Black History Month: These writers’ messages still ring true

I have kept two books from my college years. One is about points, picas, and figuring out proportions. Little did I know that the copyfitting skills it covered were becoming obsolete at the very moment I was poring over that paperback. Graphic design software was gearing up during the 70s and would require a different set of skills to create printed materials. And the internet was about to determine whether the written word would be printed at all.

I don’t know why I’ve carried this book with me from house to house over the past 45 years. Perhaps I’ve feared tossing it out as much as I feared the professor who wrote it and was waging a personal war against grade inflation. Based on my experience, he was winning.   

The second book is an anthology filled with works by Black writers. I know why I’ve kept this thick tome. I knew it would never grow old. I knew I’d need its words for the rest of my life, and I have. I’ve pulled it off the shelf every time I wanted to accurately recall a Langston Hughes poem or review Frederick Douglass’ 1852 Independence Day oration. I’ve borrowed inspiration from its pages to see how other writers turned a phrase, and I’ve sat with it, especially during the past few years, to see if racial discourse has changed over America’s centuries. Not so much.

Whether they were writing autobiographies, eulogies, speeches, poems, songs, or stories, Black writers captured a people’s history in the way only a people can capture their experiences, with feeling and diversity. There was and is no one way to gather up the life of a people into one narrative, so the anthology gave me a sampling of the myriad ways Black people tried to cope with an environment that fought their flourishing. 

From autobiography to poetry

Excerpts from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano introduced me to the resilience of an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his home somewhere in modern-day Nigeria; introduced to slavery in Barbados and Virginia; and taken to England, where he learned to read and write, and later purchased his freedom. He then used his story as one of 12 million stories that could have testified to the need to end slavery and human trafficking.

I read Frances Watkins Harper’s poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” which expresses a trauma so profound that she didn’t believe her bones or weary soul could find rest in soil where slavery was sanctioned by the state.  

I came to respect the effort and skill needed to write in Negro dialect, and the hope that is hidden in the blues, and work and prison songs. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” confirmed the duplicity of spirit necessary for people to survive the cruel and unusual incarceration known as slavery. I read a speech by Robert Brown Elliott, a U.S. Representative from South Carolina, who on Jan. 6, 1874, gave a well-reasoned argument for the federal government to do its duty to protect the civil and political rights of all its citizens.

Black lives have always mattered

When Carter G. Woodson introduced the observance of Negro History Week in 1926, the precursor to Black History Month, it wasn’t to make Black history a sidebar to American history. As he explained, African American contributions “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” 

When Black history – or the history of any people for that matter – is not given equitable footing in a nation’s historical or literary works, the silence says those individuals didn’t make a worthy contribution to their nation or their world. For Woodson, that was unthinkable.

It was and is critical that Black Americans as well as every American have a comprehensive grasp of the people, policies, and cultural philosophies that have shaped and continue to shape the lives of all Americans. Woodson published the inalienable truth that Black lives matter nearly a century before it became a social media hashtag. 

Learning from the obsolete

How we communicate is always changing. Today, there’s a plethora of ways to get information that have nothing to do with points, picas, or figuring out proportions. What is still needed, however, is an inclusive and settled understanding of history, even history that is merely a year old.

Should I have the desire to pick up and move for the 12th time since my college years, my coming-apart-at-the-seams anthology will travel along. I’ll place it on a convenient shelf in the new home and call upon it as needed to help me find strength from a courageous past and the resolve to work for a more inclusive accounting of American history. My anthology has been an invaluable asset – a counterbalance to narratives that would try to erase the tragedies and triumphs of the only people systematically enslaved in these united states.  

As for my copyfitting paperback, I pondered selling it or tossing it, but decided to keep it. While I could get 15 bucks for it online, I’ve come to know its greater worth. It serves as a reminder always to be on the lookout for obsolete ideas, processes, procedures, and laws that are used to deny civil rights, political access, and human dignity to us all.

Maisie Sparks is the author of “Holy Shakespeare!” and other works.