Logan Ramsey
News Editor
This story is part two in an ongoing series by The Bengal Newspaper regarding Black History Month. Others parts in the series can be read at isubengal.com.
To deny that a racial group has a history is also to deny that group their own identity. Not only does it deny them that, but it also denies them the right to define their identity themselves.
This was the reality faced by Black people living in the Americas, where what little they knew about their history was written by white people. Even today, many mainstream history textbooks neglect to tell the full story of being Black in a world built by colonization.
Photo Courtesy of Idaho State University
“You find that throughout the period of the slave trade and slavery in the United States, the Black man, the negro, was always in search of his or her identity,” said Raphael Chijioke Njoku, an Idaho State University professor with doctorates in History and Political Science who will be speaking as a part of the Diversity Resource Center’s Black History Month Virtual Programming. Njoku, who teaches African and world history will speak on the history behind the formation of Black History Month.
“Black History Month raises awareness of the continuing African American struggles in the Americas… . A lot of Black history is still denied, and when you read all those textbooks and manuscripts by people of European descent, they skew the history the way they want to skew it,” Njoku said. “You have generations of Black people born on the continent built by Black people. They began to believe that they had no history.”
Mainstream historians continued to deny Black history without objection until around 1915 when historian Carter G. Woodson began to tell the story of African American history. By 1926, after publishing the Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February to be “Negro History Week.” While it didn’t initially garner much attention, ever since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated February as Black History Month.
“Woodson and others led this crusade for the Black man to write his or her own history, so that we define our own identity and define our struggles in a way that does Blacks and those who are not Blacks will understand what the Black person feels and how the Black person defines his or her identity,” Njoku said.
Njoku said that inclusion is a responsibility that falls on the state government, and that any major effort in Idaho to recognize diversity should be a top down approach.
“So I think, recognition first, is the most important step. If they can not recognize that, then there is no planning and there is no foundation to implement any policy,” Njoku said.
Some members of the Idaho legislature have been openly hostile to recognizing diversity in Idaho. After Marlene Tromp became the named president of Boise State University, 28 House Republicans signed a letter that urged Tromp to abandon inclusion programs they called antithetical to the “Idaho way.”
“Diversity must be recognized because that’s the soul of the United States,” said Njoku. “We all cannot be the same.”
Njoku is aware that the common phrase ‘I don’t see color’ is figurative, “But if I took it literally I would respond… oh, maybe you are blind.”
Students today can learn more about Black history even if it’s not being taught accurately in their classroom. Njoku urges young people to find different stories rather than look at one story alone, and to look beyond what their teachers tell them.
“The true meaning of being a student is someone who does what? A student is a discoverer, an explorer,” Njoku said. “Read beyond what the teacher tells you. Discover things yourself. Make your own judgement. That’s what makes us rational human beings.”
