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Home > Features > Black History: Triumphs and Tragedies
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Black History: Triumphs and Tragedies
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by Patrick, Manning
Professor of History and African-American Studies
Northeastern University
Boston, Massachusetts
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| | Origins of the Movement
A tradition has grown up of celebrating, every year in February, the history of people of African descent. We owe that tradition especially to the efforts of Carter G. Woodson, who initiated Negro History Week in 1926, and who worked to build it for years thereafter. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian and a prolific writer, had earlier founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History. Black History Month, now celebrated especially in the United States, provides an opportunity to trace the accomplishments, the trials, and the connections of black people around the world.
The record of black religious leaders goes as far back as Bilal Bunami, the black slave who was the first prayer-caller for the community of Islam. Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young woman who became a Catholic leader of Kongo, was burned at the stake in 1706, while Shango, the king of Oyo some time before 1500, ascended to the heavens at the end of his life to become the god of thunder. The mathematicians of ancient Egypt and the architects of Great Zimbabwe laid down a tradition of technical exactitude that was followed in later centuries by Benjamin Banneker, who laid the plans for Washington D.C.; by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the violinist and composer from England; and by Cheikh Anta Diop, the analyst of human and natural sciences from Senegal. Political leaders, creating and defending communities, include Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire; the leaders of escaped slaves who maintained Palmares as an independent society within Brazil from 1605 to 1694; Antonio Maceo, leader of the Cuban war for independence from 1868; and Fanny Lou Hamer, the Mississippi voting-rights activist.
Overcoming Obstacles
Alongside these successful individuals were the crises faced by individuals and groups. Mothers faced betrayal as their loved ones were stolen and sold by grasping neighbors; communities lost their lands, crops, and animals to devastating droughts. The steady work of constructing cities and villages in Africa and the Americas brought fatigue to laborers whether free or in bondage. People of the Caribbean gained freedom from slavery in the nineteenth century, only to find that courts and legislatures prevented them from buying the land that they lived on. People in Africa gained relief from slave raiders in the twentieth century, only to find themselves labeled as "uncivilized" by the Europeans who occupied their lands and imposed taxes on them.
Black activists responded to these succeeding dilemmas by developing a tradition of crusading journalism. Olaudah Equiano published his autobiography in London in 1789; Frederick Douglass edited four different newspapers between 1847 and 1874. Robert Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905, and it eventually became a daily. The Negro World, published by Marcus Garvey, circulated all over the Atlantic from 1918 to 1933. In Paris, the Dahomean Kojo Tovalou-Houénou and the West Indian René Maran published Les Continents from 1923 to 1925; in Dahomey, La Voix du Dahomey appeared steadily from 1927 to 1957; and in Brazil, O Clarim d'Alvorada appeared in Sao Paulo from 1924 to 1932. In Los Angeles, Charlotta Bass took leadership of the California Eagle in 1912, and edited it until 1951.
The Reaffirmation of Black Life
As the twentieth century progressed, the people of Africa and its diaspora began to win praise instead of rejection for their cultural achievements and their lifestyle. The experience of black people -- enslaved to draw profits out of plantations and mines, subordinated by colonialism, and stigmatized by racism -- came to be recognized as a set of trials for all humanity. As the suffering can be widely understood, so also can the triumph of people rising from oppression to create new works of wonder and joy. The reaffirmation of black life, even in the midst of difficult times, springs clearly from the writings of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa-Thiong'o, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott. In another reaffirmation of life, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a global symbol of the politics of nonviolent action for self-determination, along with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who himself lived for over two decades in Africa.
With the impact of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. during the 1960s, and at the same time with the national independence of many countries in Africa and the Caribbean, Negro History Week became Black History Month. This annual celebration of one-sixth of humanity reminds us of the potential available within every person.
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