Black History Month?

Heather Cox Richardson

Any high school history teacher knows that February is Black History Month. And almost any American high school student can tell you who Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was, because schools tend to focus on him around the time of the federal holiday that honors him.

But, sadly, many Americans know little else about black history.

In an interview with Mike Wallace, Morgan Freeman objected to Black History Month, pointing out that black history should not be relegated to a single month. Black History is American history, and should be taught as generally as any other kind of American history.

Easy, huh?

The last thing high school teachers need is more extra lessons tacked on to old histories. They don’t have time for what they have to do now. So how can we tackle Freeman’s legitimate complaint?

Marian Anderson: The Contralto Who Launched the Civil Rights Movement

Heather Cox Richardson

April 9, 1939, fifty-four years to the day after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant, brilliant contralto Marian Anderson launched the popular civil rights movement.

Born on February 27, 1897, into a musical family in Philadelphia,

Anderson was the granddaughter of a slave. Her astonishing voice caught people’s attention when she was only six. She began to sing in church choirs and, as she got older, sang for pay at local events. Poverty and prejudice kept her from obtaining even a high school education, but her neighbors raised money to enable her to study music privately after an all-white music academy refused her admittance.

A few successful New York concerts could not break through the racial prejudice of 1920s America, but Europeans recognized her talent. A European tour in the early 1930s was a wild success, with composers writing for her and fans flocking to hear the young singer with, as conductor Arturo Toscanini said, a voice heard once in a hundred years.

Black History Month: What We Owe to the Black Domestic Servants of the Jim Crow South

Katherine van Wormer*

Cheering a speaker in a Montgomery
bus boycott church meeting. From Life
magazine, February 6, 1956.

For Black History Month, let us honor the women who worked as domestic servants for white families in the Jim Crow South. They endured the indignities of segregation to help support their families. Moving in between black and white worlds, such women played enormously important roles in the first successful Civil Rights struggle: the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, where the young Martin Luther King, Jr., got his start. 

David W. Jackson III, Charletta Sudduth, and I (one the descendant of Louisiana slave owners, the others the descendants of slaves) have written a book based on interviews with former housekeepers, caretakers, and cooks and members of the white families they worked for, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim CrowSouth (Louisiana State University Press, 2012).