Browsing: Lost Black History

The “Great Migration” led  thousands of discontented Black Southerners to the big cities of the North. That evolved into financially and culturally vibrant meccas like Harlem (and it’s Renaissance), Sweet Auburn avenue (Atlanta), U”-Street (Washington D.C.), Overtown (Miami), “Black Wall Street” (Tulsa) and Bronzeville/“The Black Metropolis” in Chicago.  Bronzeville Vincennes.com wrote, “Bronzeville provided an isolated area for Blacks to live and work together.

A scant few months after the war, this caldron of racial discontent boiled over and created the Red Summer. History.com wrote, “On July 27, 1919, an African American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of White youths.

“The U.S. Army’s 369th Infantry Regiment, popularly known as the ‘Harlem Hellfighters,’ was the best known African American unit of World War I.” In an interview with N.P.R. Max Brooks, the author of The Harlem Hellfighters said, “The French called them the ‘Men of Bronze’ out of respect, and the Germans called them the ‘Harlem Hellfighters’ out of fear,…’”

      Ella Baker, “The Mother of Civil Rights” earned her bonafides by the    influence she had on shaping the Civil Rights Movement. Hers was not a charismatic flame like Dr. King’s, but nearly as instrumental! From teaching Rosa Parks how to protest, to being one of the female voices of the SCLC, she quietly had her fingerprints all over the Civil Rights Movement.

The legendary Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Stokeley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seele, and H. Rap Brown are some of the names we remember from the Black Panther Party. Sadly it was the violent acts adjacent to the Panthers that we learned in school. The Panthers had many more layers of peaceful participation that were rarely exposed. In 1966 Bobby Seele and Huey Newton, at a small White college in Oakland, made the schematic for the Panthers.

      The annals of school curriculums have vanquished another stout hero into the shadows of obscurity. This time it was the double edge blade of “Intersectionality” that prevented Ida B. Wells from her proper helm in our school books. She was not just a woman, but carried a second cross of being a Black Woman.

Our first Black school, African Free School, was founded 1787 in lower Manhattan by the New York Manumission Society. Webster’s dictionary defines “Manumission: a setting free from slavery.” The school followed the Society’s creation in 1785 by some of New York’s wealthiest White citizens. New York Historical Society recorded that, “Its members included John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Their work on behalf of Black New Yorkers began with protesting the widespread practice of kidnapping Black New Yorkers (both slave and free) and selling them as slaves elsewhere. 

Attorney Florynce Kennedy was a soldier in the dual fights of Civil Rights and Women’s Rights. Flo’s fervent activism, signature cowboy hat and charisma was well known in the struggle. Schools teach about trailblazer Gloria Steinem, but don’t discuss Flo’s impact on the struggle. Sheri M. Randolph, author of “Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical.” said, “She was in Black power, she was in independent Black feminist organizations, she was in the media, she was part of the women’s liberation movement. She was everywhere.”

Dr. Du Bois wrote a seminal essay for Black assimilation called “The Talented Tenth.” It’s one of seven essays included in  the 1903, “The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day.” Booker T. Washington edited the book and contributed the first essay.  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, Wilford H. Smith, H. T. Kealing, and T. Thomas Fortune were the other Black intellectuals that participated.

     There is a gross omission in the standard high school curriculum. Students are not taught that the labor of the slaves built the Capitol and the White House. A report by the National Archives (archives.gov) notes, “Two of Washington, DC’s most famous buildings,  the White House and the