A note from me about this submission: Frustration over Black History having a month isn’t new but I like this personal story of past teachers. For the record, Black History Month began as Negro History Week and was proposed by Carter G. Woodson. The expansion to a month was the work of black students at Kent State University in the late 1960s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_History_Month#Negro_History_Week_.281926.29
Black History month pisses me off. Why isn’t it just part of “history”? When I was a kid, I learned about Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman right alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Amelia Earhart etc. Of course, my 6th grade teachers history teacher was black, so that might’ve motivated her to include them in our history lessons in our mostly white town. And I leaned about Jackie Robinson from Mr. Morrison our math and science teacher, who might have played pro baseball, except he was older than Jackie Robinson, and was simply not allowed. He made a better living teaching white children decimals than he could in the negro leagues. But man he was still great to watch him play baseball, he was just awe inspiring. Of course it’s great to insist on including “black history” in school curriculum but really, “separate but equal”? NOT. What, is the rest of the year white anglo saxon straight male history?? Am I an idiot or what, for not realizing that that goes without saying?