February is Black History Month

By CLAYTON ADAMS

Time in the Word F ebruary is fast approaching and I am looking forward to celebrating this month as it has been officially designated as Black History month.

I thoroughly enjoy reading about, investigating, and writing about Black History, particularly about incidents and people from the greater Mid-South area and especially Crittenden County, Arkansas.

My library is voluminous and a very large part of my library is composed of books on black history, biographies, autobiographies all covering the range of black history in America. The first book I read that set me on the road to learning was the autobiography by Booker T.

Washington, Up from Slavery.

Reading the account of his entrance exam into school is amazing but the insight Mr. Washington gives about his dream of attending school, of working to save a little money and traveling to college is just as amazing. To anyone who needs encouragement and a kick-in-but to achieve a dream, Booker T. Washington’s account will serve well.

The concern I have about black history is that it is often relegated to just a very small group of famous people who are held up (as they should be) as the heroes and heroines to the exclusion of so many thousands of others who greatly contributed to the exploration, settling, establishing and the building of America.

The Dr. Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr., is at the head of this small group. But how much does America really know about the life and sacrifices of Dr. King? Dr. Kings generation is fast leaving this world and I am concerned about the legacy being lost with the younger generations.

If one does not know their history, history will repeat itself. I have also learned that many know their Civil Rights but few know the history that gave us our Civil Rights.

What about the lessor known people in black history? Few know their names; even fewer know their stories and what stories they are!

Men and women who were born into slavery, some escaped, some managed to buy their freedom, some were freed at the closing of the Civil War but all contributed to the reality and idea of Black History.

Most Americans believe the modern Civil Rights movement started with a bus passenger Ms. Rosa Parks, but the modern civil rights movement started earlier, in the small towns and rural farmlands in America when blacks and whites had to work together for survival – indeed for the American dream. This uniquely American dream is what draws millions of people to America from around the world today and tomorrow.

It is as Isaac Shaw, a black survivor of the 1919, Elaine, Arkansas massacre said on a hot night in July 1934, (Poinsett County, AR) in a meeting of black and white sharecroppers, Shaw said; “We colored can’t organize without you… and you white folks can’t organize without us… For a long time now the white folks and the colored folks have been fighting each other and both of us has been getting whipped all the time. We do not have nothing against one another but we got plenty against the landlord. The same chain that holds my people holds your people too. If we’re chained together on the outside, we ought to stay chained together in the union. It won’t do no good for us to divide because that’s where the trouble has been all the time” (13 July 1934, as witnessed and reported by Henry L. Mitchell, published in the Sharecropper’s Troubadour, John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition, by Michael K. Honey, 2013).

It was at the end of this meeting that a group of black and white sharecroppers, day-laborers and others formed the Southern Farmers Tenant Union (SFTU).

Black History is not just about one people to the exclusion of other people, Black History should be celebrated and discovered by all because Black History is American History.

Clayton P. Adams, West Memphis, Arkansas, email: claytonpadamslll@gmail.com.

Clayton Adams

Time in the Word