What Trump supporters can learn about race relations from the founders of Black History Month | Opinion
That the celebration of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the inauguration of Donald Trump, the 47th president, occurred on the same day is one of the ironies of recent history. Trump is leading the GOP’s charge to dismantle anything they see as “woke,” including Black history and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and the so-called “liberal agenda” aimed at creating a universal brotherhood and sisterhood of peace, sharing and forgiveness.
In this modern context, we must remember King’s hope, expressed in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, that “when the history books are written (in future generations), the historians will (have to pause and) say: ‘There lived a great people — a Black people who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.”
Carter Godwin Woodson
King’s quote refers to the man of the hour, known as the father of Black History: Carter Godwin Woodson. Born in 1875 in coal-mining West Virginia, Woodson pulled himself up from the shadow of slavery and graduated from Kentucky’s Berea College, founded by abolitionist John G. Fee on land donated by the American politician Cassius Marcellus Clay. Woodson’s thirst for knowledge led him to attain his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1912.
Woodson immediately began his lonely sojourn to bring scientific truth — not propaganda — to the study of America’s past. By the 1930s, however, most white historians taught the false premise put forth by historian John Burgess that “a Black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, and has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.”
Woodson spent his entire professional career dedicated to disproving this opinion as propaganda and not objective, scientific history. But Woodson was fighting an uphill battle, as most Americans in their early schooling were required to read “The Growth of the American Republic,” a racist text which stated that Black slaves were happy, well fed, devoted to white folks and suffered little from slavery. That book, first published in 1930, was the go-to text for many decades in American secondary schools.
Woodson founded The Journal of Negro History and The Negro History Bulletin to reject and combat falsehoods inculcated in the American mind. A major financial backing which supported these journals came from the famous Jewish scholar and anthropologist Franz Boas.
Financial support also came from various Black fraternities and sororities, Black churches and grassroots community organizations. In fact, when Woodson started Negro History Week in 1926, it was these social institutions that kept hope alive until President Ronald Reagan and Congress made Black History Month a national holiday in 1983.
In a strange twist of historical semantics, Woodson, per the name of his journals, should be remembered as the Father of Negro History, with his singular emphasis of reclaiming past contributions of Negroes that made America “great” in a sort of debatable way. To this point, Woodson would cite Dr. Charles R. Drew, who created the process of blood plasma, or Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful open-heart surgery.
The Father of Black History
The Father of Black History, William Edward Burghardt DuBois, earned his Harvard doctorate in 1895. In his writings, DuBois emphasized the racism and destructiveness of America’s slave-holding class which created a racist caste system, the remnants of which can be observed in the hearts and minds of MAGA adherents, as noted when one saw the Confederate flag held high during the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As an academic social activist, DuBois signed a 1951 petition submitted to the United Nations entitled “We Charge Genocide: The Genocide of Government Against the Negro People.”
Of late, the criticism of racism within American history has centered on the American flag and its meaning. Way before Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, Frederick Douglass, in 1851, said the flag stood for hypocrisy and racial crimes “which would disgrace a nation of savages,” and Henry McNeal Turner in 1906 called the flag a “contemptible rag.”
Trump, in his required salute to Black History Month, mentioned the obligatory Harriet Tubman, then Douglass and then Black conservatives Thomas Sowell, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Tiger Woods, a regular golfing partner.