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Why we should celebrate Black History Month
by Kathryn B. Moore

Why should we celebrate Black History Month? Because we keep making the same mistake over and over again.
After fighting for freedom for all in the Revolutionary War, we regressed to suspicion and heightened classism. After World War I, when so many came to the United States to find refuge, we talked about the rights of everyone, including Asians and Negroes, but we didn't enact them. Even after World War II, Vietnam and all the other confrontations, we still had second-class citizens -- those who were treated differently because they were considered 'the different ones.'
The majority is now turning into being that 'different one' so we'd better learn to find our distinguishing characteristics in our commitment to justice, peace, and freedom for all.
During the Civil War, we almost lost our nation over the issue of slavery and we still have not overcome the divisions slavery engendered. We still don't know each other. We don't know why persons misunderstand or seem to feel unheard or hurt. Nor do we comprehend why our attempts to reconcile seem to go astray. That's why we celebrate Black History Month.
I've recently re-read Ralph Ellison's epic 'The Invisible Man.' In this 1947 creation, Ellison makes clear that whatever else it means to be a true American, it means also to be 'somehow black.'
In the introduction to Ellison's second novel, 'Juneteenth,' which was finished posthumously by John F. Callahan, his literary executor, Callahan points out that in both of Ellison's novels 'we find Ellison's conviction that time's burden - its blessing and curse - is a matter of the past being active in the present - or of the characters becoming aware of the manner in which the past acts on their present lives.' That's why we celebrate Black History Month.
It is as though Ellison wrote beforehand of the race riots of the 1960's and of the struggles for civil rights. His sequel appearing in 1999, puts forth vivid scenes that feel like the craziness of scenes in 'Beloved' where craziness is the only description of reality that is possible. What these scenes describe as knowingly as a bursting into flames in a riot, is a certain silence, a silence that describes the evasion and the ignoring. That's why we celebrate Black History Month.
I recall being in a black church in Montgomery, Ala., some months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. I was the only person there not of color and I recall being so visible that I felt invisible. I believe that is what it's like to be a person of color in the midst of whiteness in America. That's why we celebrate Black History Month.
We celebrate Black History Month to relive the stories of, and renew our acquaintance with, those who died that the civil rights of others might be recognized.
At the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., there is a memorial to all who gave their lives for civil rights. Their names are etched into a black marble base where water is constantly flowing over them. ''Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream' (Amos 5: 24). We celebrate Black History Month to do what we can to understand and announce the struggle for human rights that persons of the African-American heritage have lived out.
On Jan. 20, 2000, a picture appeared in the Washington Post of African-American citizens kneeling in the office of the state capitol in Tallahassee, Fla. They were protesting an attempt by the governor to abolish the state's affirmative action programs. My mind flashed back to similar scenes of the '60's and I asked myself, 'Is the struggle for civil rights over or does it continue until it is completed?'
That's why we celebrate Black History Month.

The Rev. Kathryn B. Moore is pastor of Mt.Zion UMC of 'ole Georgetown' and vice chair of the conference's Commission on Religion and Race.