Black History Month 2024 (When We’re All A Little Weary)
I don’t know about you, but February seemed the farthest month away when it was below zero a few weeks ago. Now, I can’t believe it snuck up on me so quickly. Tomorrow is February 1st, the first day of Black History Month in the U.S. I wrote a more in depth post last year that you can read here for a lot more ways to learn and celebrate. There’s plenty there if you are hungry for more.
Usually, I love the opportunity to amplify voices that have been silenced and to learn what my brothers and sisters have both withstood and overcome. However, this year, I found myself looking at the “First Day of Black History Month” on my Google calendar and inwardly groaning.
My social media follows are flooded with Gaza and book bans, droughts and hate crimes, school shootings and childcare crises, the erasure of history and the creation of new chapters that are abhorrent. It feels somewhere between performative and pointless to acknowledge, yet again, that we have to have a designated month to focus on history that keeps. on. repeating.
And yet. I want to engage this month as a curious and compassionate follower of Christ. Maybe you are like me, and find yourself overwhelmed by the various fractions and fissures of this groaning world and don’t think you can do any more. I’d invite you to join me in one of these five simple ways to learn or grow in February—one for each week.
1. Listen to Hidden Story: I believe we can’t heal until we reveal what’s hidden, and these stories are ones we need to know. Choose one of these stories to keep it alive in our collective memory as we move into a new year:
“What a Jim Crow-era asylum can teach us about mental health today”
“Virginia Voices of Integration”: Recollections of six people who led the way, in Harrisonburg, Charlottesville and Warren County.
“A Conversation with Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor” on the film Origin, an onscreen adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
2. Witness Black Joy, Not Just Black Trauma: This beautiful story on why Black joy has historical importance and future weight is a great place to start (Black Joy: Resistance, Resilience and Reclamation by Elaine Nichols) It includes a moving video collection of essays on the topic at the bottom, as well as some gorgeous photos from Smithsonian’s collection.
My favorite visual reminders of Black joy are videos from Jon Batiste, especially “Freedom,” “I Need You,” and “Jon Batiste & Friends: Jazz Night In America.”
3. Learn a New Way of Engaging History As A “Better Samaritan:” Theologian and writer Arbra Bailey writes, “When LUV (Listening, Understanding, Validating) talk engages with the conviction that context matters, it paves the way for an authentic conversation with Black history…I invite you to join me in a LUV talk with a contemporary voice who told me her Black history story during a recent interview, paying attention to her context along the way.”
4. Add a book by a Black author to your TBR (to be read) list. In light of Black History Month, I’m looking forward to reading Soil by Camille Dungy. Here’s what the publisher writes:
“ Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.”
I’d love to hear which book you’re adding for the next few months.
5. Finally, linger on these words from writer and theologian Dante Stewart (bonus points if you read the whole Sojourners article. It’s worth your time.):
““The story I want to tell is this: Black people are human and worthy of love. We are not heroes. We are not villains. We are human, as beautiful as we are terrible. Our lives are not just resistance. Our lives are not just lessons.
Our stories — and our futures — are the ways we have stood up for what’s right and kept on living when dreams were deferred, hopes unrealized, lives lost, and bodies wearied, and our hearts beating fast as our feet moved across red carpets in old churches rejoicing that we are given of life. These stories are our shining joy. They have become gospel to a people bent and broken.””
