I can’t pretend to understand the South after just a few weeks, but I’ve been an American my whole life and this concerns all of us, in every corner of this huge country.
There is a strong tendency to “other” the African American experience – I just did it, right there – and nowhere is this more glaring than in the telling of the history of black liberation and the treatment of its heroes, both in the story of the Civil War and a century later in the struggle to win full Civil Rights.
The epic tale of the liberation of tens of millions of Americans is the greatest triumph of justice over oppression we’ve known here, greater even than the American Revolution itself. Hundreds of years of bondage and brutality, enshrined in the foundations of our political and economic systems, ended through the extraordinary heroism and sacrifice of so many.
Harriet Tubman. John Brown. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B. Du Bois. William Lloyd Garrison. Martin Luther King Jr. Rosa Parks. Warriors, thinkers, organizers, leaders whose accomplishments, sacrifices, and contributions to justice for and freedom of Americans in every way the equal, at least, of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Paine, Roosevelt, and so on. Yet it seems an inescapable fact that we don’t venerate them as a nation to nearly the same degree. Their stories are told not as American History, but as Black History, as Civil Rights History. They are treated as figures in their small chapters of our narrative, not as universal heroes of the American republic.
American History will be healthier when towns that aren’t demographically black are as likely to have a Tubman Blvd. as a Washington Blvd., when Rosa Parks is recognized with monuments in places she never visited, when putting MLK Jr.’s face on our currency is seen not as an act of political correctness gone amok, but rather that it’s about time.
