I have never liked the concept of a Black History MONTH.
How can one cram the entire fraught history of a people’s journey in America since 1619 into a single month? I think the history of my people should be part of AMERICAN HISTORY. Period! Black history should be taught and celebrated as the American historical story all year long because every win and every loss bear the sacrificial blood and/or talents of Black Americans.
There is no American history without the blood, sweat, and tears of African-Americans intertwined throughout its telling such as the building by slaves of Washington, DC’s two most famous edifices—the White House and the United States Capitol. It wasn’t until First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2016 speech at the Democratic Convention citing what a powerful feeling it was as an African-American to wake up every morning in the White House that slaves had built, that I even knew such a thing had happened. I certainly wasn’t taught this fact in my American History classes in school. It wasn’t until 2005 that Congress commissioned a study about the overwhelming amount of enslaved and free Blacks who not only built the White House and the Capitol building but also built many of the historical buildings throughout DC:
“Indifference by earlier historians, poor record keeping, and the silence of the voiceless classes have impeded our ability in the twenty-first century to understand fully the contributions and privations of those who toiled over the seven decades from the first cornerstone laying to the day of emancipation in the District of Columbia.” Senate Historian Richard Baker and Chief of the House of Representatives Office of History and Preservationist Kenneth Kato
Unfortunately, I don’t see a more complete history of America happening anytime soon, because we currently have a campaign in this country to undermine the reality and validity of Black history by erasing it from our consciousness and our public school textbooks.
Case in point: Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (Florida) ruling against the draft curriculum of a national Advanced Placement high school course on African-American studies. The Governor deemed the course violated state law and “lacked educational value.” He considers this national AP course as “woke ideology”. It has been reported that DeSantis doesn’t want White children to get “woke” or “feel bad about themselves” when they learn about the heinous crimes and destruction of human rights that many (not all) White Americans perpetrated against African Americans throughout our country’s history. It is reported that DeSantis has said “we’ve got to do history that is factual”—in other words, completely sanitized and lacking the whole truth. Hell, screw the adage that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
As I did a little deep dive into Florida’s history, I wondered just what Florida state history DeSantis would whitewash so that his White children wouldn’t feel bad. (There are so many heinous crimes against Black folks in Florida’s history that listing them all would put a stop to the beating heart of any good human being). For example, would DeSantis erase the Rosewood Massacre (January 1923 in rural Levy County, FL): “…an attack on the predominantly African American town of Rosewood, Florida… by large groups of White aggressors” that wiped it off the map? According to the History Channel, Rosewood was entirely destroyed by a White mob who resented the prosperity of the African-Americans who lived there, so they burned it to the ground and wiped its existence from Florida’s collective memory. Even after the truth of this history was uncovered a hundred years later, some of the White residents’ responses were that it was all a lie or that the black people brought it on themselves.
Perhaps DeSantis would erase the Ocoee massacre. Now that one is a doozy because it encompasses voter suppression, terrorism, and the trampling of equal rights. W. E. B. DuBois, an intellectual (first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard University), sociologist, and civil rights activist had encouraged the Negroes of the early 1900’s to work hard, get educated, own property, obey the laws, and become outstanding citizens. By doing these things DuBois opined, White people would have no choice but to let Negroes vote as citizens. The NAACP went down to Georgia to register the Black folks of Ocoee to fulfill that vision. The night before the Federal election in 1920, the KKK rode through two Black communities in Ocoee with bull horns warning that “not a single Negro will be permitted to vote,” and if they disobeyed there would be hell to pay. When approximately 50 of the residents attempted to vote, some were told they weren’t registered, or that they needed a bogus notary signature to vote from a town clerk who had conveniently gone fishing on voting day and couldn’t be found. Those that couldn’t be dissuaded by the manipulative run-around were chased away from the polling stations by gun-toting thugs.
According to the writer Robert Stephens from the Pegasus magazine (University of Central Florida, UCF), on the night of the election the KKK massacred what Blacks they could catch, burned down their homes, commandeered their land, while driving the majority into the alligator-infested swamps on foot. July Perry, the most prominent Black citizen and leader in Ocoee who owned a large estate with a small mansion and several barns and buildings was “beaten, shot, jailed, dragged and lynched” to set an example to the rest of the Black people. The entire Black population was purged from that area of Florida for 60 years, and the truth was buried for just as many years. Connie Lester, UCF associate professor of history writes that immediately “after the massacre, newspapers advised that order had been restored and everyone should stop talking about whatever happened.”
A month later (Dec. 1920), an article appeared in the Orlando Sentinel: “Special Bargains. Several Beautiful Little Groves Belonging to the Negroes That Have Just Left Ocoee. Must Be Sold—See B.M. Sims.” (Guess who Sims was, Dear Reader? You guessed it: One of Ocoee’s wealthiest White landowners.) *
Now here’s the rub: In 2020, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law that required public schools in Florida to teach about the 1920 Ocoee Election Day Riots. (Say, what?!)
NOTE TO GOV. DESANTIS: What happened, Dude? You be “woke” in 2020, but asleep in 2023? Could it be your presidential aspirations and catering to the MAGA base—who mostly promote the Big Lies of the Lost Cause (the South didn’t “really” lose the Civil War), the Stolen Election (Trump didn’t “really lose” the election), and that CRT is “really” satanic—has caused your brain to break? (“Critical Race Theory is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity”—Wikipedia.)
So, you get my point, my friends. Florida is just one of many states that is trying to erase the truth of Black history from our educational system. More than 30 states have waged war against CRT being taught in their schools, although they seem to have completely misunderstood what CRT is—seemingly not caring about the deleterious effect that erasing the Black history and writers attached to CRT discussions will have on minority students. Last year Texas proposed a law to remove the word “slavery” from their textbooks—changing “slavery” to “involuntary relocation”! (Bra-ha-ha-ha!) Anything that doesn’t show the United States of America in an exceptional and glowing light without blemish, shouldn’t be taught or discussed (BTW, I truly love the USA, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is my country—my home. But it’s like living with your family, just because you love them, it doesn’t give them the right to lie to you.)
In the meantime, we have all been gaslit for years regarding the big lie of the Lost Cause (the South didn’t lose the war, slaves were treated like family, the Civil War wasn’t about slavery), causing me and my peeps generational trauma that will never completely go away until every last Confederate flag and monument that supports this big lie is put into contextual framework of the Black experience and history.
On that note: Please check out the 30-minute documentary link below from the Atlanta History Center sent to me by a dear friend, neighbor, a former Georgian, and reader. It is about the largest Confederate monument in the world (Stone Mountain) which has completely buried its bloody, terrorist history in denial theme-park pablum. Today, Stone Mountain’s website boasts of it being a “lovely theme park, a family campground, a lakeside resort, a conference center, and family gathering place on 3,200 acres” with an adorable choo-choo train—providing a “lively five-mile excursion around the mountain in open-air cars while you marvel at beautiful views of Stone Mountain…” under the imposing gazes of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, those gods of the Confederacy and lovers of enslaving human beings. The documentary is superb! It reveals the hidden truth of the Ku Klux Klan’s involvement in the monument’s creation, and you will be stunned by this giant stone of propaganda as you hopefully realize that without the truth, and nothing but the truth told about our complete American history, we are doomed as a country and will never meet our higher calling of a people who “…hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
STONE MOUNTAIN DOCUMENTARY: Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”– George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”—Winston Churchill, 1948
*The Truth Laid Bare by Robert Stephens
Eleanor Tomczyk is an author and a satirist who is an award-winning voice-over performer. In 2011, she created the blog, “How the Hell Did I End Up Here” which features mostly satirical posts that have thousands of readers around the world—although she was recently banned in Pakistan (for real!). Tomczyk’s three books were featured in a recent book festival: “Monsters’ Throwdown,” “Fleeing Oz,” and “The Fetus Chronicles—Podcasts to my Miseducated Self.” Currently in her 70s and living life like it is freakin’ golden, she is a consummate storyteller and much sought-after motivational speaker. If you don’t believe me, just ask her!
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how the hell did i end up here? 