Who Is To Tell Our Story?

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile

tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in

the thought of the world, and it stands in

danger of being exterminated.

--Dr. Carter G. Woodson

I began with a quote from Dr. Woodson because I want readers to know who he was and what motivated him to establish what is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 along with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps.  In January 1916, he began publication of what is now The Journal of African American History.  In 1926, he pioneered the celebration of “Negro History Week,” during the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  It is important to understand that Woodson was operating during a period of rising Black self-consciousness that was being expressed in movements such as the Harlem/New Negro Renaissance and by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.

I arrived at Kent State University as a first-year student in September 1970, on the day campus reopened after the shootings that previous May and two years after Black United Students (BUS) marched off campus in protest against the administration’s decision to allow the Oakland, California police force to recruit at KSU.  They demanded what is now the Department of Africana Studies (AFS), the Center of Pan-African Culture (CPAC) and the hiring of more Black faculty and staff.  I remember being a naïve, wide-eyed, anxious 18-year-old and being swept up into BUS.  I was groomed by upper classmen who had participated in the 1968 “walk-out.”  I was mesmerized and in absolute awe of the militant group spirit they exuded.

When two BUS members, Dwayne White (aka Ibrahim Al-Khafiz) and Carl Gregory (aka Saiti Dihati), approached Dr. Edward Crosby, Director of the Institute for African American Affairs (IAAA), and Dr. Milton Wilson, the Dean for Human Relations, to propose that programming for Negro History Week be extended throughout the month of February, they were acting in concert with a larger Black student led Black Studies movement that was sweeping the country at that time.  Like Woodson before them, they believed,  “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.”

During those early formative years, if someone had told me that I would return to KSU as a Professor and Chair of the Department no less, I would have responded with an incredulous, “N-word, please!”  Now, more than 50 years later, as I move mercifully toward retirement, race is still the elephant in the room.  The weaponization of ignorance is the real danger in these treacherous yet exciting times.  The fabricated battle over Critical Race Theory (CRT); the banning of books, the attacks on African American history in a growing number of states; the legislative assaults on higher education, on DEI initiatives, and on the fundamentals of academic freedom are being waged to conserve an archaic status quo that was never intended to embrace 21^st century American realities. 

When State Senator, Jerry C. Cirino declared that Ohio colleges and universities were “too woke” and Ohio Senate Bill 1 became law, we understood precisely who and what was being targeted. The Women’s Center, the E. Timothy Moore Student Multicultural Center and the LGBTQ+ Center are now closed and the “Flashes Take Care of Flashes” KSU community is reeling under the deadly weight of the same authoritarian hammer that has always loomed over Black life.  The state legislature has effectively extorted Ohio colleges and universities into vile submission.  The forces of white supremacy have never shied away from making examples of their own.

A case can be made that the Civil Rights, the Black Consciousness and the Black Art Movements inspired other marginalized groups in the United States to awaken and to claim their legitimate places in this society.  The celebrations of Women’s History, Native American and Latinx Heritage, and Pride Flags are not coincidental.  Here at KSU, the Department of Africana Studies, the Center of Pan-African Culture and Black United Students are still housed in Oscar Ritchie Hall—named after KSU’s first African American professor—but the program’s future is shrouded in doubt.  The current SB1/MAGA-Sphere/“Make America Great Again” culture war is bent on obliterating the hard-fought-for social progress that has been achieved over the last five or more decades.

For those BUS students that transformed Negro History Week into Black History Month in February 1970, Woodson’s book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, was an even stronger influence.  He wrote, “… taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro’s mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor.  The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved.”  The current attacks on both public and higher education reveal the extent to which the MAGA posse wants to “re-take” control of the so-called “education” system; which is to say, they want to shape how and what people think.

I remember my father saying, “Take that Black shit back to Ohio, boy!  You got to get your foot in the door!”  My father, my mother, my grandparents did not live to see their son, their grandson, who changed his name, who learned to love and to be/become his true Afreekan Self get a proverbial job from “The Whiteman.”   They did not live to see him become a Professor and Chair at a predominantly white institution (PWI), yet I know they have watched over, guided and protected my journey from the House of the Ancestors.  After a more than 40-year career, and after spending the last five years of it being “the diversity” inside “the rooms” where the power brokers gathered, I learned the same lessons that the Blackside of American history have always taught: we are no more or less than the unwanted foster child that forced its way into a willfully blind dysfunctional family.

Black Lives do matter, but we cannot expect Black Life to matter more to others than it visibly matters to Black people.  For us, the study of the history and contributions of African people, not only here in the United States of America but throughout the development of the so-called modern world is the real point.  Our quest must be to acquire a true sustainable education that will help us to become better human beings or to achieve what the Yoruba people of West Africa call, “Iwa-Pele,” which means, “good and gentle character.”  Ultimately, our quest must not be limited to the question of how the Black experience is taught within the public/higher education system.

Embracing Black History Month can help this nation to learn about major chapters of the true story of how this nation became great.  There can be no genuine American story without all of our stories being told.   

Dr. Carter G. Woodson was clearly urging Black people to control not only the true education of ourselves, but more importantly, to control the education of our children.

We must tell our own story.