Facing Black History as a Two-Sided Story
We’ve come a long way since the early 1990s, when I wondered whether we ought to bother with special stories for Black History Month. Shouldn’t we just integrate stories about black people into our regular coverage?
Editors of the Afro-American newspaper, to whom I posed my question, politely set me straight. That February spotlight shined a bit of light, they explained, on a history shrouded in ignorance. I couldn’t disagree, so every February we’ve sought to learn, report and share a bit more of that history.
We’ve written on African American tourism; researching that story introduced me to such real-life characters represented in the Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore as Henry ‘Box’ Brown, who mailed himself to freedom; and Arctic explorer Matthew Henson in the Banneker-Douglass Museum. We’ve had stories on impersonating Harriet Tubman and reports on high school history projects on Calvert County hero Harriet Elizabeth Brown, who enlisted Thurgood Marshall to sue for equal pay for black teachers. We’ve written about monumental statues to Marshall and Alex Haley.
As you can read between the lines, we felt pretty proud of ourselves. Surely we were part of an enlightened era. When we elected and reelected an African American president, it was easy to let ourselves believe that focusing on the good things — ingenuity, indomitability, inspiration — was enough. Through those years, I could write that black history is all our history, and believe that we all rose together on the tide of those virtues.
Over the last few years, I’ve learned that I was wrong.
Slavery and its legacy put black and white Americans on different sides of history.
Black Americans? Not in 1857, when Calvert County-born Marylander Roger B. Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court, ruled in the Dred Scott decision that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States. His statue stood in veneration on our State House grounds until two years ago.
Nor in the time of Abraham Lincoln (on whose 210th birth anniversary I write), who prosecuted the terrible Civil War for the sake of a nation not divided by slavery.
It took the 18th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1868, to grant citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
If white Americans — my ancestors among them — recognized that law, why did equality need the Civil Rights Act a century later?
The answer is in the 1964 Act’s long title: “An act to enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States of America to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations …”
We needed it to enforce and provide relief.
I lived through that century’s Civil Rights movement. Yet born on the white side of the great divide, I had no idea what life was like on the other side.
I could meet a Tuskegee Airman like Leroy Battle, our Lothian neighbor who died a few years back. I could even read his books and feel proud of what he’d achieved — without having the slightest idea what it cost him.
That’s what white privilege means.
Today our obliviousness is falling on us like a ton of bricks.
It hits us when white losers shoot up black churches. When we see college yearbook photographs of white men dressed up for fun in black face and Ku Klux Klan robes. When high school kids in our own counties express their values in lynching ropes.
Signs like that tell me that we — all of us, on both sides of the great racial divide — are living out the legacy of slavery.
So this week, for Black History Month, we bring you a story about a dubious honor. The good news is that Historic Sotterley Plantation in St. Mary’s County has been recognized as a UNESCO world history site. The bad news is that it is recognized as a Middle Passage destination in the international slave trade. Facing up to those facts, and learning how to tell that double-sided story, as Sotterley is, may be the challenge of our times.