AN OLD WHITE GUY CONSIDERS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Frederick Douglass, Circa 1879 Black History Month highlights an opportunity to discover more of the actual history of how people of color have been treated in the U.S.A. The stories of enslaved people, indigenous Americans, indentured servants and immigrants are only recently getting told widely. My own view is that more and more people have researched original documents, family stories, and oral history so that 21st Century Americans (if we choose to) can discover the whole story of our Nation's history. The facts have always been there; the difference is that the facts are now being told in detail more and more by those descended from people of color. For many years, school history books focused on the aspirational nature of the American experience as first expressed in the founding documents. By definition, this gave an overview without the detail needed to listen and learn about the lived experience of