Donell Edwards Founder & Publisher The College World Reporter

I felt compelled to write this commentary in response to the article, "Black History Month Needs to Go," written by Ms. Trudy Bourgeois for the Huffington Post.  Also because there appears to be a growing number of people who share Ms. Bourgeois' opinion and who believe there is no need to continue to celebrate Black History Month. 

First of all, Black History Month is an American celebration, for all Americans, not just for Black Americans; a time when all people in this nation and around the world recognize the achievements and contributions of people of the Black Diaspora.

It is unfortunate that the history of minorities (African Americans, Latinos, Asians, etc.) is not included in American history classes to the extent that it should be.  However, to be quite honest, because of the richness and vastness of those histories, this would be a very difficult undertaking, and thus the need for Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

As the publisher of The College World Reporter  (CWR) during our first year I decided that we would celebrate not only Black History Month, but also Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Women's History Month, and we planned to do a tribute to Native American Month as well.  Because it is our belief that the more we know about our neighbors and their achievements and their way of life, the more respect we will have for each other, and hopefully, this will at the very least result in our being more tolerant of each other.

I also mention this because I learned so much about the contributions of cultures other than my own African American culture doing the research to pay tribute to these other outstanding American groups.  I was literally amazed at the contributions of Asian Americans and Latino Americans, and women, and I was ashamed that I had until then been ignorant of those contributions, and had made no effort to educate myself.

In response to those who feel that history should only be taught in our schools and these special months that have been designated to honor the achievements of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and women are insignificant and should be eliminated, it should be noted that in many cultures the histories of the people are transferred from generation to generation, and thus, the history is preserved.  If not for Black History Month much of our history would never be learned by younger generations relying only on what they learn in school history classes.  And this is true regardless if the children are black, Latino, Asian, or female. 

I have come to the conclusion over my years of doing research and educating myself about other cultures, that it is not solely the responsibility of the educational system to teach individuals about the achievements of members of their particular ethnic group, it is the responsibility of those diverse groups and our own individual to learn about our history and to share our history with others.  Black History Month has been and continues to be a profound instrument in achieving that goal. 

Yes, we still need Black History Month and all of the other months that are designated to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of all of the diverse ethnic and gender groups in America.

I have a number of theories about the reasons those who feel that Black History Month should be eliminated have come to that conclusion.  One of those is that there is a serious generational gap and disconnect between African American youth and our older generations.  

I am in my 60s and I grew up during the civil rights era.  I experienced and lived through segregation, then integration.  I know and understand the monumental struggle it took and the lives that were sacrificed so that African Americans can enjoy the measure of freedom and opportunities that we now have.  By the way, that struggle is ongoing in spite of the many advances that have been made in race relations.

I feel that some of our youth and even some in our older generations are unaware of our history, or choose to ignore or forget our history, because they don't want to be reminded of our past.  It makes them ashamed.  Some of them feel like I imagine some white people may feel about being reminded about the atrocities of slavery.  They just want to forget and move on.

We must move on, but we cannot move on into the future without acknowledging and paying the proper respect to those who have given so much in the effort to make life better for blacks in America.  Those sacrifices cannot be acknowledged if there is not some means of focusing attention on the achievements of African Americans on a larger scale than inclusion in history books, and that is what Black History Month does.

Anyone who believes that Black History Studies alone will accomplish the task of educating those interested in learning about the achievements of African Americans, and will promote the appreciation and respect for those sacrifices and accomplishments among African Americans themselves, are very na�ve.

When I was in high school many years ago a white student challenged black students to cite any examples of the contributions and achievements of blacks to society.  I was angered but at a loss to respond, as were the other black students who were present.  There was no Black History Month at the time, and I only learned later that some of the Americans I studied about in American history were black.  In most instances their photos were not included along with their historical accounts.  There was no Internet or search engines to use for further research.  In most instances our parents were just as ignorant as we were and could not help us.  Without Black History Month, this unacceptable condition would have continued.

In order for people to succeed it is imperative for them to feel good about themselves, to have a measure of confidence, to relate to others who have succeeded, to have some sense of pride and self-esteem, and being told as a child that you have no heritage, and that your people have not made any contributions to society, it is very easy to begin to accept what you are being told, especially when you see nothing to refute what you have been told, and that continues on into adulthood for many.

Black History Month has been the remedy for this problem, and has helped not only African Americans to learn about their history, but all Americans who choose to learn about our rich heritage, and has generated interest in learning about African Americans among many other groups who would otherwise not have given a second thought to what contributions African Americans have made.

Our history is rich with the achievements of people like Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Crispus Attucks, Reginald Lewis, Benjamin Banneker, Harriett Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Marva N. Collins, Malcolm X, Cathy Hughes, George Washington Carver, Kenneth I. Chenault, Booker T. Washington, Dr. Ben Carson, Madam C.J. Walker, Dorie Miller, Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Granville T. Woods, Matthew Henson, Mary Church Terrell, Joe Louis Clark, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, Sojourner Truth, Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, Dr. Charles Drew, Dr. Mae C. Jemison, Mary McLeod Bethune, John H. Johnson, Maggie Lena Walker, Garrett Morgan, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, Constance Baker Motley, Earl Graves, and L. Douglas Wilder, and many, many other Black history makers too numerous to mention here. 

All of these great black Americans made significant contributions to our world society, not just to America and the black community, but most of them were not included in 

American history books until recently, and many are still excluded.  

If you are reading this article and you do not know who the great black Americans are on the list above, and what they achieved, that is another reason that we still need Black History Month.

During Black History Month we also learn much from the ugly and violent history of the Civil Rights Movement, which includes the Birmingham church bombing, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and the march on Washington, as well as the brave people, white and black, many of whom gave their lives in the struggle to win civil rights and equality for everyone, not just black Americans. 

I refer to such people as Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo.  Do you know who these people are, and the sacrifices they made?  If you do not, that is why we still need Black History Month. 

In order for American  citizens to be fully educated about American history, they must possess some degree of knowledge of all of the peoples and cultures that have contributed to this great nation that we call, America.

I acknowledge and applaud the progress that has been made in race relations in the United States, and continuing to celebrate Black History Month, and the fact that it is embraced by so many Americans of all ethnicities, is proof of that progress. 

However, we must never forget the lessons we have learned from our collective history, so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that is one of the foremost reasons that we should continue to celebrate Black History Month.

So, do we really need Black History Month anymore?  The answer to that question is absolutely and unequivocally, yes! 

I am Donell Edwards, a member of the human race, a black man, a proud American, and a citizen of the world.    

 

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was born on July 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, William Marshall, the grandson of a slave, worked as a steward at an exclusive club. His mother, Norma, was a kindergarten teacher. One of William Marshall's favorite pastimes was to listen to cases at the local courthouse before returning home to rehash the lawyers' arguments with his sons. Thurgood Marshall later recalled, "Now you want to know how I got involved in law? I don't know. The nearest I can get is that my dad, my brother, and I had the most violent arguments you ever heard about anything. I guess we argued five out of seven nights at the dinner table."

 

Marshall attended Baltimore's Colored High and Training School (later renamed Frederick Douglass High School), where he was an above-average student and put his finely honed skills of argument to use as a star member of the debate team. The teenaged Marshall was also something of a mischievous troublemaker. His greatest high school accomplishment, memorizing the entire United States Constitution, was actually a teacher's punishment for misbehaving in class.

 

After graduating from high school in 1926, Marshall attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. There, he joined a remarkably distinguished student body that included Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana; Langston Hughes, the great poet; and Cab Calloway, the famous jazz singer.

 

After graduating from Lincoln with honors in 1930, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Despite being overqualified academically, Marshall was rejected because of his race. This firsthand experience with discrimination in education made a lasting impression on Marshall and helped determine the future course of his career. Instead of Maryland, Marshall attended law school in Washington, D.C. at Howard University, another historically black school. The dean of Howard Law School at the time was the pioneering civil rights lawyer Charles Houston. Marshall quickly fell under the tutelage of Houston, a notorious disciplinarian and extraordinarily demanding professor. Marshall recalled of Houston, "He would not be satisfied until he went to a dance on the campus and found all of his students sitting around the wall reading law books instead of partying." Marshall graduated magna cum laude from Howard in 1933.

 

After graduating from law school, Marshall briefly attempted to establish his own practice in Baltimore, but without experience he failed to land any significant cases.

 

In 1934, he began working for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In one of Marshall's first cases-which he argued alongside his mentor, Charles Houston-he defended another well-qualified undergraduate, Donald Murray, who like himself had been denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School. Marshall and Houston won Murray v. Pearson in January 1936, the first in a long string of cases designed to undermine the legal basis for de jure racial segregation in the United States.

 

Later in 1936, Marshall moved to New York City to work full time as legal counsel for the NAACP. Over the following decades, Marshall argued and won a variety of cases to strike down many forms of legalized racism, helping to inspire the American Civil Rights Movement. Marshall's first victory before the Supreme Court came in Chambers v. Florida (1940), in which he successfully defended four black men who had been convicted of murder on the basis of confessions coerced from them by police. Another crucial Supreme Court victory came in the 1944 case of Smith v. Allwright, in which the Court struck down the Democratic Party's use of whites-only primary elections in various Southern states.

 

However, the great achievement of Marshall's career as a civil-rights lawyer was his victory in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of black parents in Topeka, Kansas on behalf of their children forced to attend all-black segregated schools. Through Brown v. Board, one of the most important cases of the 20th century, Marshall challenged head-on the legal underpinning of racial segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.

 

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore racial segregation of public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While enforcement of the Court's ruling proved to be uneven and painfully slow, Brown v. Board provided the legal foundation, and much of the inspiration, for the American Civil Rights Movement that unfolded over the next decade. At the same time, the case established Marshall as one of the most successful and prominent lawyers in America.

 

In 1961, then-newly elected President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall as a judge for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Serving as a circuit court judge over the next four years, Marshall issued more than 100 decisions, none of which was overturned by the Supreme Court. Then, in 1965, Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed Marshall to serve as the first black U.S. solicitor general, the attorney designated to argue on behalf of the federal government before the Supreme Court.

 

During his two years as solicitor general, Marshall won 14 of the 19 cases that he argued before the Supreme Court.

 

Finally, in 1967, President Johnson nominated Marshall to serve on the bench before which he had successfully argued so many times before-the United States Supreme Court. On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, becoming the first African American to serve on the nation's highest court.

 

Marshall joined a liberal Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which aligned with Marshall's views on politics and the Constitution. As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall consistently supported rulings upholding a strong protection of individual rights and liberal interpretations of controversial social issues. He was part of the majority that ruled in favor of the right to abortion in the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, among several other cases. In the 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, which led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty, Marshall articulated his opinion that the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances.

 

Throughout Marshall's 24-year tenure on the Court, Republican presidents appointed eight consecutive justices, and Marshall gradually became an isolated liberal member of an increasingly conservative Court. For the latter part of his time on the bench, Marshall was largely relegated to issuing strongly worded dissents, as the Court reinstated the death penalty and limited affirmative action measures and abortion rights. Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991; Justice Clarence Thomas replaced him.

 

Thurgood Marshall died on January 24, 1993, at the age of 84.

 

Thurgood Marshall stands alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as one of the greatest and most important figures of the American Civil Rights Movement. And although he may be the least popularly celebrated of the three, Marshall was arguably the most instrumental in the movement's achievements toward racial equality. Marshall's strategy of attacking racial inequality through the courts represented a third way of pursuing racial equality, more pragmatic than King's soaring rhetoric and less polemical than Malcolm X's strident separatism. In the aftermath of Marshall's death, an obituary read: "We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall."

 

Thurgood Marshall. [Internet]. 2013. Biography Channel Online Official website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241 [Accessed 28 Feb 2013].

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Barbara Jordan

A groundbreaking African-American politician, Barbara Jordan worked hard to achieve her dreams. She grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Houston, Texas. The daughter of a Baptist minister, Jordan was encouraged by her parents to strive for academic excellence. Her gift for language and building arguments was apparent in high school, where she was an award-winning debater and orator.

After graduating from Texas Southern University in 1956, Jordan continued her studies at Boston University Law School. She was one of the few black students in the program. Jordan returned to Texas after earning her degree and set up her law practice. At first, she worked out of her parents' home. Before long, Jordan became active in politics by campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket of John F. Kennedy and fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1962, Jordan launched her first bid for public office, seeking a spot in the Texas legislature. It took two more tries for her to make history.

In 1966, Jordan finally won a seat in the Texas legislature, becoming the first black woman to do so. She did not receive a warm welcome from her new colleagues initially, but she eventually won some of them over. Jordan sought to improve the lives of her constituents by helping usher through the state's first law on minimum wage. She also worked to create the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1972, her fellow lawmakers voted her in as president pro tempore of the state senate. Jordan became the first African American woman to hold this post.

Advancing in her career, Jordan won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee, she was thrust into the national spotlight during the Watergate scandal. Jordan stood as a moral compass during this time of crisis, calling for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon for his involvement in this illegal political enterprise. "I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution," she said in a nationally televised speech during the proceedings.

At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, Jordan once again captured the public's attention with her keynote address. She told the crowd, "My presence here . . . is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred." Jordan had reportedly hoped to secure the position of U.S. attorney general within Jimmy Carter's administration after he won the election, but Carter gave the post to someone else.

Announcing that she wouldn't seek reelection, Jordan finished up her final term in 1979. Some thought that she might have gone farther in her political career, but it was later revealed that Jordan had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around this time.

She took some time to reflect on her life and political career, penning Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (1979). Jordan soon turned her attention toward educating future generations of politicians and public officials, accepting a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin. She became the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair of Public Policy in 1982.

While her educational work was the focus of her later years, Jordan never fully stepped away from public life. She served as a special counsel on ethics for Texas Governor Ann Richards in 1991. The following year, Jordan once again took the national stage to deliver a speech at the Democratic National Convention. Her health had declined by this point, and she had to give her address from her wheelchair. Still, Jordan spoke to rally her party with the same powerful and thoughtful style she had displayed 16 years earlier.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Jordan to head up the Commission on Immigration Reform. He also honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year. She passed away two years later, on January 17, 1996, in Austin, Texas. Jordan died of pneumonia, a complication of her battle with leukemia.

The nation mourned the loss of a great pioneer who shaped the political landscape with her dedication to the Constitution, her commitment to ethics and her impressive oratory skills. "There was simply something about her that made you proud to be a part of the country that produced her," said former Texas governor Ann Richards in remembrance of her colleague. President Clinton said, "Barbara always stirred our national conscience."