The 4th of February indeed is a remarkable day to write this post as it’s the birth anniversary of Rosa Parks, ‘Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights movement’. Her resistance to racial segregation back in 1955 has been auxiliary to the history of Social change in America. Her action that sparked the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott is one of the many notable and moving incidents of the American History and just not Black history. The courageous acts of Thurgood Marshall, a Civil rights lawyer, who won the famous ‘Brown Vs. Board of education of Topeka(1954)’ case that ended the segregation between black and white kids in public schools, is yet another adjutant of America’s racial history. The phenomenal address, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ by Sojourner Truth at Akron, Ohio back in the dark tunnels of time, and the unforgettable acts of so many other civil rights activists, all have been incidents of evolution, metamorphosis and America’s rebirth on the racial map.
From its inception as Negro history week in 1926 to its current entity as black history month, this period is a celebration of freedom, identity, diversity, reverence and remembrance and most of all expression, opinion and action. Sometimes it’s hard to understand that what took America so long to end apartheid? Why did this nation and its children have to suffer for long because of their color? Why did America have to wait 55 years before they could choose a black president? I guess answer to these questions is voice bound and mind bound because any kind of discrimination is an antagonistic pattern provoked by morally repugnant minds. It’s also complicated to assess if the so called oppression or segregation has really ended or is it still hidden under political covers. Initiating a ‘Birthers movement’ against President Obama is one incident that could take us back to controversial coffee sessions or round table discussions. Moreover, why do our children still have to add their native race, ‘African, Latino Irish or Asian’ before they could introduce themselves as Americans?
In my view, history of any nation is just not about its industrialization, colonization or expansion. It is also about its people, their culture, their trials and tribulations, sufferings and emancipation. That’s what I would say American history is about, which seems to have a silent partake in the Black History Month. All the more, Black heritage is a saga of transition. It’s a tale not about the end of subjugation but the beginning of independence and a monarchy of self-reliance and equality, where no race is better than human race. Such egalitarianism in our thinking can infuse real change, which actually is an impending action of discharging ourselves from the shackles of bigotry to move forward towards humanity. To conclude, I would say America today is like a rainbow, which beautifies the sky with different shades. It is a nation just not of multiple races but of vivid colors. It however has to remember forever that Black History Month is also like that color spectrum, which signifies one prominent color that made America what it is today, a nation founded on the beatitude of love, values and aspirations of dreams of million eyes that can be achieved and realized through one heart and one mind.
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