(RNS) — I always tell people that, as a college professor, I got to do the two things I loved best in the world — read and talk. One thing I miss most now that I am emerita is the opportunity to prescribe books for students to read. I not only recommended books to my students but had fantasies that they would run out to buy my recommendations and take them to the beach to read in the summer.
Several years into teaching I discovered that some of my students were not only buying and reading the books I recommended, but they were sending them and the assigned reading for my courses home to their parents. Some parents actually thanked me at graduation for what they learned from the books their children had sent home.
I especially enjoyed teaching, and recommending, during Black History Month. Beginning as “Negro History Week” in 1926, Black History Month was created by Carter Godwin Woodson, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, in part to equip teachers with materials about African Americans and their experiences. Woodson chose the second week in February in order to celebrate the birthdays of Frederick Douglass, (Feb. 14) and Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12).
In 1915, Woodson had founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History), perhaps the only learned society supported by local chapters of community members as well as a national membership of professional historians and other scholars.
Woodson also founded Associated Publishers, which, in addition to publishing the Journal of Negro History, prepared kits for teachers at all educational levels. Woodson took advantage of the contradictions built into de jure segregation to reach the majority of African American school children in their segregated schools.
Church leaders also became members of his association. One of his supporters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, who had begun her career as the corresponding secretary of the National Baptist Convention Foreign Mission Board, mobilized her denomination’s women, the principal educators in their churches — the convention had previously been associated with a company that encouraged Black pride through “colored dolls” manufactured through the National Negro Doll Company. In 1927, Burroughs addressed the annual meeting of the association, insisting that it was “the duty the Negro owes to himself to learn his own story.”
In cooperation with the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls, making one of its graduation requirements the delivery of a public address on what was then called “Negro History.” She envisioned unleashing an army of articulate Black women household domestics as missionaries who could advocate on behalf of Black people. In that spirit, throughout my time as a professor of African American studies and sociology, I repeatedly told people that African American Studies is missionary work.
We are currently facing a moment when racial antipathy has (again) taken control of key segments of American governance. The Trumpian notion of civil rights enforcement in higher education seeks to stop discussions about race or identity. A white person who feels uncomfortable with class discussions about race or specific “ethnic” experiences may claim discrimination. Educational policies aiming to provide relief for people and groups who have experienced historical legal adversity are now being turned on their heads and used as examples of so-called reverse discrimination. Whole disciplines are under threat in institutions that receive federal funds.
The aim is a kind of cultural homicide the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. decried in his last book, “Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community,” published in 1967. In the book, King lamented the failure of American education to include the African American experience. He described an incident at his children’s newly desegregated school in which students presented a public program on the multiple ethnic traditions comprising American music that ignored totally the contributions of African Americans.
The incident left King and his wife, music educator Coretta Scott King, experiencing “a combination of indignation and amazement.” He wrote, “I wept within that night. I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage; I wept for all white children, who, through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society; I wept for all the white parents and teachers who are forced to overlook the fact that the wealth of cultural and technological progress in America is a result of the commonwealth of inpouring contributions.” In King’s view, exclusion and erasure victimizes everyone and reinforces a vicious form of racism.
In hopes of counteracting these trends in some small way, I will end Black History Month by recommending an arsenal of 28 books that should make it possible for “whosoever will” to learn and grow. We cannot allow the politics of hate to succeed in fostering the racism of “cultural erasure.” We need to celebrate and learn now more than ever, for the healing of the nation.
(Photo by Hermann Traub/Pixabay/Creative Commons)
“A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics,” by Juanita Tolliver (2025)
“An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence,” by Zeinab Badawi (2025)
“Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” by Imani Perry (2025)
“Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydee (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860,” by Ibrahima Seck (2014)
“Carver: A Life in Poems,” by Marilyn Nelson (2001)
“Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619-Present,” Nell Irvin Painter (2006)
“Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner,” by Ralph Craig III (2023)
“Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology,” by Dwight N. Hopkins (2000)
“Ella: A Novel,” by Diane Richards (2024)
“Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island,” by Emily Meggett (2022)
“Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” by Braxton D. Shelley (2021)
“Homecoming: Healing Trauma to Reclaim Your Authentic Self,” by Thema Bryant (2022)
“James: A Novel,” by Percival Everett (2024)
“Jesus and the Disinherited,” by Howard Thurman (1949)
“Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine,” by Uche Blackstock, M.D. (2024)
“My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations,” by Mary Frances Berry (2005)
“Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement,” by Tanisha C. Ford (2023)
“Prayers for Dark People,” by W.E.B. Du Bois (1909-1910)
“Somebody’s Calling My Name: Black Sacred Music and Social Change,” by Wyatt Tee Walker (1979)
“Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart: Poems,” by Alice Walker (2018)
“The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde,” by Audre Lorde (1997)
“The Mis‑Education of the Negro,” by Carter G. Woodson (1933)
“The Souls of Black Folk,” by W.E.B. Du Bois, (1903)
“The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History,” by Anne C. Bailey (2017)
“There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America,” by Vincent Harding (1981)
“Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation,” by Linda Villarosa (2022)
“We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For,” by Eddie Glaude Jr., (2024)
“When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras,” by Claudrena Harold (2020)
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes. (Courtesy photo)
(Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is an assistant pastor for special projects at Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Sociology at Colby College. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)