By Frederick A. Clark
I was inspired recently by the hearing part of a poem noting: ”those who push through the brushes wind up wearing the thorns ” to again appreciate how much we stand on the shoulders of those who proceed us.
This comes two years after America’s painful and not very enlightening discussion of whether the successful “built it” on their own.
Welcome to Black History Month. If nothing else, it’s proof of how complicated history is and evidence that no one “makes” anything on their own.
First, though, it really isn’t “Black History month.” It’s American history about people of color. It belongs to us all.
It’s easy, though not meaningful enough, to observe what’s officially National African- American History Month by reciting black success stories.
I proudly celebrate scholars like John Hope Franklin, Henry Gates, Michael Eric Dyson and Melissa Harris-Perry; scientists like astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and astronaut Mae Jemison; leaders like, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King; jurists like Thurgood Marshal; soldiers and statesmen like President Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and John Lewis.
But to understand race in America don’t think in black and white, but mostly in greys. The line about coming here in different ships but all being in the same boat now is catchy, but obscures more than it illuminates. We’re a nation founded by free thinkers like Thomas Jefferson with views complicated enough to detest slavery while owning slaves.
American history is complicated enough to recognize leaders like President Abraham Lincoln who knew slavery as “unqualified evil” but took office proclaiming “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery.”
He led a great Civil War dealing slavery a fatal blow with the Emancipation Proclamation. But that came only after two years of war. It proclaimed slaves “forever free” but only in states in rebellion and not immediately. It was as much invitation for states to cease combat to save slavery as a document of moral outrage.
The Civil War ended slavery but barely impacted freedom. It led to “Black Codes” not in some states, but in every southern state. It perverted our justice system to a blunt instrument restricting mobility, oppressing opportunity and suppressing voting. It also led to extraordinary heroism of black and white Americans at sacrifice of their own security and often at the cost of their lives. But things got better.
Jim Crow laws followed, more subtle but with the same goals and outcomes. And another generation of brave Black and white leaders risking their futures and sometimes losing their lives. Nor is it yet played out.
Call this the new Jim Crow or whatever you will, but to this day , there is racial oppression, income inequality, social immobility and voter suppression.
The real glory of our history is captured in Martin Luther King’s claim that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
Dr. King was inspired by white Unitarian minister and leading abolitionist Theodore Parker. In the 1850s Parker published nearly identical language. Parker, too, had complicated views on race, but risked much, suffered federal indictment for obstruction in a fugitive slave case and social degradation for supporting abolitionist John Brown.
I recognize whatever modest success I’ve had in business and life is hardly my own alone. I too have succeeded only through incredible sacrifices of others, mostly in complicated and trying circumstances beyond any I’ve contributed or taken myself.
That’s a lesson I reclaim each February along with my acknowledgement of how much more I owe to even out the balance.