Cleveland.com/ The Plain Dealer: During Black History Month, while taking stock of the lessons of the past, we must keep moving forward
On February 14, 2024, Congresswoman Shontel Brown published an op-ed on Cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer on the importance of Black History Month and Northeast Ohio's Black History legacy.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Inside the Capitol, not far from where I cast my votes, is the statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks. When it was unveiled in 2013, it was the first full-length statue of any Black American in the U.S. Capitol. In a building full of statues, there wasn’t even one full statue of a Black person until 2013. There are, of course, more than 130 slave owners and 13 Confederates memorialized in statues or art in the Capitol.
The Capitol is the heart of our democracy. If history is whitewashed there, what does that say about our country’s present and future? This is why we need Black History Month.
In Northeast Ohio, our Black History legacy stacks up against anyone’s, which we should embrace. In fact, one of the landmarks in the history of Black History Month took place in our region. After decades as a weeklong observance, Kent State University held the first Black History month in 1970, six years before presidential recognition.
Our history is told through Jesse Owens, who smashed the myth of white supremacy on a global stage, right under Adolf Hitler’s nose, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It’s told through Nobel-Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and the poetry of Langston Hughes. Cleveland is where Larry Doby integrated the American League, Carl Stokes made history, and where Garrett Morgan invented the traffic light.
Black leadership from Cleveland also changed the calendar and how we think about workers’ rights. In 1890, state Rep. John Patterson Green, the first Black elected official in Cleveland, authored legislation that established Labor Day as a state holiday, four years before it became a federal holiday.
Frederick Douglass spoke in Cleveland multiple times, beginning in the 1840s. Sojourner Truth delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech down the road in Akron in 1851. Decades later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke frequently in Cleveland and lent his support for local civil rights efforts.
Northeast Ohio’s Black History legacy includes the three U.S. representatives who came before me. Rep. Louis Stokes, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and Rep. Marcia Fudge represented Northeast Ohio for over 50 years, serving with distinction. They chaired committees and subcommittees and served on some of the House’s most powerful committees. Congressman Stokes and Congresswoman Fudge both chaired the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2021, Congresswoman Fudge was confirmed as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – and the first Black woman to lead the agency since the 1970s.
Black History Month is a time of pride, but it’s also about setting the record straight. Recently, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley failed to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War during a town hall. I don’t know what’s more frightening – that she didn’t know the facts or that she felt her audience wanted to hear a different answer. Perhaps she was trying to compete with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed the line for his state’s education standards that enslaved people benefited from slavery. So don’t let anyone tell you we don’t need Black History Month in 2024.
Black History Month is also a call to action. Here’s what Black Americans face:
Our voting rights laws are weaker than they were in 1965; our reproductive rights are weaker than they were in 1973; and our gun safety laws are weaker than they were in 1994. According to the Brookings Institution, in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households owned $15.
Only 2% of U.S. businesses are Black-owned. Black Americans also face significant health disparities and have lower lifespans than other groups.
In 1967, Dr. King spoke at Glenville High School in Cleveland, noting that Black history and American history are ultimately one. “Abused and scorned as we may be,” he said, “our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.”
Dr. King concluded that speech with a simple message which should be our charge today: “... we must keep moving. We must keep going.”