We believe the Sunday stories featured in this paper throughout February demonstrated precisely why Black History Month still matters a great deal.
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The argument is correct: We shouldn’t need “Black History Month” because Black History should get full coverage as part of “American History.”
Yet we believe the Sunday stories featured in this paper throughout February demonstrated precisely why, even if that is true, Black History Month still matters a great deal.
Dedicating a month to telling the many stories of how profoundly and diversely Blacks have contributed to and influenced this nation remains an important because, as each of those Sunday stories showed, there is a great deal still untold, even not yet found.
Among the many offerings of area colleges and universities, Salisbury University History Professor Aston Gonzalez showed, in a Wilkes University online presentation, how far back, and how complex, the imagery in the fight against slavery goes in our country.
Far from beginning with the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” Gonzalez showed the battle against slavery and mistreating people as property goes back to before the founding of the country itself. He offered images of the supplicant slave deserving to be free dating back to pre-declaration of Independence.
“He looked at a whole set of documents that no one had analyzed before,” Wilkes’ own Amy Sopcak-Joseph said of Gonzalez’ research. Sopcak-Joseph helped organize events at Wilkes that included participating for a second year in the nationwide Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon, an opportunity for those interested to directly help in expanding the spread of Black history by transcribing selected historic documents made available online.
Dallas Intermediate School Principal Thomas Traver eagerly showed off his classrooms and the wide range of Black History covered in them, from the well known including Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson and Ruby Bridges to the less familiar including Alma Woodsy Thomas, Benjamin Banneker and the inventor of the Super Soaker water gun, Lonnie Johnson.
Travers did more than show off the efforts, he contributed, telling on class about how the Underground Railroad included a stop in bucolic Beaumont, Wyoming County.
And 70-year-old Constance Wynn opened her home to a Times Leader Reporter to recount the story of an escaped slave named Mary Jane Merritt, her great-great-grandmother.
Wynn has been piecing the saga together as best she could, believing Merritt escaped slavery in Georgia with 15 children and other family members to ultimately help found the Bethel AME Church in Scranton, moving to the Wilkes-Barre home where Wynn now dwells.
“We’ve never been taught the true story, that’s the problem,” Wynn said, explaining her belief in the need to continue Black History Month as a means to shine a spotlight on so much history still unearthed or unsung. Then she gave one of the best justifications for Black History Month we’ve seen in a while.
“We’ve been taken out of context for 400 years. We’re just trying to creep back into the story.”
—Times Leader