Black History: One Month

February 1st marked the beginning of Black History month and as excited as I am to celebrate the history of my people, deep down I am troubled.
My entire life, I have looked forward to this special time of year where we put aside the textbooks and focus on some of the important people whom we normally wouldn’t learn about in the classroom environment and this was great to me.
I remember having to look up different African Americans and write reports on them for class during this month and I remember the joy of special assemblies where students would recite poems from famous black poets and put together African dance routines.
The halls would be covered in pictures and quotes from black activists and teachers would make a special effort to put on movies about slavery, but at some point something hit me and I began to look at Black History in a different light.
I started to realize just how much black people have contributed to history and as uplifting as it was, I was troubled by the fact that it was limited to one single month of the year. And more than that, it is limited to the shortest month of them all.
I began to wonder why is it that we only get to enjoy the history of our people for one month and the rest is pretty much white history?
Why is it that when we celebrate black history, teachers must go to the archives to dig up books and movies and to have students look up African Americans who have contributed to history? Why is it that our books do not already have these people? This makes me angry because it took me graduating high school and attend a HBCU and take African American history courses to finally get some history on my people and my culture.
It seems that the only black history that we are taught is slave history and don’t get me wrong, that is very important but there is much more to our history than that.
I am tired of schools teaching our people that the only place we have in history is on a plantation.
What about Garrett Morgan? He was a black man and he invented the stop light which we still use today.
I know we were all educated on Thomas Edison, the man who invented the light bulb, but what about Lewis Howard Latimer who was the original designer of the light bulb.
There are countless African Americans who have made their marks on history and it seems to me that their work has been brushed to the side, only to be dug up during one month of the year. If you ask me, something has to change.