What Does Black History Month mean to me?
I’ll have to start at the beginning for you to see.
As a small black boy I went to public school in the city.
My neighborhood was poor, and nothing I saw was pretty.
But for one month a year we hung posters of tired old black faces.
We were constantly reminded; we suffered more than all other races.
If you doubted that happened, then you weren’t listening closely.
In every story told we were victims of the evil white man… mostly.
We learned we were kidnapped and stolen from our motherland.
Bound in chains upon the sea and then cast onto a foreign sand.
There we endured hardships that no other people ever had to face.
Stripped of our freedom and made a slave in a strange & evil place.
No other people labored and died like we did, in all of human history.
How the word slavery exists all over the world is an unspoken mystery.
Our bondage by the white man came through no fault of our own.
Anyone who claims we sold each other would be shunned and stoned.
Against slavery only bold blacks stood tall, and our liberty they won.
They did it with courage, strength, God and not with the use of a gun.
And yet we aren’t really free; the struggle still goes on each day.
We fight for equality, the end of oppression and for reparation pay.
So we honor King, Malcom, Douglas, Oprah, Jackson, Parks and many more.
And we make sure to limit our conversation only to those who came before.
We never speak of the horrors and evils that we as a people did to many others.
History must not include the Moors, African genocide or the killings of our brothers.
The use of slavery must always be our shield against every attempt at accountability.
We must cry racism whenever we are faced with the notion we take responsibility.
Today many blacks turn our criminals into heroes and our cheaters into champions.
Valuing emotion over logic, & lies over truth, has become our constant companions.
Must we always be society’s victim or remembered as a withered beaten slave?
Do those who tell only one side of history think that they being kind or brave?
These are just some of the questions I asked when I stood and gave my speech.
Unfortunately, I asked these forbidden questions while within my teacher’s reach.
I hope one day we will end this ridiculous yearly racial dividing of our nation,
And whites will stop crying about sins of the past that were not of their creation.
Today, I look around and wonder what have we done with the freedoms we’ve won?
But mostly, I hope that soon February will be just another cold month to my black son.
