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 Roots to Rap
Rahiel Tesfamariam
Columnist Page
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page 21
“The Mis-education of the Negro” Still Resonates
Carter G. Woodson, who founded the Association for the Study of African American Life & History (ASALH) in 1915 and the Journal of Negro History in 1916, was born on a small farm in New Canton, Virginia to former slaves Anne Eliza (Riddle) and James Henry Woodson. Despite his humble upbringing, he went on to earn B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Chicago, attend the Sorbonne in Paris and receive his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. In the second week of February 1926 he launched Negro History Week, which evolved into Black History Month in 1976.
One of Woodson’s most notable contributions to history is a book titled “The Mis-education of the Negro”. Although published in 1933, the nonfiction paperback is used in the curricula of college professors throughout the world, widely interwoven into popular culture and listed as a bestseller by Essence magazine week after week. The book, which outlines Woodson’s philosophies on the Black plight, is one of those rare jewels in our community that refuses to wither as it ages.
While some may think that its discussion of oppression is outdated as African Americans are no longer subjected to Jim Crow laws, others recognize that you do not have to force African Americans to sit in segregated classrooms where they will receive inadequate and unequal education in order to subjugate them.
Woodson makes the claim that a man’s psyche can be the very source of his enslavement, for “when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go there without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.”
According to Woodson, all groups of people should be educated and led by members of their own community in order to meet the needs of that society, but “no systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of moral, the Negro’s mind has been brought under the control of the oppressor.” That control remains even today.
African Americans are still looking at history through blue eyes, still painting their Creator in an image unlike their own and still longing to be like those that have for centuries tried to simultaneously mock and imitate them.
So, what fight must we continue to forge ahead with in order to undo the miseducation of the Negro? Woodson says that “the race is especially in need of vision and invention to give humanity something new” because “the world does not want and will never have the heroes and heroines of the past.”
The author’s solution- almost symbolic of a Black Messiah that will take the race to a level that seems incomprehensible at the present moment- is embodied in many things. Woodson calls for enlightened youth “to imbibe the spirit of these great men and answer the present call of duty with equal nobleness of soul”; he calls for servants of the people to live among, think with, feel for and die for their people; and, most importantly, he calls for thinkers.
Woodson believes that “if we had a few thinkers we could expect great achievements on tomorrow. Some Negro with unusual insight would write an epic of bondage and freedom which would take its place with those of Homer and Virgil. Some Negro with esthetic appreciation would construct from collected fragments of Negro music a grand opera that would move humanity to repentance. Some Negro of philosophic penetration would find a solace for the modern world in the soul of the Negro, and then men would be men because they are men.”
For Rahiel Tesfamariam send email to rahielt@washingtoninformer.com. |
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