February is Black History month, chosen because February contains the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, born nine years apart. Lincoln is honored, of course, for keeping the country whole during the Civil War and for freeing the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865. Douglass escaped slavery at 16, then became an abolitionist, widely known for his eloquence on behalf of the equality of all men. Abolitionists in his time saw him as a living argument against slaveholders' insistence that slaves lacked the intelligence to function as independent citizens. Still, even many abolitionists found it hard to believe that such a great orator could have once been a slave.  

Since then, over the ensuing 156 years, Black people have:

• excelled as writers, musicians, actors, CEOs, mayors, legislators, teachers, doctors, generals, scientists, and athletes,
• discovered how to store blood and make blood banks possible,
• invented the filament that made Edison’s lightbulbs last longer than a few days and thus become useful and affordable,
• introduced the first vaccination to this continent (smallpox),
• helped launch the US space program (see the film Hidden Figures),
• invented the sanitary belt,
• reached the North Pole just ahead of Admiral Peary,
• established the settlement that became Chicago,
• become U.S. Supreme Court justices,
• and become president of the United States.

Yet, clearly, old assumptions die hard. 

In December, my church, Nativity Lutheran in Rockport, urged everyone to view the 18-minute video, Race in America, and to participate in one of three discussions we hosted online afterward. (Here’s the link, in case you’re interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY ) It starts with the question, Why after all these years are we still struggling with issues of race?

Honesty requires that we acknowledge what we know to be true: that the continued poverty and substandard life experiences of so many Black Americans is primarily a result of government-sanctioned policy. Black history is the reason. It’s not lack of ability. Historically, Black people have been kept down, by law. For example:

• After the emancipation in 1865, by 1900 every Southern state had passed laws that mandated segregation. Even whites and blacks playing chess together was illegal. The Jim Crow era jailed Blacks for things like “vagrancy” (e.g., standing still on a sidewalk, not having a job), or making “insulting gestures,” laws that were applied only to Black men.
• Home ownership was discouraged through the 1960s when the Federal Housing Administration pronounced black neighborhoods “too risky” to lend to. 
• The realtors’ code of conduct dictated that a realtor who sold a house to a Black family in a white neighborhood could lose his license.
• After WWII, when 1.2 million Blacks served in the military, the GI Bill insured low cost housing loans to returning soldiers, but largely left nonwhites out.  Of 67,000 mortgages in New York and New Jersey, under 100 went to Blacks.  In Mississippi, out of 3200 mortgages, 2 went to Blacks. Because homeownership has been the primary building block of household wealth, this greatly widened the prosperity gap for Blacks hoping to rise into the middle class.

The list of injustices is long.  We were not taught most of this in school. White America has been able to blame Black poverty on lack of initiative or will or character.  But the real reason that so many of our Black fellow citizens have been left behind is the policies, the laws, that have kept them from rising.

At the end of the Race in America video, the speaker asks: “What should we do?”  His answer:  “Care.”

We cannot change the past, but we can change the future. As citizens and people of conscience, we can pay attention. We can influence policies, we can speak up for the downtrodden. Isaiah 1:17 spells it out for us: “Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed…”

In addition to the Race in America video, you might like to watch a couple movies that relate to this: Lost Boundaries (1949, filmed in Kittery, ME) free on YouTube; Fences (2016) on Amazon Prime Video; and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) on Netflix. Any of them would be a good way to commemorate Black History month. 

The more we know, the more effectively we can, as Martin Luther King said, bend the arc of the moral universe closer to justice.

Sherry Cobb

Union