This year marks the 40th annual celebration of Black History Month in America, as well as the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Additionally, it’s been more than half a century since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. So maybe you’d think by now that the American melting pot would have sufficiently amalgamated all of its resident cultures and ethnicities. After all, we’re one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Do we still need a separate Black History Month?
“Black history is American history,” Morgan Freeman said in 2009. “You’re going to relegate my history to a month? No thank you.”
But as easy as it would be to think we live in a truly egalitarian society, the current state of civil unrest has brought “bigotry” and “racial discrimination" back into national conversation. And that conversation has served to remind the mainstream that there are some difficult truths we need to face collectively about the American experience.
“We live in a world that’s anti-black,” says Rae Paris, a Professor of English at Michigan State University. “That’s hard for some people to hear, but that’s exactly why we need Black History Month. It serves as a focus moment to think about the past.”
In December, Paris wrote the essay “
An Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter” on her blog after a second wave of rioting broke out in Ferguson, Mo. More than 1,100 African American professors signed the letter, and it was reprinted on websites around the globe.
“You are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our godchildren,” Paris wrote to the country’s black student population. “You, with your stories of erasure, break our hearts because you are family … (Y)our stories of erasure ultimately are stories of violence, because your stories mirror our experiences, past and present.”
Since 1990, more than 70 unarmed African Americans have been killed by police according to the NAACP, but last year the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson officer served as a tipping point that sparked demonstrations from coast-to-coast. Some of those demonstrations were peaceful, but not all.
It’s certainly not the world Martin Luther King Jr. fought and died for — he envisioned an enlightened nation where people could be judged by the content of their characters and not by the color of their skin. But it’s painfully obvious 50 years after King delivered a speech on the campus of Michigan State University that we’re still a nation fragmented along color lines.
“The time is always ripe to do right,” King told the 4,000 people who had packed the MSU Auditorium on Feb. 11, 1965. “Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”
King’s speech was culled from his missive, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written two years earlier. His appearance was part of a fundraising drive for MSU’s Student Education Program, a student-administered educational outreach program. King’s appearance was the brainchild of MSU campus minister and civil rights activist John Duley, who was spurred into action by what he calls “the need to help justice.”
“There just came a point where we decided Michigan State University ought to do something for the civil rights movement,” says Duley, 94. “We couldn’t just stand by and watch. We could see (King) needed help.”
Duley and fellow activist/MSU professor Robert Green, assisted with a voter registration drive in Mississippi. Duley says Green encouraged him to write a letter to King inviting him to MSU, but he never expected to hear back.
“A week later I called (King) to see if he’d received it, and I was told that he had and had already made plans to come,” Duley says. “It was unexpected but a real pleasure.”
King’s arrival came two months after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and just weeks before his historic march from Selma, Ala., to the State Capitol in Montgomery. Duley says helping King with his message of equality and nonviolence was “a marvelous experience.” He agrees with Paris that race relations still have a long way to go, and that Black History Month can play a big part in bringing problems to a positive light.
“Black History Month is important because it’s a reminder of how far we’ve come and where we still need to go,” Duly says. “It’s Jim Crow all over again right now. Racial differences have the potential to rip us apart, but if we work together, we can achieve King’s dreams.”
Lansing also has ties to another civil rights icon: Malcolm X spent his formative years growing up in the state capital. He worked here, went to school here and was married here. Although he relocated to the East Coast, he maintained ties to Lansing. On Jan. 23, 1963, two years before King’s speech, X also addressed the student body at MSU.
“(The) unity of Africans abroad and unity of Africans here in this country can bring about practically any kind of achievement or accomplishment that black people want today,” X told the mostly white audience. “You don’t realize what a crime your forefathers have committed … so you have to take the blame. It’s easier for you to approach the problem more sensibly and try to get a solution.”
Although his tongue was sharp, X was trying to rile the students into action. This speech was given just before his separation from the Nation of Islam, in a time when he had just started accepting help from whites. He was assassinated two years later, Feb. 21, 1965, but X’s legacy lives on in Lansing. In 1990, the place where his childhood home once stood was commemorated with a historical marker. In 1995, the charter school El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Academy (which takes X’s Muslim name) opened on Lansing’s south side. And in 2010, Main Street was renamed Malcolm X Boulevard.
Willard Walker, another local civil rights activist, says Lansing’s willingness to embrace local African American heritage is the key to moving into a new level of racial accord. And he says Black History Month fills a vital role in this move.
“I don’t believe that many whites know anything about black history before the time of slavery,” Walker says. “If we want to solve the problems of racism, it’s important to educate ourselves as much as possible about all our histories, and having a Black History Month can only bring good things.”
Walker is the senior policy consultant and Public Policy Associates, and, like Duley, worked as part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Throughout his career, he has provided diversity training for Lansing businesses, has worked to improve recruitment and retention of African American teachers, and conducted research to address the social disenfranchisement of young black men.
“We have to start working for equality across all public systems,” Walker says. “You can see the disparities out there. We can try to fix housing, but that won’t fix how blacks are treated in the banking system. We can try to fix banking, but then the educational system is still broken. You can’t address these issues individually — you have to take it as a holistic issue.”
But Walker remains positive that change can be affected.
“Our history is intertwined in biases and solving one problem won’t eradicate those biases,” he says. “But it’s important to see how far we’ve come. Barack Obama is president. In my mind, that’s phenomenal. We have changed the system sufficiently enough that (a black man) could become president. That’s a miracle to me.”
Paris’ goals are just as lofty, but no less revolutionary. For starters, she’s concerned about the lack of discussion about the African American experience in the educational system.
“I have students who have gone through four years of higher education and have never read a novel by a black woman,” Paris says. “Think about that. That’s a whole segment of the population whose voices aren’t being heard. We have a pressing need for talking more about black history.”
Paris hails Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, co-creators of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as present day activists whose work she admires.
“Opal recently wrote a piece in the Huffington Post where she started calling it ‘Black Future Month,’” Paris says. “I thought that was great. Yes, there’s a need for talking about black history and looking at the past. But we need to do more than just talk about where we’ve been. It’s important to also focus on what it means for the present and what it could mean for the future.”
Paris said she’s working from within to spur change in education.
“MSU has one of the highest instances of lack of black student retention in the country,” she says. “Black students just aren’t graduating. And their stories (of discrimination) fall on deaf ears. A lot of people think racism doesn’t exist, and if you’re one of those people, then hearing these stories won’t help. They’re only seen as instances, not part of a broader picture.”
But Paris said she’s happy with the changes she’s seen. She’s says that Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s historic Virginia plantation, recently began to include discussion of slavery on the premises to its tour. She said Black History Month — or Black Future Month — will be part of the answer to solving racism.
“I think things are dire, but I also think there’s always hope,” she says. “If there wasn’t hope, people wouldn’t still be protesting. And there are a whole lot of us who have a strong desire to live in this world together peacefully.”
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Allan Ross is a Lansing-based freelance writer, actor, podcaster and television producer.
Photos ©
Dave Trumpie
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of
Trumpie Photography.