Essays

I grew up in a conservative small town in the southwest, meaning that my history lessons started with the Revolutionary War and ended with WWII. The first time I ever learned about the Civil Rights movement was at a museum dedicated to the era in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s right — to learn about some of the most important history in our nation, I had to cross the country and stumble upon it myself.

History is a very broad subject to be interested in. Some people can talk for hours about World War II, the Titanic, or Tudor England. Even with all that knowledge, there is still more history to learn. Last year, I read Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, which focuses on the forced sterilization of Black and brown bodies by the American government. I focused my learning efforts on Black history in America, which has been lost to time or hidden across the country in pursuit of white supremacy. Therefore, I wanted to challenge myself in my reading habits: find a book focused on Black history for each decade of the twentieth century.

If you’re interested in my picks, you can see them here. This article is not a book review, but an insight into what I learned during this reading challenge and how I’ve used it to grow as a human.

When I started this challenge, I decided not to look up the race of the author beforehand, focusing only on the stories they were telling. Because of this, I did have some books written by white authors on my list. In hindsight, I wish I would’ve found books written by all Black authors. This is largely because I didn’t enjoy the way the storyline went in the books written by white authors. They usually ended with a white savior complex, or Black characters forgiving white characters for slavery or injustice of some sort. Both of which are harmful lessons to take away from this challenge.

Some of my favorite books in this challenge (The Great Mrs. Elias and Sisters in Arms) showed the resiliency of Black women despite people stepping in their way. I could cheer on the all-Black battalion of the Women’s Army in World War II as they single-handedly helped deliver lost mail to soldiers fighting the front lines. I dived into archives of the New York Public Library to learn more about Hannah Elias, the real-estate mogul of early 1900s that paved the way to Harlem being a predominantly Black neighborhood today.

And during my reading, I learned about the atrocities that Black people were forced to face in the twentieth century, issues which still dominate BIPOC lives today. In The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed, a Black teenager navigates the streets of Los Angeles during the Rodney King protests of 1992. As I read this book, I was acutely reminded of the more recent George Floyd protests, where a Black man was mercilessly murdered by police in the streets and justice was not served. I could so clearly piece together the similarities, and it was shocking that this is a prevalent discussion and fight that still plagues our country today.

I read more about police brutality in online articles and other nonfiction pieces such as America on Fire, which discusses over-policing in BIPOC communities and the way white rebellions are shaped to be nationalist necessities (eg. Boston Tea Party) while Black rebellions are labeled riots. It opened my eyes to the history behind the horrific realities that BIPOC communities continue to face every single day.

Man raises his fist during a Black Lives Matter Protest in Paris, France. 2020. Photo by Thomas De Luze. Sourced from Unsplash.

The biggest takeaway from this challenge is the blatant mistreatment of Black communities in regular life. Hannah Elias, a wealthy businesswoman in Gilded Age New York, had her door beaten down by the police and dragged out of her home, even though law stated she was safe from arrest if she did not leave her house. Black characters are sneered at for the most mundane things, such as a wealthy Black character in The Davenports is insulted by a sales assistant who insists she can’t afford anything in the store (spoiler alert: she can). Military rank is broken by white soldiers who refuse to see Black women as their superior in Sisters in Arms.

In every single book I read, the resiliency of Black people has shined through the pages every time. Where doors were closed in their faces, they broke them down. Hannah Elias was a sex worker who learned how to invest in real estate, becoming the richest Black woman of her time, less than forty years after slavery ended. The Ref sisters, after being coercively sterilized in their early teens, ended up winning a class-action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, putting an end to government-funded sterilization abuse which also included indigenous women and the women of Puerto Rico.

Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf, 1973. Printed in Ebony Magazine, Sourced From Natural Museum of American History Behring Center

I am now acutely aware of the way the country has systematically abused Black communities in the entirety of our nation’s history. From a vast African diaspora that can never trace their roots to the War on Drugs after the CIA flooded crack into Black neighborhoods. It is hidden underneath most of what we are taught on the surface and how our world works today.

This challenge made me see history from a new perspective. I dove deeper into research about why things are the way they are, while opening myself up to look at my life and how my whiteness benefits from that. It feels like my duty to learn what I can and unravel my own behaviors in order to fight the systemic injustice that I have never experienced, and never will.

To learn about America is to learn about Black history. We did not become the country we are today on the backs of white enslavers or segregationists. They built this nation on the hard work of Black bodies that didn’t even ask to come here. This was a mentally exhausting challenge to partake in, and it took over a year to finish. But I am privileged enough to have the ability to close the books and step away from these situations, and I am proud of the BIPOC communities and activists who continue to fight every day for a greater version of America.