Rep. Ed Oliver (R-Dadeville) predicted in January that a “divisive concepts” bill — which presumes exposure to hard or unflattering history will melt children into gelatin — would pass in the first or second week of the legislative session.
And happy Black History Month to you, too. The good news is that the 2024 Alabama Legislature finished its second week last Thursday without the bill — sponsored by Oliver over the last several years — rearing its rage-choked head in the Statehouse.
However, the legislative session is only 20% complete. Maybe we’ll see it filed in March for Women’s History Month.
Then advocates can claim to be mad about — oh, I don’t know. Let’s go with telling school kids that Alabama excluded women from state juries until 1966.
I’m always struck by the presumption that Americans are too brittle to have a clear view of history. Most of us can acknowledge that our country has done terrible things and not spontaneously combust. I want my kids to learn this so they can learn from the people who called us to be better.
For decades, the broader culture denied us these stories.
Read old newspapers and old history books — anything published before, say, 1970 — and you won’t find a lot about Black Americans.
What turns up is often ugly and vindictive. But the absences are just as striking.
Growing up, I had Volume 12 of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, published in 1959. It included an entry on Robert Peary’s (now discredited) discovery of the North Pole. Matthew Henson, who mastered Inuit languages; who was responsible for getting the party as far as it went and who happened to be Black, was referred to like this:
“At last Peary had with him only one Negro, four Eskimos and 38 dogs. With them he reached the North Pole.”
No names for Henson or his Inuit companions. No testimony to Henson’s skills.
In many cases, exclusion was deliberate. As Kyle Whitmire has written, Marie Bankhead Owen, the guiding force of the Alabama Department of Archives and History from 1920 to 1955, ignored or neglected Black history and helped write textbooks that shoved Black Alabamians out of the narrative.
This neglect is apparent in much of the material in the Archives. Enslaved people show up as items for sale and afterthoughts in family records. There’s a file from 1901 on the lynching of Robert White, a Black man from Elmore County. White is barely mentioned and his murderers are treated as the salt of the Earth. (Archives leadership today is doing all it can to undo the damage. That makes the legislature’s attack on its independence even more troubling.)
‘Inspiration to achieve as well as they did’
The historian Carter Woodson’s goal in 1926 when he launched the predecessor to Black History Month, known as Negro History Week, was the restoration of this past. Woodson saw honest history as a means of liberation and a rebuke to racial prejudice. As he wrote, without history, Black Americans would become “a negligible factor in the thought of the world.”
It’s easy to see how excluding Black history made it easier to justify segregation and voter suppression. Putting a boot on a person’s neck is much easier if you don’t see them as part of your community.
And it’s hard not to connect the Alabama Legislature’s attempts to restrict Black history to other efforts apparently aimed at shoving Black Alabamians off the political stage.
After a court order, state lawmakers to draw a new congressional district where Black voters could have a chance to elect a new member of Congress, legislators defied the federal judiciary and forced the court to draw the district itself.
The Senate last week approved a bill attacking absentee ballot assistance in the name of fighting voter fraud. The measure drew a lengthy filibuster from Democrats, who noted that it would hurt the ability of older rural voters, many of them Black, to cast ballots.
History tells us this has happened before.
White politicians launched the Jim Crow era by slashing public school funding and pushing Black voters into voting districts where white racists could threaten them. Voter fraud, nearly always unproven, was the varnish they applied to a thoroughly racist project.
Not that the architects of Jim Crow were above cheating. A 1901 constitutional convention was called through fraud. The state constitution that emerged, and took the vote away from Black Alabamians, only won approval because white planters in the Black Belt stuffed ballot boxes.
We know — or at least we ought to know — the fruits of paranoia about Black Alabamians exercising basic constitutional rights: church bombings and mob violence.
A state that claims to have left those terrible scenes in the past would acknowledge that history and the brave men and women who fought back. It could build a government that treats its authoritarian past as a challenge to make a better future.
If our leaders love America, they can face our shame. Acknowledging the wounds does not mean abandoning the patient.
That was Woodson’s vision of Black history. At its very base, he wanted us to see that Black Americans had shaped and directed the nation. Those stories, he believed, would make the United States a better place.
“We must go back to the achievements of these Black men, then, and looking into these Black faces of heroes and heroines, get inspiration to achieve as well as they did,” he wrote in 1932.
But the supporters of “divisive concepts” bills look at those heroes and heroines and can’t see past the shame. Or they see those men and women, who knew the hell of terror and disenfranchisement, staring back at them.
They can’t handle the eyes of history. And they want us all to look away.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector.
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