Police blotter

By Rev. Dr. Roxanne Jones Booth

For Capital Region Independent Media

EDITOR’S NOTE: February is Black History Month, a time to honor and celebrate the achievements and contributions of African-Americans. The Ravena News-Herald is pleased to offer this op-ed on the importance of Black History Month by guest writer the Rev. Dr. Roxanne Booth, co-pastor of Riverview Missionary Baptist Church in Coeymans.

Since February 1926, the United States of America has celebrated Black History thanks to Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson.

He was born December 19, 1875, to formerly enslaved parents and died April 3, 1950. Dr. Woodson, a historian, author and journalist, was the second person of African heritage to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University and one of the first scholars to study the history of the dispersion of African people throughout the world (The African Diaspora). 

While Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at my alma mater, Howard University, Dr. Woodson launched the celebration of “Negro History Week,” the precursor of Black History Month.

Dr. Woodson is recognized as the preeminent historian of African-American culture. His motivation to preserve African-American history was galvanized when he realized that the American Historical Association (AHA), of which he was a member, had no interest in recognizing and studying Black history. As a dues-paying member of the AHA, Woodson was not allowed to attend AHA conferences. He determined that a Black historian had no future in a white-dominated historical professional organization.

Ninety-seven years ago, Dr. Woodson saw that the history of Black people in the United States was ignored or misrepresented among scholars. He saw the need to research and document the African-American neglected and overlooked past. 

As the United States sanctioned Jim Crow/segregation, Dr. Woodson reasoned that an institutional structure was needed to encourage and support Black scholars to study United States history that included African-Americans. On Sept. 9, 1915, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), which later became the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). 

As a result of the founding of this association, Dr. Woodson is affectionately known as the “Father of Black History.”

I thank God that Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson was moved to pursue research to lift the neglected contributions and accomplishments of people of African descent in the United States of America so that it would be evident that Black history is a vital part of U.S. history. 

The celebration of Black History Month over the years has exposed the absurdity of thinking, teaching, and living as if people of African descent in the USA are nonexistent and inconsequential. Black History Month reminds everyone not to forget or ignore what the enslaved and formerly enslaved people contributed to the “land of the free and home of the brave,” even when they did not experience this freedom for themselves.   

Black History Month is a beacon to this nation that it was out of “a gloomy past” that people of African descent in the USA persevered and continue to persevere in a country that has not lived up to the true meaning of its creed, “that all men [humans] are created equal.”

Celebrating the contributions of people of African descent in the history of the United States of America pieces together a mosaic of which the great American Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of when he said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny, whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  This is to say that over the past 97 years, Dr. Woodson’s clear premise of acknowledging people of African descent in studying the United States of America’s history and human experience will support that Black history is United States history. 

We can feel proud, disgusted, indifferent, uncomfortable, enlightened, motivated, inspired, intimidated, or any other emotion about our history. However, no matter how the facts of our history make us feel, we can live with and prayerfully learn from our past.

For me, Black History Month energizes my faith. I believe as my parents, grandparents and their parents believed. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32 KJV).

The Rev. Dr. Roxanne Jones Booth is co-pastor of Riverview Missionary Baptist Church in
Coeymans. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY Albany and is a credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor-Trainee (CASAC-T).