Black History Month remains important

By Leo Sandon

TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT

Once in the mid-1980s, after I had lectured on the 1965 Selma campaign and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a young honors student came to me at the conclusion of class. She was incredulous. "Let me get this straight," she said. "Are you saying that African-Americans in the South were denied the right to vote?" When I answered that was the case, she exclaimed, "That is incredible. I never knew that."

Her ignorance of our racial policies before 1965 was not all that unusual among my students. Otherwise decently informed undergraduates often were only vaguely aware, if not totally unaware, of this important part of our national story. So when I taught about black and white patterns in American history and religion, …show more content…
The black proportion of American society, 13 percent, is less than it has been during most of our history. Richard Rodriguez, journalist and PBS commentator, has pointed out that the color pattern in contemporary America is not so much black and white as it is brown.

Even among black Americans today, distinctions must be made between African-Americans, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and those from Central and South America. Current immigration of blacks from Africa is greater than the number who came here during the slave trade. Sam Roberts writes in The New York Times that "more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries."

There is an impressive new book, "In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience" (National Geographic, 2004), accompanied by a Web site with the same name, written by Howard Dodson and Sylviane A. Diouf of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "In Motion" is a beautiful book with National Geographic-quality photographs and readable demographic material presented in historical