Celebrate black history with education

I feel pretty lucky with the way I was raised and educated. A product of the military, I’ve been taught by educators both on and off army bases through the public school system.

There weren’t many teachers I’ve had that I thought wasted my time.

But if there is one beef I do have is the way we were educated during Black History Month.

When you think of black history, the usual names such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X pop up. Maybe you even get to hear about that dude with the peanuts. Not to downplay the accomplishments of George Washington Carver, but that’s not good enough.

Reciting Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not good enough, especially because the way that speech is taught turns him into this mushy “I’m all about peace” man.

Dr. King’s name is prostituted out whenever there are riots or protests. “Martin Luther King wouldn’t have stood for violence.” Except King literally wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that the goal of his demonstrations was “so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

How’s that quote go about education? Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world? Conversely, miseducation is a very dangerous tool.

Sticking with Dr. King, I would just like to ask you to read that entire letter from Birmingham Jail. Educators, have your class study it. Here’s one of my favorite passages.

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” King wrote, “who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Are those the words of a man who wouldn’t have stood for violence or a man who is all about peace? I don’t think so.

This Black History Month, read about the lives and writings of others such as Frederick Douglass who in a speech on July 5, 1852 described how the American Independence Day and the values in such a holiday didn’t resonate with slaves and other African Americans.

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

This is what we should be studying during Black History Month. Not all the uses we can get out of peanuts.

Education is power? Well let’s make sure we empower with proper weapons.