BlackPast.org Board Member and newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. shares his concerns about the prospect of Black history being lost from public memory. He also advances his ideas on how it can be preserved in this nationโs increasingly politically polarized atmosphere.
โWhat happened on September 11th?โ
My youngest grandsonโhe was thirteen thenโasked me that question two years ago in a gift shop at EPCOT. We were talking and I had made some passing reference to that day, en route to making some other point. Now I stood there with my mouth open, wondering: how could he not know?
But of course, he didnโt. While the trauma of September 11, 2001, is seared into memory as if with a branding iron for those of us who were of age on that day, Jayden wasnโt even born until eight years later. So, he didnโt knowโcouldnโt knowโthe significance of that day simply because no one ever bothered to tell him.
It troubled me in the moment. It troubles me more two years later. After all, no one was intentionally trying to keep my grandson from knowing about the terrorist attacks of twenty-four years ago. He just didnโt. But people are most certainly and intentionally trying to keep him from knowing black history. If an intelligent boy: deanโs list student, gifted program, can miss something as looming as September 11th just by happenstance and neglect, what are the odds of him having any appreciable grasp of black history as he comes of age in an era wherein his ability to understand that history is under assault from every direction?
This year alone, we have seen Jackie Robinson erased from a Defense Department website and Harriet Tubman banished from one belonging to the National Parks Service. Weโve seen the Tuskegee Airmen removed from Air Force training materials and an executive order attacking the National Museum of African American History and Culture for supposed โideological indoctrinationโ and โdivisive narratives.โ
Itโs a lot. But other than the brazenness of it, there is nothing new about any of this. On the contrary, the campaign to officially erase inconvenient history has been underway for years. As far back as 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law banning ethnic studies classes that โpromote resentment toward a race or class of people.โ Four years later, students in Jefferson County, Colorado walked out of school over a mandate that their history classes emphasize only โpositiveโ aspects of the American story.
There has, it seems, long been an impatience with the history of people of color in this country and perhaps thatโs not surprising, given that that history so often stands in implicit indictment of Americaโs failure to live up to its own ideals. But that impatience has never felt as free to express itself as it does at this fraught moment in history.
Thatโs why recent years have seen a marker commemorating the spot where Emmett Tillโs mutilated body was fished from the Tallahatchie River repeatedly shot full of holes. And the governor of Virginia instituting a tip line for students to rat out teachers who explore so-called โdivisiveโ concepts in class. And a school board in Kentucky banning Ruby Bridges Goes To School, a book Bridges wrote for second graders about how she integrated New Orleans schools in 1960. And a black history museum in Baton Rouge ransacked and a statue honoring George Floyd in New York City vandalized and a plaque in Cairo, Georgia marking the birthplace of Jackie Robinson defaced. And dozens of states banning or trying to ban courses on African American history while DEI, Lord, DEI, is bruited about like some incantation of the devil by the same people who, three years ago, thought critical race theory was the end of the world as we knew it.
What are the odds in this era of my grandson or any of our children learning any of those names, any of those people, or the circumstances that made their lives (and deaths) worthy of note? The answer is as obvious as it is disheartening.
Which is why, on the first day of this month, Dr. Marvin Dunn, a retired professor at Florida International University, parked himself in a chair beneath a tree on the FIU campus and held what he called a free course in African American history. About thirty people, drawn by an Instagram post, gathered beneath the tree to hear Dunn discuss the 1923 massacre in Rosewood, Florida where a thriving black town was burned after a white woman lied about being assaulted by an African American man.
โI did not get taught a lot of black history from school,โ a 27-year-old marine biology major told The Miami Herald, by way of explaining her attendance there.
Dunnโs impromptu class, beneath what has been unofficially dubbed The Black History Learning Tree, is both a sobering sign of the times and stirring proof that sometimes, it is an act of defiance simply to remember. Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwellโs classic novel 1984 would certainly agree, living as he did in a world where the right to remember was explicitly denied and thus, the โlie passed into history and became truth.โ
Which is an apt description of what is happening in this country right now in real time. And a person without memory, a person who doesnโt know his or her own story, is a tree with shallow roots that topples in the first heavy storm. So for black people, our very survival demands that we not only safeguard memory, but that we pass it on.
Remember what they told you to forget. Remember Mansa Musaโs gold and Abubakariโs voyage. Remember Harrietโs flight and Frederickโs question. Remember Idaโs witness and Marcusโ parades. Remember Madame C.J.โs pomade and Marianโs concert. Remember Marthaโs brand-new beat and Jamesโ brand-new bag. Remember the guns that killed Emmett, Breonna, Tamir, and Trayvon. Remember the knee on Georgeโs neck, the rope around Abramโs throat. Remember Malcolmโs X and yes, remember Martinโs dream.
Remember as a bulwark against the tide. Remember as resistance to the great command of the age which demands forgetfulness, because some deem the price of remembrance too high.
Summer before last, my wife and I visited the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. If you havenโt been, you should go there. It is, even for one who has visited a dozen black history museums, a stunningly powerful experience. My wife was on the far side of the room from me, studying one of the exhibits when out of nowhere, this sobbing, disconsolate white woman embraced her. โI didnโt know,โ she wailed. โIโm so sorry.โ
After Marilyn patted her back uncertainly and the lady got her emotions under control and went off with her husband, a black woman working security gave my wife a knowing look. โWe get that a lot,โ she said.
And there it is, of course, laid bare, the plain truth behind all the word salad about this history promoting โresentmentโ and furthering โdivisive narratives,โ the embarrassingly obvious reason some people find it so dangerous and inconvenient that it must be restricted, neutered, corralled, and the world thereby made safe for mythologies of a noble, uncomplicated American greatness.
Because otherwise, white people might feel bad.
Therefore, we are told, we must not remember.
But we must. We should remember even when it hurts white folksโor, for that matter, black ones. In fact, remember because it hurts. Somehow, some of us have evolved a strange ethos that they have a divine right to live without pain. But pain is an inextricable thread of life. And properly understood, it is a teacher. It is a way to grow.
Unfortunately, it takes a certain emotional maturity to understand this and that is a trait not found in abundance among us these days. Until and unless it is, Marvin Dunn offers a model and a way forward that all of us should seize upon.
If not in the classroom, then out beneath the tree. If not beneath the tree, then in the church basement, the school library, the community center, the rec room, the living room. Wherever, however and whatever it takes, we must remember by any means necessary. Ignorance is not an option.
That goes for me as much as for anyone. That day at EPCOT, I made sure my grandson walked away with an understanding of the great tragedy that befell this country on September 11. I felt an obligation to make sure he knew that story.
But it occurs to me only now that I need to talk to him about a few other things as well.
The photo accompanying this article is of Whipped Peter, an enslaved man. It was taken in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in April 1863
