Our view: All must embrace our history
The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States redefines black history and integration in America as we’ve known it for so many years.
But we have much more to do.
It was a black historian, Carter G. Woodson, who first suggested we set aside time to study black history. Woodson rightfully observed that contributions of blacks were essentially ignored in mainstream American history, and in 1926, he initiated a week in February to set the record straight.
That was expanded to a month in 1976, when February became Black History Month.
It is wrong that the color of a person’s skin would determine placement in the annals of American history. Woodson knew that, of course, and Black History Month has helped raise the American consciousness when it comes to the many contributions blacks have made. That includes recognizable names like Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, but it also includes lesser-known leaders.
Former slave Henry Highland Garnet, for instance, followed the Underground Railroad to Central New York and as a teenager entered the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry in Whitesboro — one of the first schools in the United States to embrace abolition and to admit blacks. Garnet became a leader there and was active in many anti-slavery causes in Oneida County before the Civil War. In 1881, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Liberia.
Another former slave, Jermaine Wesley Loguen, came to Upstate New York and was instrumental in the Underground Railroad. In 1848, he founded Hope Chapel — today the oldest African American church in Utica and the Mohawk Valley.
Look for leaders in more modern times, too. John Cavness, who died 10 years ago, moved to Camden in the mid-1950s, long before other people of color lived there. He taught black history first at a local church and later at Rome Free Academy, where he helped organize a Black History Club. In 1976, Cavness opened part of his Westdale home to area teens because he wanted them to have a safe place to hang out. Those teens were all white, but Cavness was colorblind.
McKinley Collins, whose family was among the first blacks in Rome, is perhaps best known for his rich baritone voice which has long been a staple at Utica’s Grace Episcopal Church. Behind the scenes, Collins has worked tirelessly to improve race relations.
We need to tell these stories — and so many more. By weaving them into the American fabric, we can move beyond “Black History Month,” as suggested some years ago by C.W. “Clarence” Bass, a prominent black Utica businessman and civic leader, who died in 1998.
“The longer Black History Month remains as a separate segment of our history,” Bass said, “the less important it will become to the total population and American history itself.”
Bass was right. The election of the first black president moves us to a new level. When this story is told, Barack Obama will be a thread not in black history, but in America’s history. That is exactly where all the others belong, and it is our responsibility to make sure that they are.
Observer-Dispatch
