Maryville Black His­tory Month re­view

Feb­ru­ary may have seemed like just an­other month on the cal­en­dar, but for many, it holds a lot of res­o­nance be­cause this month is Black His­tory Month.

Feb­ru­ary is a time for African-Amer­i­cans to cel­e­brate who they are, where they are from and what they are to­day.

Here at Maryville, Black His­tory Month is a month to com­mem­o­rate what di­ver­sity means to our cam­pus.

Austin Davis, pres­i­dent of Maryville’s As­so­ci­a­tion of Black Col­le­giates (ABC) and a third-year com­mu­ni­ca­tion ma­jor, said that to him, Black His­tory Month is a time to re­flect and ap­pre­ci­ate “how the peo­ple that came be­fore you im­pacted the way that we do things and the way we can im­pact oth­ers for the peo­ple in the fu­ture.”

Tu­ran Mullins, as­sis­tant dean and di­rec­tor for the Of­fice of Di­ver­sity and In­clu­sion at Maryville, said that for him, the month is “a time to have some in­ten­tion­al­ity and re­flec­tion on the his­tory and the cur­rent state of black cul­ture, par­tic­u­larly in Amer­ica, but I like to look at it glob­ally some­times.”

For Davis, Black His­tory Month car­ries rel­e­vance in to­day’s world. He said that as the world gets more di­verse and in­clu­sion be­comes more com­mon, Black His­tory Month has al­ways stood as a com­mem­o­ra­tion of a group that has been able to not be “si­lenced.” The month re­minds every­one, he said, that in typ­i­cal text­books, peo­ple of color are deem­pha­sized, but that “we’re more than just slav­ery. There is a lot of peo­ple that have done great things for Amer­ica.” He pointed out that be­cause of Black His­tory Month, “we can rec­og­nize” the great fig­ures in African-Amer­i­cans’ past.

For Mullins, Black His­tory Month is rel­e­vant “be­cause of the im­por­tance of cel­e­brat­ing all cul­tures.” He added it is very im­por­tant to know your his­tory.

Davis said in ad­di­tion to fig­ures like Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., whom he called the “grand fig­ure” of Black His­tory Month, Oprah Win­frey and for­mer Pres­i­dent Obama, a black fig­ure from his­tory that stands out to him is Black His­tory Mon­th’s cre­ator, Carter G. Wood­son. Wood­son turned what be­gan as a week com­mem­o­rat­ing African-Amer­i­can his­tory into the month-long cel­e­bra­tion that it has since be­come. Davis said, “If it was­n’t for him to say that we de­serve a Ne­gro His­tory week, there would be no Black His­tory Month for us to cel­e­brate.”

Mullins, for his part, said, to him, both King and Mal­colm X stand out, as they were able to or­ga­nize ef­fec­tively and have con­ver­sa­tions on race and so­cioe­co­nomic sta­tus in an era be­fore mod­ern tech­nol­ogy and with lim­ited re­sources.

For those seek­ing to un­der­stand black his­tory, Davis rec­om­mended those who are in­ter­ested should do their re­search on the topic. For ex­am­ple, Googling im­por­tant black fig­ures, tragedies that af­fected the African-Amer­i­can com­mu­nity and the sys­tems that still im­pact to­day’s world would all count as re­search.

He also noted ABC does a lot of work mak­ing sure that African-Amer­i­can his­tory is re­mem­bered, so for Maryville stu­dents, he said he would rec­om­mend at­tend­ing an event or meet­ing, which “would mean a lot to show that you’re try­ing to learn some­thing that’s kind of close to you.”

Mullins con­curred, say­ing that read­ing and vis­it­ing mu­se­ums are ad­di­tional ways to learn about black cul­ture. In short, he noted, “there are a lot of op­por­tu­ni­ties” for peo­ple to learn.

To learn more about ABC, fol­low them on Twit­ter and In­sta­gram @abc_­mu­saints.