Black History is Every Month: Black Patriots: NBA Legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Puts the Spotlight on the Overlooked Black Heroes of the American Revolution; A Tribute to NASA’s Katherine Johnson; Louis Armstrong, the King of Queens; Oklahoma Will Requi
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"Why aren’t our children exposed to the crucial contributions made by African-Americans toward the independence and formation of the United States? Names like Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, Peter Salem and James Armistead Lafayette should be mentioned alongside the founders of America.
Basketball legend, best-selling author and history buff Kareem Abdul-Jabbar teamed up with the History Channel to create Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution. The one-hour documentary shares the African-American experience during the Revolutionary War and the rarely told stories of these overlooked heroes who helped establish this country.
“A lot of people are uncomfortable with acknowledging that blacks have a stake in our country and have contributed and deserve better treatment,” Abdul-Jabbar goes on to say, “The Revolutionary War period is important because it is the emergence of America. One of the most important nations in the world, and we don’t know very much about what black Americans contributed to that effort.”
In the full video above, the NBA’s highest scorer of all time discusses some of these figures, the importance of the documentary and his own personal love of history. The documentary will premiere on History
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"Oklahoma’s Education Department is adding the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to its curriculum for the first time, in what doubles as a contingency to stop the tragedy’s centennial from devolving into a pile-on of the state’s failure to fully reckon with the tragedy. CNN reports that the decision was announced on Wednesday, with State Senator Kevin Matthews describing the 99-year-old killings as “Tulsa’s dirty secret.” Students from elementary through high school will be required to learn about them starting this fall. A pilot program run by Tulsa Public Schools has provided the blueprint for how the incident will be taught, and helped administrators develop tools and resources to ensure that teachers are comfortable teaching it. Until now, lessons about the massacre have been inconsistent — some schools taught it, some didn’t. Its universalization this week marks something of a turnaround in how its centrality to Oklahoma’s history is understood there.
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The broad strokes of what happened in Tulsa in 1921 are perhaps more widely known today than ever before, owing in part to a fictionalized depiction of the tragedy in HBO’s Watchmen [
] series. It commenced on May 31 of that year, when rumors circulated that a black man named Dick Rowland had sexually assaulted a white woman, Sarah Page, in an elevator. The allegations catalyzed what’s widely understood as a broader set of interracial resentments — namely those of Tulsa’s white residents toward the black denizens of Greenwood, a thriving business district marked by an unusual concentration of black wealth. Whites lay siege to the area, cordoning off its borders so that black people had trouble evacuating and shooting those they’d trapped. They set fire to around 40 blocks of homes and businesses, torching buildings from the ground while using airplanes to firebomb Greenwood from the sky. Forty-eight hours later, more than 300 black people were dead and 10,000 more were left homeless."
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