Essays and Literary Vignettes

Written by: Charles A. Bush

Originally Published in The Institutes Black History Month Spotlight Series, Feb 1, 2024   

This is a challenging question to answer. For Black History Month for me serves as a time of joy and, if I’m being honest, frustration. 

But this is nothing new. 

The generations of Black Americans who came before me were also burdened with such conflicted sentiments. It was James Baldwin who once said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” That rage comes from four hundred plus years of oppression; from being enslaved by a country we as Black Americans have fought to protect in every war our nation has ventured into; from being stripped of our history and falsely imprisoned by keeping us trapped in poverty; from still feeling the repercussions of systemic tyranny in countless genocidal acts initiated by our white countrymen, like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 or the Wilmington Race Riots of 1898 to name two of countless examples. Not to mention, the fact that there is a Black History Month at all is rather frustrating. Every month should be Black History Month because Black history is US history. Since that day in 1619 when the first slave ships landed ashore this young nation, a systemic seed was planted, one that to this very day continues to grow and spread like wildfire through our nation. One that breaks every parent’s heart when their child is slain unjustly because of the color of their skin; one who is evicted because of redlining or gentrification; one who as recently as 2022 in Mississippi was left with no drinking water for weeks. These cries of frustration have been chanted and sung from the cotton fields of Virginia to the Selma marches of 1965 to the BLM marches today, all asking for the simplest of feats in a country that from its inception we helped build—for equality and the acknowledgment that our lives matter. 

The miraculous rub of it all is that through all of these hardships and atrocities, so much Black joy and beauty has been able to shine through. Even in the face of insurmountable odds we have managed to create timeless art by the likes of Baldwin and Jean-Michel Basquiat, have been at the forefront of space travel with heroes like Katherine Johnson, and have even held the highest office in the world with the forty-fourth President Barack Obama. Black people, despite the continued oppression, have managed to shine bright in the darkness like a shooting star travelling through a solar system void of any light. These amazing accomplishments should be celebrated a million times over. And for this, I am grateful and joyous of Black History Month and the way it highlights so many of these accomplishments. 

I suppose my overall feelings of Black History month can be summed up with a question of my own. Every February we celebrate the achievements and history of Black people everywhere. One could argue that with February being the shortest month of the calendar year, and with over 400 years of rich history to celebrate, twenty-eight days simply isn’t enough time to properly honor such beauty. Thus, I ask, could you imagine what we could achieve if the Declaration of Independence were true, and all people were in fact created equal? Imagine how much better off America and the world would be.