our community than we may have previously explored.
It’s not a horizontal timeline of events we walk, but a spiral. We are living in the history forged by our progenitors, as we in turn create the narrative for those who will follow.
