with short attention spans. Many people in this internet-enabled era have little interest in what happened two days ago, let alone fifty years ago before most of us were even born. How can we ensure that the sacrifices made many years ago to secure our civil rights are respected and understood by the generations that follow? How do we connect the dots between the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s against segregation and the struggles we face today as we continue to strive for social justice in America? I believe that knowledge of the past can help us draft a blueprint to fix what’s broken in our society today, but we have to be willing to look back to look forward.
During the American civil rights movement, the media played a key role in the movement’s success. The images shown on television were critical: protestors being brutalized by police, students being blasted with fire hoses and set upon by vicious attack dogs. If not for the media’s role in broadcasting those repulsive images, America might not have been so inclined to become sympathetic to the cause
The media still plays an invaluable role in social progress, but much of it is distributed not on the airwaves but on the internet. We primarily consume our media online today, often through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Consuming these modern media images can make us feel as though we were present at the events they show, allowing us to feel more connected to the people who experienced them. Similarly, reading about the American civil rights movement online and watching videos of the brave and courageous protesters, who were often bludgeoned and brutalized for their opposition, can make us feel like we were there with them. It’s painful, but it needs to be. Otherwise you’re just a bystander.
One step above viewing media of the events or reading about them is being able to speak with someone who actually experienced them, and having the ability to ask questions. There are people alive today who can remember and share what happened. There’s been a push to record the words of survivors of atrocities, like the Holocaust, before this generation completely passes away so that there is proof of what they endured. I believe we need the people who weathered segregation to tell their experiences too. Their words must also be recorded as proof of an atrocity. We need to understand, and remember, what they went through.
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The way I first learned about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the American civil rights movement, was very unorthodox. Today, it’s almost taboo for an African American not to know about the life and legacy of one of the most important people in our history. In fact, many of us who aren’t versed in his accomplishments have learned over the years to camouflage this deficit to avoid embarrassment. We might memorize a line or two from King’s most popular speeches, so that we are ready to recite them if pressed to do so. But when I was a kid, I wasn’t that sophisticated, and I wasn’t great at camouflaging the truth.
I was in the fifth grade, attending public school in Baltimore City, when I first began to hear about a man named Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Back then, I thought he was a famous singer. Yes, you read that right: For a few years, in grade school, I thought that the Nobel Peace Prize–winning leader of the movement for black freedom was just another man who entertained America. I know it sounds ridiculous today, but let me explain.
The reason I believed this was because the subject of King’s life and legacy was only taught to us once a year. February was Black History Month, the time when the accomplishments of legendary African American entertainers like Cab Calloway, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole were highlighted. Since there was no other time devoted to the subject of African American accomplishments, discussions about their lives were usually mingled together with discussions about black social and political leaders, abolitionists and revolutionaries like Harriet Tubman, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. Once a year, during Black History Month, the biographies of these colossal figures in our history were all lumped together in one big pot like alphabet soup. A young public-school student had only twenty-eight days in the month of February to learn three hundred years of African American history.
As a result, the public schools I attended in Baltimore didn’t devote much time to teaching us about the impact King or the civil rights movement had on America. We weren’t taught the details: how King, through nonviolent protests and activism, forced the integration of lunch counters and public transportation systems in the South, and established legally mandated voting-rights equality that changed the trajectory of America. Besides Black History Month, there were no other times during the school year when King was the subject of discussion in class, so his numerous accomplishments and legacy were not crystal clear to me. At the time, his birthday had not yet been recognized as a national holiday and was not celebrated in all fifty states. Even when King’s life was the main topic in the classroom, he was never talked about with the same level of importance as other twentieth-century leaders, like President John F. Kennedy, or even international ones like Mahatma Gandhi. Although King’s impact on society was just as significant, he was not talked about in the same vein as other men who were revered for their willingness to fight for the things that are noble about our humanity.
When I was in grade school, Michael Jackson and Muhammad Ali were the two most important black men, in my mind, to ever walk the streets of America. Michael Jackson had just begun to perform his world-famous moonwalk dance while wearing that ugly white sequined glove, and Ali, my all-time favorite athlete, was still a superstar, although he was beginning to age beyond his boxing prime.
The light bulb in my young mind wasn’t turned on until middle school. That’s when I began to gradually understand that King was nobody’s singer. Nowadays, when I think back, it’s incredible to me that I lacked so much knowledge on such an important subject. Was I just another public-school student who had fallen through the cracks, or was I another victim of society’s attempt to whitewash the legacy of one of the most consequential black leaders the world has ever known?
Sometimes I wish I had been raised by parents who were Afrocentric, or maybe even Black Panther sympathizers who wore cool black leather jackets and protested systemic oppression. Maybe then there would have been all kinds of books lying around the house to enlighten me about the long history of black America. I wish that I had read books about King when I was younger, and about the early days of Malcolm X’s life, when he served time inside a Massachusetts state prison. It might have been enlightening for me to browse through the pages of books like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, or Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I had been exposed to the literature and the history of African American heroes when I was young, my knowledge of their lives—and possibly my understanding of my own—would be much more complete today. One of the important things we get from learning history—one reason why it matters so much whose stories get told—is a sense of being able to contextualize, to see how we fit into a world that very rarely gets directly explained to us.
The stories of Harriett Tubman guiding escaped slaves through Maryland into Delaware, on their way to freedom, would have been powerful to read. Maybe I would have known more about a talented black man named Benjamin Banneker who lived in the 1700s, a clockmaker and astronomer—a rare talent for the son of a former slave, who was self-taught and had little formal education. Studying these leaders and contributors to our humanity earlier in my life and understanding their legacies could have made a big difference in how I viewed my culture and how I viewed myself. Having serious gaps in my education on black history still haunts me today, and I’m still trying to make up for that loss.
In the last few years, however, I’ve started to think that I may have been a little too hard on myself. I began to realize that I wasn’t the only one with a deficit of knowledge about the civil rights era and the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr., and I’m not the only person who could’ve used a few extra days of Black History Month, or who should have hung around with the smart kids who read books about the movement and were more in tune with black history. There are many of us who would have failed an African
