Black History Month: Why we celebrate

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford announced Black History Month granting federal recognition for the sacrifice, bravery and entrepreneurship achievements of African Americans throughout the centuries. A building of the infrastructure and contributions of wealth made for this country.

Take an eye-opening look at the one-thousand and one inventions created by African Americans that we use every day in our lives without realizing who the inventors were. Examine the black Americans who overcame impossible odds and survived and are thriving in today’s economy.

A people who used religion and faith to weather and survive horrific atrocities committed against them. A people who overcame the burdens of slavery to place the nations’ first Black President along with Four-Star Generals and a Secretary of Defense making their mark in the twenty-first century. Transferring the injustices into a peaceful transformation into mainstream society. African Americans have fought in every war for freedom including the American Revolutionary War.

Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Indigenous ancestry, died in Boston, Massachusetts on March 5^th 1770 after a British Soldier shot two musket balls into his chest. His death and that of four other men at the hands of the 29^th Regiment which became known as the Boston Massacre of 1770. This incident happened after Attucks shouted, “Kill them, knock them over!”

Meanwhile, American soldiers were being shelled with ice and coal from mobs armed with clubs. This act sparked the American Revolutionary War. Attucks is considered to be a Patriot martyr. A turning point for the Civil War was the voluntary enlistment of the 54^th Regiment out of Boston, Massachusetts. Eight hundred soldiers comprised the very first African American Regiment that helped change the tide of the Civil  War. Prior to this point it was a stalemate between the North and South. This regiment pushed through enemy lines down into Fort Sumter, South Carolina. A heavily fortified fort that the North could not penetrate until the arrival of the 54^th Regiment. It was at this battle that the South began to lose its grip.

Speaking of changing the tide, in World War II the Americans and British were losing massive troops in the famous “Battle of the Bulge.” A battle in which the Germans had drawn American soldiers deep within its territory with substantial casualties. General George S. Patton, Commander of the 761^st Tank Battalion was running out of manpower to push the Germans back. He asked if there were any reserves stateside. That is when he learned there was a Tank Battalion of African American soldiers that had been training for two years but no one would put them into action.

Patton called up this battalion to aid him in the fight. Once present, he reminded the men that he is counting on them and not to make him look bad since Black soldiers were considered too scared to fight and not brave in combat.

These soldiers silenced their critics as they began to push the Germans back to the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, General Patton used this same group of men to race toward Berlin, Germanys’ Headquarters, in a race with British General Montgomery. Not to disappoint, Patton and his 761^st African American Tank Battalion reached Bastogne and other cities liberating town after town before Montgomery arrived.

Blacks were not considered for pilot training at this time as well. American bombers were being lost on escorts missions by the dozens. That was until they enlisted the help of a group of African American pilots known as the “Tuskegee Airman.” White pilots were amazed and soon started to request them for escorts after discovering that not one bomber was lost with their services. Painted red were the tails of their planes as they became known as the “Red Tails.”

In the achievements in the field of entrepreneurship as far as patents, only free African Americans were allowed to own them. Thomas Jennings was one of the first, inventing and patenting a dry cleaning process in 1821. One hundred years from that date, Garrett Morgan with only an elementary education invented the three-way stoplight, a sewing machine along with the gas mask that was used heavily in World War I.

Lewis Latimer was credited for the invention of the filament used in light bulbs. Latimer worked for Alexander Graham Bell. His filament lasted longer and was cheaper to use than Thomas Edison’s model who Edison hired soon after.

George Washington Carver as a boy in slavery was sold for $300 and an old broken down race horse to an adoptive family. Carver, who is also out of Tuskegee, Alabama, invented 300 different items from a peanut including peanut butter and peanut oil.

In 1989, on a hot summer day, the invention of the Super Soaker was created by an African American named Lonnie Johnson who formed his own engineering firm, the Laramie Company. A toy that generated $200 million dollars in sales and became the number one selling toy in America.

One set back however, African Americans have not historically been able to maintain towns they build due to mobs. One example would be an African American community of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. It was at this time when Blacks were seeking employment and were being turned away. So they decided to form their own community. It did not take long before the town was formed with two airports, four banks, grocery and lumber stores. It also became known as “Black Wall Street” for its thriving financial district. It contained everything a town would need to sustain itself.

However, upon the return of World War I veterans who had trouble finding jobs were frustrated. They had been falsely told that the Black community had taken their jobs. One day a fourteen year old boy decided he needed to go to the restroom which was on the second floor of a building. Upon entering the elevator he tripped and fell on the elevator operator who shortly claimed he was trying to rape her. A mob quickly formed and began burning down the town, looting banks and grocery stores while burning houses and killing occupants. A World War I plane had reportedly dropped a nitroglycerine bomb on the town as well.

A similar incident happened two years later in Rosewood, Florida as a mob of 200 men attacked the community. In which they also claimed a black man had raped a white woman. This infuriated the mob as they set that town on fire also known as the Rosewood Massacre of 1923. Even though it is reported that 30 men, women and children were killed, eyewitness accounts the death toll of 27 to 150.

You may have heard of a R&B group known as the Gap Band. This band had grown up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in 1982 they made the hit song “You Dropped The Bomb On Me.” Their name GAP stands for the main thoroughfare that enters their neighborhood on Greenwood –Archer and Pine Street.  In 1997, a Black Director by the name of John Singleton would direct a movie of the massacre on Home Box Office or HBO.

As you look upon your calendar in February or view your television set and you see segments of African Americans, remember the history and achievements that they have contributed to the greatest country in the world.

The post Black History Month: Why we celebrate first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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