A Month When We Should Listen to the Ancestors

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:26:00 -0500

Life is full of delicious”and sometimes not so delicious”irony. If there is a “white” man in this country who could have been expected to vote for President Barack Obama more than the “white” man who is writing this, it is difficult for me to imagine such.

For more than forty years, now”ever since, as a barely-wet-behind-the-ears high school teacher, I went south, in the summer of 1969, to North Carolina Central University for an National Defense Education Act (NDEA) teachers’ institute on African-American history and literature”I have been involved in teaching, researching, writing, and speaking about, in a host of public program venues, the journeying into the African-American ancestor world that I take my college students on each semester. Our nation has set out, in special ways, on this ancestor journey every February since the “Father of Black History in the Twentieth Century,” Dr. Carter G. Woodson, decided”in the 1920s, during the bleakest of times for black Americans”that there should be a national week devoted to such ancestor journeying, and that it should be placed between the birth dates of the two most consequential of our ancestor voices, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

February, as Black History Month, is a good time to turn to the ancestors for a wisdom hard bought and of inestimable value.

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A Month When We Should Listen to the Ancestors