Understanding Why We Celebrate Black History in February and Everyday
February 1, 2021 marked the first day of Black History Month in the United States. Even though we’ve come so far as a nation, we have much, much further to go to fully achieving equality. Part of the reason for that is a serious lack of understanding of why recognizing Black history in America and across the world is important. That lack of understanding comes from two places: willful ignorance and conscientious stupidity. This is especially true in the video games industry, where asking for better representation of Black, PoC, and LGBTQ persons is constantly met with aggressive resistance.
The United States: Where We Came From vs Where We Are
Black History Month is a celebration Black people and events across the diaspora and is celebrated in the United States and Canada in February. Black History Month is also observed in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Netherlands in October. In 1926, African American author, historian, and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Carter G. Woodson established the second week of February to be Negro History Week.
The purpose of establishing ‘Negro History Week’ was to recognize Black people’s contributions to America. The second week of February was chosen because of birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, February 12, and Fredrick Douglas on February 14. Woodson, along with other African American scholars wanted the history of Black people in America to be taught in public schools. Our history includes Black people. Why should we not all be taught about where we came from and where we are?
Emancipation and National Freedom Day
On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring his intention to free enslaved peoples in states that were still in rebellion of the Union on January 1, 1863.
“That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”
And he signed the Emancipation Proclamation as soon as January 1, 1863 hit. On February 10, 1864, the Senate Judiciary Committee submitted a draft of the 13th Amendment that used language from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787:
“There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
On January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed the 13th Amendment and the following day, Lincoln signed the joint resolution, sending it to the states for ratification. It was Major Richard Robert Wright Sr., activist, community leader, and former slave who fought in the Civil War who chose February 1 as National Freedom Day to commemorate Lincoln’s signing of the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment wouldn’t be ratified until December 6th, however.
40 Acres and a Mule
On January 16, 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and other Union leaders met with Black ministers in Savanah, GA to discuss how best to assist the hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves. Those local Black leaders conferred that they wanted to be “free from domination of white men, [wanted] to be educated, and [wanted] to own land” Sherman signed Field Order 15 to set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed slaves, dividing the land to give to each family no more than 40 acres.
With President Lincoln’s assassination, however, President Andrew Johnson reversed Field Order 15 and gave those confiscated lands back to Confederate owners and offered no protection or assistance to newly freed slaves.
Reconstruction, Black Codes, and Jim Crow
Many states enacted Black Codes during reconstruction. These Black Codes are the basis for much of the racial discrimination of Black folk that persists today. These restrictive laws ensured continued cheap labor by forcing Black people to sign yearly labor contracts. If they refused, they risked jail, being fined, and forced into unpaid labor—the beginning of the American prison system.
Segregated drinking fountain
Source: History.com
Southern States enacted these Black codes just in late 1865, with South Carolina and Mississippi being the first states to require Black people to have written evidence of employment for the upcoming year or be arrested. In South Carolina, Black people were not allowed to have any occupation outside of farmer or servant or they would be taxed annually.
With no protection or assistance for newly freed Black people, many had no choice but to return to their abusers on those plantations, often working for the privilege of not being tossed out. Free and cheap labor from Black people naturally caused an even deeper rift between them and poor Whites. Poor Whites people—former Confederate soldiers-- took on the job of hunting, capturing, and beating Black people to maintain the new “law and order” as well as becoming judges, ensuring that Black people could not win court cases and had to be subjected to Black Codes. Hello, criminal justice system of the United States.
Though Republicans in Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, ratified the 14th and 15th Amendments, Southern states maintained much of the Black Codes throughout Reconstruction. And those laws would become Jim Crow laws.
Jim Crow laws, named for a character in a minstrel show, created and enforced laws of segregation. Though Jim Crow laws were enacted by Southern Democrats, they were supported by a segment within the Republican Party (the Lilly-White Movement) that supported excluding Black people from socioeconomic progress. Thus, the beginning of the slow, gradual shift of Republicans’ ceasing to support of Black people gaining equality and thriving in the United States.
Jim Crow laws would have the backing of judicial precedent with the 1896 United States Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine for Black people in America. President Woodrow Wilson segregated federal workplaces in 1913. Financial institutions, public education, workplace conditions, public entertainment, the military, and access to healthcare were essentially segregated from the Reconstruction era to 1965 with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Again, in case this somehow escaped your psyche: racism in the United States of America was sanction on both the state and federal levels, backed by law after law. For more context of how recent desegregation is—my mother was born in 1964.
The Civil Rights Era
Black people in America suffered state and federal mandated little to no access to funding for education in their neighborhoods. Property ownership in Black communities was difficult to come by due to the practice of redlining, the systemic refusal to sell to, loan to, or service Black people by raising prices or placing unobtainable criteria to qualify for said services.
Note, that in the US, education funding is determined by property tax. If Black people cannot afford to own property in their neighborhoods, how do you think the quality of education will be compared to those communities who do own property?
While Black people had been continuously fighting for equality in the US, it was Chief Justice Earl Warren’s ruling in the landmark SCOTUS case Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional that really sparked a glimmer of hope. The Warren Court continued to take cases that ruled Jim Crow laws unconstitutional. Naturally, there was incredible pushback from White people who genuinely believed Black people and other PoC did not deserve to be treated equally.
In 1961, the newly elected Democrat President, John F. Kennedy Jr. wanted the world to see the United States as a free and democratic society. The problem was he had taken a very cautious approach to making Civil Rights a part of his policy. Intolerance, oppression, and blatant violence against Black people was rampant across the US, especially in Southern states. Civil Rights leaders urged Kennedy to get off the sidelines and really start practicing what he preached and push for the tolerance and equality he preached.
Because Southern Democrats in Congress opposed any legislation supporting Civil Rights, JFK was cautious about addressing Civil Rights publicly. He, instead, focused more on enforcing existing laws rather than enacting new legislation. Though he was cautious, Kennedy appointed Black lawyers to various positions of his administration, including naming Thurgood Marshall to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.
It was also during this time of the Civil Rights Era that Southern Democrats felt abandoned by the Democrat Party and had finally had enough. Democrats from the Northeast and West Coast flocked to South to help Black Americans vote in the face of continued intimidation, harassment, and murder by Southern Whites.
It took the Ku Klux Klan murdering four little Black girls on May 3, 1963 in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama for President Kennedy to finally give up his non-committed stance and fully address racial inequality head on.
The year of Birmingham wasn’t just a turning point for Kennedy; it was a turning point for America’s two political parties. With Kennedy and more Democrats beginning to push for racial equality, Southern White people felt abandoned by the Democrat Party. With the Democrat Party pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1965, Black voters overwhelming changed from the Republican Party to the Democrat Party. South Carolina’s Southern Democrat Senator Strom Thurman, angry over the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the direction of the Democrat Party changed his party affiliation to Republican.
Many of the South’s “states rights” Democrats were attracted to 1964’s Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater who campaigned in opposition of the Civil Rights Act, even though he supported federal Civil Rights legislation before his presidential bid. Though Goldwater saw heavy support in the Deep South and was the first Republican since the Reconstruction era to win electoral votes in the Deep South’s swing states of Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, every other state, except his home state of Arizona. Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat, became president with over 70% of the Black vote.
With Harry Dent’s Republican strategy to fill the void that left Democrats left in Southern White voters, the new racial tension became more about economics on the surface, but ultimately, still targeted discrimination toward Black people in America. These tactics were perfected by Ronald Reagan’s political strategist, Lee Atwater and remain an integral part of Republican political “Southern” strategy.
70s TV Shows and White, Cognitive Dissonance
A few years ago, I was talking to a friend, on their page. Somehow, we began talking about racial stereotypes in the media and one of her friends, an older White male, said something to the effect of television in the 70s were the best because you had shows like All in the Family who weren’t afraid to tell it like it is and still be neighbors.
When I practically ignored him, because I didn’t have the energy, he became irate that I refused to indulge his conversation. I was a snowflake and didn’t know how to have a conversation. He was trying to force me to have a conversation with him because he felt entitled to my time and energy. When people, especially White people invoke television shows for their ability to discuss difficult to have conversations, I tend to back away because I have learned that they simply do not understand that my experience with the show isn’t the same as their fond memories of a show where an old racist white guy gets schooled by his black neighbor—a popular television trope.
It feeds into the notion that, with the vast array of information on Beyonce’s internet, Black people are obligated to 1. educate White people about racism and racial injustice at their whim and 2. be the arbiters of peace and reason in the face of ignorance. We’re not allowed feelings of anger, frustration, exhaustion. No, we must have this conversation and if we don’t, we’re not good Negroes.
I still see it in social media interactions whenever a Person of Color is defending themselves from a discriminatory encounter, they’re often demonized and even accused of being bullies for holding people accountable and telling them to go fuck themselves.
BLM and a New Generation Continuing the Fight for Racial Justice
Before the 2000s, Black people had to sit through racist jokes by coworkers and colleagues. We didn’t want to make waves, lose our jobs, or be seen as difficult, angry, ungrateful, or problematic. I can recall numerous times I had to sit through jokes that started off with “This joke is kind of racist, but…” and “You’re not easily offended, are you?”
Those days are absolutely over, much to the dismay of people who never thought there was anything wrong with racist jokes to begin with. Millennials and Gen Z gives no fucks about White people crying about not being able to tell their racist jokes. And they’ve helped older generations to be able to express that as well. Not that older generations weren’t already fighting the good fight (how else did we get here?) but the vigor of our youth’s ability to quickly mobilize via social media is something to behold.
The Black Lives Matter movement continues to fight for racial justice in our criminal justice system, to hold police and our government accountable. It’s unfortunate that people don’t understand the importance of creating a world that’s safe and fair for us all. Rather, too many people don’t care to. The BLM movement isn’t saying that “only” Black lives matter. We have to shout from the rooftops and highest mountains that our lives are important, we matter, because our law enforcement and justice system prove time and time again that our lives do not matter to them. And there are people who absolutely refuse to believe it because it’s not their experience.
There will always be resistance to Black existence. People will gaslight us with “whataboutisms” and “play devil’s advocate” and urge us to see racism “from someone else’s point of view.” Too many White people seem to be under the impression that treating non-White people as human beings—allowing us freedom and equality somehow takes away from their freedom and rights as human beings. And that’s just not true. The only thing we are hoping White people lose is their racist outlook toward non-White people. Like we really just want to exist in peace and there are people really saying, “No.” So we press on, fighting racial stereotypes, social and economic injustice, and our unjust criminal justice system.
Black History Month is not only about acknowledging the struggles that made us the strong, amazing, diligent people we are today, but celebrating what, for literally centuries—until 56 years ago, we weren’t allowed to—our Blackness, our beauty, our contributions, our vulnerability, our joy, our culture, and our magic.
