Black History Month: What Have We Learned?

I do wonder who Black History Month is for? Certainly, black Americans don't need to be reminded of their history. They continue to have to put up with racial stereotypes and profiling today, often with tragic results like last year's Trayvon Martin case. But, someone needs to be reminded of this history, especially before suggesting such events as a George Zimmerman-DMX celebrity boxing match. The promoter had the audacity of suggesting proceeds go to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. I can't even begin to imagine what Trayvon's parents must have felt hearing about this horribly crass event.

In today's reality show environment anyone can become a celebrity. A far cry from the Civil Rights Movement, which Black History Month was intended to keep fresh in people's minds. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks continue to get their due, but the struggle itself has been pretty much reduced to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington, conveniently summed up in these clips on History channel.

This has led writers like Theodore R. Johnson to ponder if Black History Month has any relevance today. It pretty much went underneath all the right wing pundits' radar screens this year, who typically rant why there isn't a White History Month, taking little or no heed of what should be a month of reflection on our tarnished history.

It seems most Americans believe that what is past is past and that they are not accountable for former misdeeds, even when they continue to commit them, such as rallying behind George Zimmerman in the infamous trail, where Zimmerman claimed he was defending himself against a young Trayvon, which the media essentially presented as a typical black hoodlum.

The notorious Florida Stand Your Ground law clearly came into play in this case, and that law is now enforced in many other states throughout the country. You can blame Zimmerman's acquittal on overzealous prosecutors who wanted to pin him with a second-degree murder charge, but evidence seemed to suggest Zimmerman was fully aware of his actions, and probably knew he was within his "rights" according to the law.

It is cases like these that show how little we have moved forward since the Civil Rights era. We hear claims of "victimization" from all sides to the point that you have faux debates over which is worse, "nigger" or "cracker," as Martin apparently called Zimmerman a "creepy-assed cracker." If only Zimmerman had filed charges against Martin for assault, but I guess his "manhood" had been called into question.

Maybe if some enterprising American cable network did something like BBC One's Turn Back Time: The Family, which introduced a black Jamaican immigrant family (7:50 mark) in the 1960s, persons might get a better awareness of what it was like growing up in America over the decades, instead of the hackneyed reality shows we are subjected to like "celebrity" boxing matches.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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