We’ve all heard the reasonable sounding questions, “Why black history?” Why not a white history month?”  The public school history that I learned went something like this: Slavery was a very bad thing that we ended.  Lots of slaves and their descendants went north where they were free and equal.  The South resisted but the Jim Crow era ended with the Civil Rights Laws so now it’s all good and black folks can succeed if they will do the work.  Unfortunately, that version of history denies the life experiences of most black Americans.  The reality of history exists in those experiences, not in laws and textbooks.

To see the difference, come with me on a short trip to my home state and town, New Albany, Indiana.   Founded in 1813, it was once the largest city in the state and being directly across the Ohio River (which belongs to Kentucky) from Louisville, it was the first “free” stop for many fugitive slaves.  The Second Baptist Church, built in 1849-1852, sits on Main Street, not more than 300 yards from the slave-state waters of Kentucky.  The beautifully restored church features a marker describing its history as a stop on the underground railroad, a respite where refugees could hide in dirt floored rooms  or escape to the street through a tunnel before making their way to other states or to Canada.  Helping fugitive slaves was illegal but New Albany’s free blacks and anti-slavery whites risked violence and arrest to do that as early as 1821.

Also on Main Street, about four blocks away, is another historic marker.  It describes mob violence against blacks in the summer of 1862, about 15 months into the Civil War.    White mobs responded to a fight between white and black men with two days of attacks on black people and their property.  The historic marker is placed at the site of the Israel Boarding House, whose owner saved one black man by barring her door against the mob.  Similar mob attacks were reported that same summer in Cincinnati, Chicago and Toledo.

In 1851,  Indiana voters approved a new state constitution that banned black migration into the state and denied blacks the rights to vote, serve in the militia, bear witness in trials involving whites, and attend public schools.  Despite those provisions, more than 11,000 blacks lived in the state.  Thus began the tradition of “Sundown Towns”.  Northern states had very small black populations; and a majority of whites wanted to keep it that way.  Historian James Loewen lists nearly 300 suspected Sundown Towns in the Hoosier State.  Black folks steered clear of them and many remain mostly white to this day.  Some passed ordinances and posted signs such as “Whites only within city limits after dark”.  Other warnings were far more graphic.  Through the mid-1920s about 30 percent of white Hoosier men were Ku Klux Klan members.  So were the governor and the majority of the legislature who had learned that it was hard to get elected without a Klan endorsement.

Alabama Governor George Wallace (“Segregation now, Segregation forever”) received 30 percent of the vote in Indiana’s 1964 Democratic Presidential primary.  By 1972, the solid Democrat/Dixiecrat segregationist south abandoned the newly pro-civil rights Democratic Party.  Southern states have favored the Republican Party since it abandoned Lincoln’s legacy  in a quest for populist votes.  In that political turmoil the legal protections that black Americans had gained were inconsistently enforced. For example, despite laws requiring equal employment opportunity,  I recall a manufacturing plant tour in the late 1960s.  It was a thriving unionized company with excellent wages and benefits, but the union didn’t accept blacks so they could only have non-union manual labor jobs.  The black men who packed and loaded finished products were known as “bagger boys”.

The details that I’ve described won’t make it into history texts but they are the experiences that black grandparents can describe for today’s youth.  It appears that two generations from now, black children will be hearing about jobs with few benefits and wages too low to support a family, police shootings of unarmed black boys and men, fathers in jail for non-violent crimes, lead tainted water, and racially gerrymandered  voting districts designed to keep the creators of the status quo in office.

The flow of black history continues today.   It is closely related to the rest of the American story, but always distinct because of barriers that separate the two.  It is said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it; and few of us want that.  If Americans of all races learn the realities of black history, we may finally be able to join it fully to American history.  And that is why black history matters to us all.