The Online Reflector

“The problem of the twentieth century,” scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, “is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a Ph.D from Harvard University, cast a long shadow over a field we might now recognize as African-American Studies.

If nothing else, Black History Month makes us take stock of where we’ve been as a nation as well as where we still want to go.

Although Du Bois is quite well known in academic circles, his fame typically rarely permeates into the general public. That is why I am thankful each year that February rolls around, because it affords us a special opportunity to explore the centrality of African-Americans to the rich tapestry of American life.

I believe the course of events largely supported Du Bois’s uncanny assertion, particularly when one realizes that the color line he spoke of wasn’t just something suffered by people of color in this country, but rather something that others dealt with in various places throughout the globe.

If nothing else, Black History Month makes us take stock of where we’ve been as a nation as well as where we still want to go. It is a time for celebration. It is a time for reflection. But it is also a time for learning.

I am fortunate enough to get to study the past. I’m even more fortunate because I get to teach courses on African-American History at the University of Indianapolis. As part of this job, I get to expose students to names both famous and obscure, as well as let them experience the joys of unearthing the past for themselves.

Probably the best part about teaching African-American history is that it powerfully demonstrates just what a difference common people can make in the course of human events. Nowhere was that seen more powerfully than during the Civil Rights Movement.

Too often we reduce the Civil Rights Movement to great speeches or great actions by a heroic few. Indeed, part of the success of Black History Month is that we can now refer to many of those heroes by a single name: Martin, Rosa, Malcolm. Those individuals were certainly heroic.

But there were many others, young and old, rich and poor, (and, it should be noted, black and white) who helped transform this country not so long ago.

Among the most powerful narratives of the Civil Rights Movement was the one in which people as young as our current freshmen decided to confront the humiliating system of Jim Crow segregation. Adopting nonviolence, they attempted to integrate public facilities, including lunch counters and public transportation.

The first sit-ins were entirely spontaneous and entirely local. The key is that those who undertook these actions had little idea what would follow next. They had no way of knowing that regional, national and eventually international media would be drawn to their actions. Instead, tired of waiting for what poet Langston Hughes once called “A Dream Deferred,” they tried to change conditions on their own.

The results of their actions began to shatter a system that had once seemed to be indestructible. To be sure, the path was not short, nor was it direct or without tremendous obstacles. But among other things, they proved to their contemporaries that the idealistic and committed actions of our nation’s youth can, in fact, make a difference.

Yet it is worth remembering that a crusade for civil rights did not occur just in the South, nor did all Americans embrace the actions of those who sought to change the system.

If I could offer one last word, it would be to continue the fight. You will be bombarded with images this month of African-American firsts. Those are important to know.

But I believe it is more important to recognize the battles of your own time, and to begin to fight those battles with the strength, wisdom and determination of those who came before us.