Their Voices Must Be Heard

 Currently Informed embraces Black History Month

By: Aryan Mukherjee

February is Black History Month. Great, you say, feigning a smile and then going back to texting your friends racist jokes in your group chat. Now imagine what you’ve done in a more flushed out sense. Millions of African Americans were ransacked, beat, lynched, raped, and had their wills extracted out and burnt to a crisp under excruciating amounts of pain and sacrifice, their struggles so real and so incredibly dark that Black History Month was created to honor their suffering in our history. And you have just slandered that all because times have changed and you refuse to look back. You see, this is not just a special month where you would greet your African American friends with a little more cordiality than would typically be beckoned. Rather, it is a testament to something that many could never even imagine living through- something to be remembered.

To briefly sum up, Black History month originated as an expansion of “Negro History Week” established in 1926 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and made it his mission statement to enunciate African American contributions to American society in the way that they truly were, cutting down the fallacies from white mainstream media in the process. During that time period the Harlem Renaissance was also in full bloom, so for the first time in exactly 4 centuries since the trade slave, an isolated and abused group of people that had no comfort, no recognition, and no acknowledgment of even being living breathing humans outside of their own tight-knit families was finally being accepted into the United States of America for a little bit more of themselves. Later, in 1976, President Gerald Ford created Black History Month to balloon out from this week, and the tradition has flowed out ever since, our nation’s sweltering scars gradually healing themselves through small compensating steps in the right direction.

And so we end happily ever after, with Black people getting at least some resemblance of an apology and actions made towards improvement. Or do we? Historians and scholars worry today that negligence by the newer generations has resulted in such fervent cultural explosions of Blacks to ebb away and away, and many fear that this part of our new communities will be forgotten in just a few decades.

Thus, we at Currently Informed embrace Black History Month and wish to bring about a resurgence in the celebration of a people who our beloved country was literally built upon: day by day, article by article, act by act. Ultimately, we hope to see Woodson’s dreams firmly fastened into society’s clutches for infinitely more generations to come, preferably with the help of all of you who have just finished reading this.