Six on History: Black History is Every Month
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Welcome back to Six on History
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Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
Welcome back to Six on History
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
1) PBS' Muhammad Ali Is a Monument to the Strength and Sacrifice of the Greatest Athlete Who Ever Lived, The Root
"There’s a lot to love about Ken Burns’ latest creation: the gripping PBS documentary, Muhammad Ali.
Taking cues from Burns’ award-winning forays into Black triumph that proceeded this one—such as 2005's Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson and 2016's Jackie Robinson—Muhammad Ali offers a refreshing take on the titular character’s well-documented journey of faith and repositions arguably the greatest athlete of all-time as not only a generational talent, but an integral component of American history.
Throughout the course of this four-part odyssey, there are plenty of moments that most of us are acutely aware of thanks to a seemingly endless succession of films that have mined Ali’s plight for Hollywood gold. But where Muhammad Ali departs from predecessors like Regina King’s One Night In Miami, Will Smith’s Ali, or Antoine Fuqua’s What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali is its access to archival footage that other filmmakers can only dream of obtaining and its commitment to sheer scope. Instead of attempting to shovel 74 years of courage and contradictions into a single sitting, his legacy is given ample room to breathe and is explored over the course of nearly eight hours of riveting cinema
In the first chapter, “Round One: The Greatest,” we’re introduced to Cassius Clay, the brash demeanor that would define him, and the amateur boxing circuit that bred a cultural icon. In subsequent chapters, we bear witness to his conversion to Islam, his eventual standoff with the U.S. Army, and his continued quest to use his platform to be in service to Black progress. Much like Martin Luther King Jr., that pledge has since been contorted by those who seek to revise history and dilute his ambitions to suit their own personal agendas, but Muhammad Ali captures the three-time heavyweight champion in all of his unapologetic glory.
And yes, while much of it feels like riding a bike for the first time in over a decade, there are still plenty of little-known trivia answers that the film introduces to the world. Case in point, during Ali’s amateur career he was so scared of flying that he wore a military parachute during his flight to the Olympic trials. And after winning the competition, instead of flying back home to Louisville, Ky., he pawned off one of his prizes—a watch—in order to purchase a train ticket so that he could get back home. Other revelations include Zaire’s (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) dictator Mobutu Sese confiscating George Foreman’s passport in order to ensure that “The Rumble in the Jungle” went on without a hitch, Ali’s affinity for performing magic tricks for former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and the boxing legend receiving a decapitated dog in the mail—with a letter that read: “We know how to handle black draft-dodging dogs in Georgia”—in order to deter him from returning to the ring in 1970.
Whether you’re brand new, vaguely familiar, or acutely aware of Ali’s story, the comprehensive nature of this film ensures that there’s plenty of magic and meat on the bone for every appetite—insatiable or otherwise. For fans of the sweet science, there’s a treasure trove of fight footage and a meticulous breakdown (it even gets its own chapter) of his bitter rivalry with his archnemesis, “Smokin’” Joe Frazier. For those curious about how his family and religion informed his purpose and unwavering principles, that’s in this documentary, too. And for those curious to learn how the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage winner navigated his final years while at the mercy of Parkinson’s Disease, this film unveils those challenges as well.
In closing, Muhammad Ali truly floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. It also serves as a timely reminder that even though Ali has long since left this physical plane, his strength and sacrifice will endure forever."
The third chapter of "Inheritance" is a recognition, a celebration, and a reclamation of the Black body.
Parents like me who are committed to dismantling racism want our children to be taught by people who deeply understand social justice, but our entire education system is designed to produce educators who do not have the knowledge, skill, experience, or relationships to engage students in productive conversations about racism or police violence. For example:
. The overwhelming majority of educators learned almost nothing about race and racism in their own K-12 schooling and most graduated from teacher certification programs without learning much about racism, dialogue facilitation, classroom management, or trauma.
· There is little value placed on teaching for social justice in hiring, evaluation systems, or even curricular standards.
· 80% of teachers are white (and the majority of them do not have even one friend from a different racial background).
· The professional development and support provided to teachers once they enter the field doesn’t come close to making up this gap.
1. Get the police out of your schools and get that police car away from your front entrance.
2. Get really honest about the individuals on staff so you can distribute resources in ways that help them develop more capacity when it comes to issues of justice.
3. Proactively take a public stand so that when someone complains about the Black Lives Matter pins and posters and the lessons on race and racism (as you know they will!), teachers know you have their backs. Consider connecting this work to other school and district goals such as preparing “global citizens” and “ethical decision-makers.”
And if you are a parent wanting more for your children, keep demanding that your local schools, districts, universities, and teacher preparation programs take seriously the need to invest in and value the skills that will produce educators capable of teaching for social justice. Those of you who have class or race privilege, stop baking cupcakes for fundraisers, and start organizing to demand that your community prepare and retain anti-racist (and anti-classist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-ableist, etc.) teachers so that your children have a better chance of becoming critically thinking adults committed to social justice.
In sum, whatever your role in schools, you should do as much as you possibly can, aligned with your current knowledge and skill, while minimizing potential harm, especially to the most marginalized students. Good luck!"
Co-Founder of Justice Leaders Collaborative, Author of Those Kids, Our Schools & Race Dialogues, Mother of 3
"A 30ft wave crashes over your head as you enter the museum, dragging you instantly down into the roiling waters. The waves keep coming at you in gunmetal grey surges, with nothing to cling to amid the loneliness of the sea.
Across the giant screen in front of you, words start emerging that ask you to reflect on the “the terrifying, tragic and deadly ocean journey” which 12.7 million men, women and children were forced to make having been kidnapped from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery. For about 2 million of them, the voyage to the Americas would end “in a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean”.
As the name suggests, the visitor is taken on a white-knuckle ride through some of the most painful elements of America’s long history of racial injustice – slavery, lynching, segregation, all the way to the present-day epidemic of police killings of African American teenagers and the societal addiction to putting Black people behind bars.
The museum pulls no punches. One section memorializes the children killed in racial terror lynchings: “Four-year-old Black girl Lillie Mike, her six-year-old sister Emma Mike, lynched by a white mob 1884, Calhoun County, Georgia.”
Bryan Stevenson, the mastermind behind the Legacy Museum, sees such searing detail as bitter but necessary medicine for the American soul. The new institution, which starts on 1 October, lands at a time when racial violence is again on the rise and when “critical race theory” is being used as a ruse to prevent the history of America’s racist past being taught in schools.
It will open its doors less than a year after a white mob spearheaded by far-right groups and fueled by white supremacist anger stormed the US Capitol, egged on by the then US president.
“We really felt the need to be even more precise in detailing the harm that people in this country have inherited and failed to address,” Stevenson said. “In a moment when it’s so tempting to say that’s not true, it didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad, when all these false narratives are being created, we had to be even clearer about the nature of the injury that was done.”
The Legacy Museum is the latest manifestation of a vision of truth-telling and repair that Stevenson, 61, has been developing for years. His ruminations began when he first came down to the deep south as a young Harvard Law graduate in the early 1980s.
He cut his teeth fighting for justice for innocent death row inmates, which became the subject of his 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, and the subsequent movie of the same name in which he is played by Michael B Jordan. The non-profit he founded, Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), has won reversals, relief, or release from prison for more than 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row.
Over the years he reflected on why it was that 42% of America’s death row inmates are African American when the Black population makes up just 13% of the US total. He kept being drawn back into American history, and what had happened in his adoptive home of Montgomery.
The Alabama capital was the site of the first Confederate White House, where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. When Stevenson arrived in the city, all its main public monuments were devoted to glorifying white supremacy.
“In the 1980s you couldn’t find the word slavery anywhere in Montgomery. There were 59 markers and memorials to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis’s birthday is still a state holiday in Alabama, as is Confederate Memorial Day.”
Stevenson’s response has been to slowly, stealthily remake the city in a very different mould. The monuments he is championing are devoted to memorializing not the Confederacy but the horrors of racial injustice and honoring not only its many victims but also the courageous civil rights activists who fought against it.
He began by putting up markers to the slave trade which are now dotted through Montgomery. Then in 2018 he opened the first national memorial to the more than 4,000 people of color who were killed in racial terror lynchings, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which sits audaciously on top of the hill overlooking the state capitol.
Now he has taken the nascent Legacy Museum that opened in 2018 and expanded it fourfold into a giant 40,000 sq ft space in which his desire for truth-telling vision has room to flourish. The new exhibition is housed on the exact location of a former slave warehouse where Black people were held in bondage, forced to process cotton and held in pens in preparation for being sold.
Stevenson’s hope is that if Montgomery – a cradle of the Confederacy, ground zero of lynchings, birthplace of the civil rights movement – can be reconfigured from a city glorifying slavery into one dedicated to racial healing, then anything is possible.
“If we can create a new architecture, a new landscape, a new conversation, a new relationship to history in Montgomery, Albama, then there’s not another community in the country that can say, ‘We can’t do that.’”
Which brings the story back to the 30ft cinematic Atlantic wave crashing over our heads at the entrance to the new museum. Stevenson said that he wanted to immerse visitors into the violence that the ocean represented to so many kidnapped Africans.
“We did something to millions of people to disconnect them not just from their families and homes but from their identities. Two million people died during the middle passage, there are hundreds of thousands of bodies buried at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and yet we are more interested in exploring the wreck of the Titanic than this unparalleled human tragedy,” he said.
From the trauma of slavery, the museum’s journey takes you through the slim glimmer of hope that was emancipation and the Reconstruction period into the renewed subjugation of lynching. A wall of contemporary newspaper headlines records such unconscionable events as: “Lynched Because He Didn’t Say ‘Mr’”, “Oil Soaked Negroes Burned” and “Triple Lynching in Georgia – Lynchers Could Not Find the Negro They Wanted and So Took Three Others”.
The museum traces how when lynching began to decline in the 1930s, the white mob gentrified its violence and took it indoors. White supremacy found a new home in the legitimized, sanitized manifestation of racial terror killings that is the death penalty.
Later rooms explore the battle to secure fundamental freedoms in the civil rights era, including Montgomery’s own bus boycott. Then the Legacy Museum arrives at the present day.
It is here at the end of the museum’s journey that Stevenson’s holistic vision becomes clear – history must be understood not only as an end in itself but as a cure to the sickness coursing through the veins of modern America.
“This is about changing the larger narrative,” he said. “Most people in this country, to the extent they knew anything about slavery, they were taught it was benign and not that big a problem; they knew nothing about lynching; and when you get to segregation, well Black people wanted it that way, they wanted their own schools. You end up in a place where you just don’t think we’ve done anything so problematic that we need to talk about it.”
The new Legacy Museum opens at an exceptional moment for America. On the positive side, last year’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests inspired a rethinking of the past that led to scores of Confederate monuments being toppled, including the statue of Robert E Lee that was removed earlier this month in the slave-owning capital of Richmond, Virginia.
But such winds of change only go so far in Stevenson’s reckoning. For him, fundamental change first requires truth-telling.
“We are in this phase where truth-telling has to happen. It’s going to require more than taking down statures, more than the easy symbolic stuff. The harder stuff is, what does it mean that most of us were born in this country at a time when there were legal restrictions on who you could love. What’s the legacy of that?”
Then there is the negative side of the present moment. The museum makes plain that the sores of America’s racial wounds remain very much open.
It records the fact that Black children today are killed by police at six times the rate of white children. That 2.3 million people are still incarcerated, affecting all Americans – almost two-thirds of all adults in the US, whatever their race or ethnicity, have family members who have been behind bars.
Many of the exhibits trigger chilling parallels with the modern day. A room that examines the myriad imaginative ways in which Black citizens were disenfranchised in the deep south – answer the question “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” or you don’t get registered to vote – is resonant at a time when voter suppression is once again sweeping the country.
The disturbing images displayed at the museum of white men at public lynching spectacles, their faces contorted into wild, elated grimaces, beg comparison to the expressions of the mob that stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. The same white rage, aggravated by fears of Black democratic participation, fueled both.
“That’s the problem with fear and anger,” Stevenson said. “It’s toxic, it’s infectious and it will destroy a healthy democracy. Which is why no one should be indifferent to the threat that these events represent.”
Visitors to the new museum are likely to emerge from the end of all this challenged and shaken. But the journey contains a note of healing.
One of the final rooms is a large “reflection space” given over to the stories of 400 people who had the courage to stand up against racial injustice. Some are familiar – Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, WEB Du Bois, John Lewis – others have all but been forgotten.
Stevenson hopes the room will inspire people to action, and act as a segue to the next chapter in his ambitious plan. After the truth-telling comes the remedy and repair.
His team has started to reach out to a range of institutions – hospitals, schools, banks, insurance companies, professional sports teams, newspapers – inviting them to engage with EJI and launch their own truth and justice project. “These are institutions with histories and they have an obligation to repair the damage they’ve created,” he said.
He hopes that by now people will appreciate that the lessons of history are not debilitating, they are restorative. “We have helped people understand that we can talk about slavery, lynching, segregation, mass incarceration, and survive. The world will not end. It will not erupt into flames. And we will get to a better place.”
