by Rev. Andrea Ayvazian

Friday, February 12, 2016
(Published in Daily Hampshire Gazette: Saturday, February 13, 2016)

I have always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with Black History Month. While I believe deeply in the need to honor and celebrate the black experience in America, I have had questions about why this is supposed to occur during the shortest month of the year.

The black experience in the United States — including enslavement, resistance, struggle, courage, discrimination, perseverance, art, music, literature, faith, athleticism, leadership, pain and triumph — cannot be reduced to 28 days per year and then neatly tucked away.

I have also felt that Black History Month was embedded in white history year and that February’s Black History Month gave schools, colleges, and universities license to go back to the default condition of glorifying white history the rest of the year.

Imagine if this nation devoted just 30-odd days to white history month. If that idea was suggested, white people would roll their eyes and wonder how even the highlights of “our” rich traditions, successes and accomplishments could possibly be compressed into one month. White people would feel cheated and diminished.

I am totally in favor of focusing on black history. So many stories about African-American communities have not been told. So many indignities, so many victories, so much pride, so much solidarity, so many tales have not been shared. I am totally in favor of focusing on black history — I just think the focus needs to extend far beyond a single month.

Consider, for example, a series now running in the New York Times: throughout February, to honor Black History Month, the Times is publishing photographs of famous and ordinary African-Americans found in the archives at the paper. “Hundreds of stunning images from black history, drawn from old negatives, have long been buried in the musty envelopes and crowded bins of The New York Times archives,” the paper explains on its website.

And so to right an old wrong, the Times is publishing some of these photographs — for the very first time — in the newspaper and online.

In their introduction to this first-ever display of these precious, old photographs, the Times writes, “Were the photos — or the people in them — not deemed newsworthy enough?” Later in the same introduction, the Times writes, “As you scroll through the images, each will take you back: To the charred wreckage of Malcolm X’s house in Queens, just hours after it was bombed. To the Lincoln Memorial, where thousands of African-American protesters gathered, six years before the March on Washington. To Lena Horne’s elegant penthouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To a city sidewalk where schoolgirls jumped rope, while the writer Zora Neale Hurston cheered them on, behind the scene.”

The never-before published photographs discovered in Times archives are remarkable, and yet this project troubles me.

The Times admits that “hundreds” of images from black history have been stuffed in envelopes and jammed into storage bins in their archives. However, the paper only plans to print these extraordinary old photographs during the month of February — Black History Month. Then these treasures will go back into the files, the bins and the archives, to be forgotten again.

Because our nation has elevated, documented, preserved and taught white history since the founding of this country, I think it is time to refocus our attention and give black history its due.

To counter the constricted Black History Month, I used to think we should establish Black History Year.

But then I thought about all the photographs we have never seen, all the narratives we have never heard, all the reports we have never read, all the losses we have never recognized, all the achievements we have never acknowledged, all the victories we have never conceded, and all the brilliance we have never celebrated. And I decided that Black History Year would also be too short. So I began to think we should start promoting Black History Decade.

But given this country’s unrelenting focus on white history for so long, I have abandoned the idea of Black History Decade and now think we should start lobbying for Black History Century. It seems only fair.