Most of My Heroes Won't Appear On No Stamp!

Most of My Heroes Won't Appear On No Stamp!

As Barack Obama inches closer to making history in his Presidential run, it came to me that I had not made a reference to Black History Month yet. The honest question is why? The simple answer is like everything else I can't relegate the importance of African-American culture to the history of these United States and the World over to one month, my blackness won't allow it! Besides, I make Black history everyday, so February can't contain the achievements of many made throughout this thing we've come to call history.

When Carter G. Woodson first came up with the concept of Negro History Week (the second week of February to commemorate Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln's birthdays), the climate was such that it was imperative to carve out a niche for Negros. With the "progression" since, being confined to 28 days (29 in a leap year) seems like rehab.

Is that where we are, history rehab? Well, that'll get you a few Grammy awards, but what does it do for your soul? Coming up in school, contributions to American his-story by African-Americans was reduced to Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King. As I got older and teachers began to expand that box, Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois, Sojourner Truth and others entered into the conversation. Carter G. Woodson himself, "The father of Black History", has not received the due recognition deserved of a man who set the wheels in action to what has become Black history.

Yet, as a student of history, I began to find others who contributed to the building of our community and country that you weren't taught about in U.S. History I or II. So, a few African-American history classes and a couple thousand dollars spent in Borders later, I've developed my own style of appreciative reverence for African-American history, history in general. As "Negro History Week" morphed into "Black History Month" it's time to transition into a way of life that honors the days gone by for the sake of what's to come.