Black History Month has come to an end, but that doesn’t mean good learning and the pursuit of knowledge regarding Blackness is over.
Every year during this time, lecturers, speakers, and writers illuminate how Black History is American History – a narrative many people are actively working to undermine.
While great examples of this rich history exist from “sea to shining sea,” Alabama’s Black History serves as a bedrock of this country’s imperfect freedom story.
Twenty-eight days can’t contain the depth of our fight to dismantle “otherness” and dissolve the sociological, political, and legal barriers bound in second-class citizenship. And even then, after navigating trials and tribulations of American terror, we must leave room – or make and create room – for the triumphs of Black folks who move in the spirit of Lucile Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” where the story goes, “come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed.”
Black History is a kind of everyday history. So, whether that be reading, listening to music, watching films concerning Black life, some other form of learning, or simply loving on Black folks, commit yourself to being in relationship with the histories, stories, and voices that have tried to shift our ways of being and knowing.
Along with literature and arts, I implore you to tap into the confines of public history amid this perpetual call to remembrance. Public history lives in the museums and relics that tell parts of our story. It’s a methodology and study, but it is also an experience – something you can feel and hold on to beyond the pages of a book.
Here are some places you should visit to engulf in the fruits of public history.
16th Street Baptist Church – Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute – Birmingham, Alabama
Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church – Selma, Alabama
Civil Rights Memorial – Montgomery, Alabama
Freedom Rides Museum – Montgomery, Alabama
Kelly Ingram Park (where powerful relics stand to honor the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Alabama)
Lowndes Interpretive Center – Hayneville, Alabama
National Voting Rights Museum and Institute – Selma, Alabama
Rosa Parks Museum – Montgomery, Alabama
The Legacy Museum – Montgomery, Alabama
National Memorial for Peace and Justice – Montgomery, Alabama
The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church – Montgomery, Alabama
Visit the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium found here.
Attending to the primary sources bound within the symbols and walls of history reflects a necessary stance against the performative movements of inauthentic devotion to social justice. Black history isn’t about a month-long reflection but rather an annual mode of reverence to the people and places within these bears of public history – and beyond.
When Carter G. Woodson founded “Negro History Week” back in 1926, before it became Black History Month, he encouraged expansive learning of Black art, culture, life, and people. It was not merely to tell of our fight and struggle but to speak of our celebration, our joy, and our song.
The current political happenings in places like Florida, Virginia, and other states – the existing attacks against Black phenomena – aren’t new in the canon of Americanized violence against Black history and humanity.
Still, we must move about with a political and spiritual energy that refuses to yield to legal intimidation and civil mendacity. Navigating public history pushes against the untruthfulness too many lawmakers tell in their efforts to hide all of America’s story. The museums only tell half of that story, but without it, Alabama – and thus America – doesn’t become who we are today.
So go forward, in the coming months and years, tour these places if you haven’t already. And if you have, then go back again and again and again. But don’t stop there. Travel to all the places where primary sources live and engulf yourself in the stories of what’s been. See about civil rights trails. Find our music’s history. Look towards the places that gave us joy. Discover how we are more than our struggle. Let the art of history captivate your spirit, awaken your imagination, and keep your feet on the ground – ready and willing to stand on truth no matter the cost.
