 In her Orange Prize-winning novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver has her narrator, Eva, quote one of her sociopath son’s deliberately droll, acidly affectless school papers:
‘Abraham Lincoln was President. Abraham Lincoln had a beard. Abraham Lincoln freed the African-American slaves. In school we study great African-Americans for a whole month. There are many great African-American Americans. Last year we studied the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Next year we will study the same African-American Americans during African-American History Month. Abraham Lincoln was shot.’
For Kevin, being American, that month would have been February. And one of the great African-Americans he studied would have been Carter G Woodson (1875-1950), known as the father of black history. The son of slaves, he received no formal education until he was 20, but in 1912 became the second African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University (the first was W E B DuBois: 1868-1963, noted academic, essayist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading US civil rights organization of the 20th century).
Woodson taught black students in the District of Columbia’s public schools and at Howard University, founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and, in 1926 (our fi rst anniversary, here, fact fans), initiated Negro History Week, the February date chosen to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass (1817-95, leading abolitionist) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-65, who – thanks, Kevin – was shot).‘Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished’, Woodson said, ‘lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.’
In 1976 (our second anniversary), that February week became a month-long celebration, while in Britain in 1986 (that’s our third) Akyaaba Addai Sebbo, a special project co-ordinator at the GLC who had been part of the US movement to add its extra weeks, began to lobby for a similar month here. A year later, as part of African Jubilee Year, London and other boroughs formally instituted October as Black History Month, with education authorities, museum, library and archive services, as well as voluntary organisations, taking a lead.
October is signifi cant in the African cultural calendar, the period of the Autumn equinox, harvest and yam festivals. Plus, in the USA, Addai had noted that its celebrations tended to be held indoors, so restricting their scope and range – October is warmer than February, after all (though these days only sceptical quislings of globalised industry would dispute that February itself is hotting up).Libraries fi gure here not least in the biography of Richard Wright (1908-60), author of international bestseller Native Son, whose serious education began when, in 1926 (fourth anniversary – do pay attention at the back!), working for an optical company in Memphis, a sympathetic white colleague, Jim Falk, devised a subterfuge enabling Wright to use his library card – a public service barred to blacks. Playing on his presumed illiteracy, Wright would borrow as an errand boy working on Falk’s behalf. A library card, he noted in his autobiography Black Boy, was his ticket to freedom.
Hackney Libraries support Black History Month with a range of displays, discussions, workshops, exhibitions and events at all sites, as part of the service’s fulfilment of Key Deliverable 32 of Priority 1 of the Mayor’s Vision: ‘Vibrant Cultural Heritage – provision of cultural events which celebrate cultural diversity’. And this year is no exception, with a free, full programme including African song and dance, creative writing, black classical composers, film and much, much more. Mostly indoors.
At Stoke Newington Library, local Carnival group Tropical Isles will be exhibiting their masks and costumes throughout the month, with a dance demonstration on Thursday 5th, 6-7pm. Monday 23rd sees two interactive sessions based on the ‘Stories from the Web’ site, allowing children aged 5-14 to publish their own stories, poems and artwork, 10-12am and 2-4pm.For ages 5-10, children’s writer and storyteller Sandra Agard presents Caribbean story and song, Tuesday 24th, 2-3pm.The Library Gallery in Edwards Lane hosts Judith Batchelor’s powerful one-woman show ’A Mother Speaks’, as debuted at the Hackney Empire, Fri 27th, 7-8.30pm. Full details of the whole schedule of events are available from all libraries, who also stock Black History Month Magazine, listing national events.
Of course, there are ongoing arguments and debate within the black history movement as to whether a month is needed, or is enough, or is merely tokenism, and shouldn’t the subject be better integrated into the National Curriculum anyhow, and, after all, isn’t black history ongoing and all around all the time…
It is and it isn’t. It’s open and it’s hidden. Take Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’, at first a seemingly superficial, typical rocker: just another name-checking ramble round his beloved American highways, or a careful reading of the stations of the Underground Railway, smuggling slaves to freedom (one stop was the print shop of Frederick Douglass).And do you like soul music, sweet soul music? As Tony Heilbut notes in the magisterial The Gospel Sound, soul’s roots lie not just in Africa but
– as slaves couldn’t overtly perform their own songs, assembling only for approved public song in their masters’ churches – in the popular imported hymnals of one Dr Isaac Watts (1647-1748), now laid to rest in Abney Park Cemetery.
Black history on your doorstep.
www.hackney.gov.uk www.asalh.org www.black-history-month.co.uk
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