For those who live in the United States, February is Black History Month.  It is a month set aside to remember a people whose contributions to society have been ignored for far too long.  It is a month set aside to remember that American history is more than the stories of great men like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.  It is more than the history of more notorious men like Aaron Burr, George Armstrong Custer, or the barons of Tammany Hall.  In fact, Black History Month is more than just a month to reflect on the accomplishments of great African-American men like Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, or Frederick Douglass. 

More than anything else, Black History Month is a month to think about the accomplishments of millions of men and women of African descent whose names have long been forgotten, and whose names will never appear in any history book.  It is a month to think about the men and women who cultivated the fields that enabled America to feed and clothe much of the world.  It is a month to reflect on the families who left their meager belongings in the Deep South to join millions of other poor immigrants to transform cities like Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland into industrial giants.  It is a month to remember that the great symbols of American Freedom standing proudly in our nation’s capital were built by men whose skin color disqualified them from enjoying the fruits of that freedom. 

Black History Month is also a time for white men like me to reflect on the deeds of our forefathers, and remember the crimes they committed against far too many innocent men and women.  It is a time to reflect on the fact that during the first century after the Civil War in many of our nation’s states, not a single black man accused of a crime against a white person was acquitted.  Not one.  It is a time to notice the reality that the pigment of most African-Americans is noticeably lighter than that of their African cousins, and to reflect on the circumstances behind that reality.

To my knowledge, there is no definitive evidence that any of my ancestors were slave owners.  However, the first members of my family to arrive in the New World settled in Northern Virginia in the late 17^th century.  The fact that we can trace that branch of my family to their arrival in America, and even several centuries before then, indicates they were likely a family of means.  Like most families of means who established farms in the Virginia Tidelands, we can infer their property included human chattel.  Initially, perhaps, the chattel might have been indentured servants, most likely poor Englishmen working under contract for 10 or 20 years in conditions that differed little from that of a slave.  Eventually, however, indentured servitude was largely replaced by African slavery.  Only those who refuse to acknowledge the obvious would deny the virtual certainty that my Virginia ancestors would have owned Negro slaves.

Another branch of my ancestral line came from the Deep South, near the heart of plantation society.  Ironically, few if any of them were slave holders.  I would fool myself, however, to think they were not somehow complicit in the evils perpetrated on their African-American neighbors, even after slavery’s end.  They certainly benefited from the unrealistically low cost of goods and services that were produced or harvested by African-Americans at barely subsistence wages.  They benefited from the reduced competition for decent paying jobs that would not be given to a black man.  They benefited from the inequitable distribution of tax revenue that supported the schools and civic infrastructure they enjoyed in comparison to that of their black-skinned neighbors.  Worst of all, they remained silent at the obvious evil that existed all around them. 

To view slavery and Jim Crow as a “benefit” for white men is, of course, a great misrepresentation of the facts.  In actuality, those evil institutions were no benefit at all; they corrupted White American society every bit as much as they denigrated and humiliated Black American society.  During the first hundred years following the Civil War, the results of that corruption were easily apparent to anyone who cared to look.  It was no accident that the South lagged behind the rest of the nation in education and economic wealth.  Even in the North, White society developed a sense of entitlement that erupted violently when someone had the audacity to challenge it.  Martin Luther King said the worst racial violence he ever witnessed occurred not in Mississippi or Georgia, but in the suburbs of Chicago.

That corruption even made its way into the one institution that should have been immune to it, the Church.  As a child, my family was a member of the largest congregation in our city.  Even so, there were no African-Americans in that congregation until the late 1960’s or early 1970’s.  I can still remember the comment one of my friends made during the introduction of a new African-American member one Sunday.  My friend leaned over and whispered, “My grandmother must be freaking out right now.”  It was the mid-1970’s, and still, 110 years after Appomattox, there were white men and women who were appalled at the thought of an integrated community of Christian worshipers.  Thankfully, by then such attitudes were clearly in the minority within my congregation, but the fact that they existed at all, and undoubtedly exist still in many communities, sadly illustrates the degree to which even our nation’s sacred institutions could be corrupted by the evils of Jim Crow.

In my lifetime, I have seen incredible improvement in the racial tone of our nation.  Every Sunday, there is a mix of all races in the congregation of my youth.  Last night, my wife and I had dinner in a restaurant where the table next to ours was occupied by a family composed of an African-American man, his East Asian wife, and their biological son.  I doubt if anyone in the restaurant thought there was anything peculiar about that family.  Americans may not be color blind, but we are certainly color tolerant, and even color accepting.  We have come a long, long way.  Black History Month is a time to see just how far we have come, and to contemplate how much further we still need to go.  We may not have reached that Promised Land envisioned by Dr. King, but we are getting closer every day.  Millions of brave, black Americans sacrificed immeasurably to bring us where we are today.  To them and their descendants, this white man says thank you.