"BIRTH OF A NATION" AND THE BIRTH OF BLACK HISTORY
“When I was going to school, I began to be bugged by the teaching of American history because it seemed that history had been taught without cognizance of my presence.”
In the winter of 1915, the first full-length movie came to theaters across America. “Birth of a Nation” caused protests in some cities, riots in others, rampaging whites beating on blacks. When the movie was screened at the White House, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, “It is like writing history with lightning.” But “Birth of a Nation” wrote history not with lightning but with lies.
Based on a best-selling novel, the movie spread the myth of Southern “redemption” after the Civil War. It showed ex-slaves, played by whites in blackface, plundering, pillaging, ravaging white women — until Klansmen rode to the rescue. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation. . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South!" From coast-to-coast, Klan membership soared.
That summer, as “Birth of a Nation” broke box office records, a young scholar went to Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Emancipation. Staying at the black YMCA, Carter Woodson talked with black doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Someone should fight these Southern myths, they told him. Someone should cherish “our history.” Two months later, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The seeds were sown.
Black History Month has been celebrated, hyped, and criticized. "I don't want a Black History Month,” actor Morgan Freeman said. “Black history is American history.” Carter Woodson agreed. His goal was to “emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history."
Carter Woodson was black history, American history. The son of slaves, he grew up in Virginia during the Jim Crow Era. Segregation. Lynching. Second class citizenship. But Woodson rose from coal miner to scholar, graduating from Berea College, then earning advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and, in 1912, Harvard.
Woodson’s Harvard professors told him there was no such thing as “Negro history.” Negroes had done nothing historic. Nothing. Woodson knew better, and when he began teaching at Howard University, his classes thrilled students. After starting the first Negro history association, and the Journal of Negro History, Woodson spread the word beyond the academy.
In 1926, Woodson created Negro History Week, sending pamphlets and teaching materials to schools and libraries. Just a few schools took up the cause, but soon the annual week, set in mid-February to coincide with the birthdays of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, was celebrated by black folk nationwide. Parades, breakfasts, banquets, speeches.
“If a race has no history,” Woodson said, “it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”
Meanwhile, back in the classroom. . .
During the 1930s, the lies spread by “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind” metastasized into a nationally accepted myth — “The Lost Cause.” Slaves, it seems, had been contented workers in a noble South. “Never was there a happier dependence of capital upon labor,” Jefferson Davis wrote.
But the dignified Old South was destroyed by the “War of Northern Aggression.” And as the myth spread, the “Lost Cause” did more than deceive. “It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction,” wrote historian Eric Foner. “All of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped to freeze the minds of the white South in resistance to any change whatsoever. “
Fighting the myth, Negro History Week circulated biographies, timelines, truth. “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions,” Woodson wrote. “You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it.”
Carter Woodson died in 1950 but his truths went marching on. During the 1960s, black studies programs began teaching them year round, and lobbying for more than Negro History Week. In 1976, President Gerald Ford made Black History Month a national observance.
Today every schoolchild learns about Harriet Tubman. And Rosa Parks. And MLK. So why Black History Month? Because black history is — well, listen to the young teachers. . .
History, Carter Woodson knew, is not made by great men — or women. It is made by anyone who rejects the myths sown by “ignorant spellbinders.” History is made by people like Virginia McLaurin.
Born five years before “Birth of a Nation,” McLaurin worked her entire life in education. And on February 21, 2016, at the age of 106, she was invited to the White House to meet. . .
