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Backlash begins against confining black history to month

The only black county commissioner in Dallas, John Wiley Price, spoke Monday to 100 mostly black middle school students about history, responsibility and their futures. If he had been invited the following day, Feb. 1, he would have refused.

That's not because of a scheduling conflict. Price no longer makes public appearances during Black History Month. Like some other top speakers, Price has grown weary of being in high demand for just a few weeks and then often ignored.

"I'm not going to be, as the kids say, "pimped' during the month of February," Price said.

A few years ago, Price said, he was inundated with speaking requests. Then he realized that "black people were visible during February, but the other 11 months of the year we became the invisible people."

He isn't a lone rebel: Twenty-nine years after Black History Month was officially designated by the federal government, something of a backlash has begun.

"Black history being confined to that month is more aggravating than ameliorating," said Larry Aubry, a columnist with the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black weekly, who worked on the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission for 34 years. "There's no commitment there. I'm looking for more in the full 12 months."

The month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February. Woodson said he hoped the week could be eliminated when black history became fundamental to U.S. history.

"An industry has grown up around (Black History Month), which is really quite fascinating," said Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton historian. Like Kwanzaa, she said, "it became a corporate holiday, a way for corporations and museums and the U.S. Postal Service to declare they're multicultural bona fide."

Despite their misgivings about Black History Month, Painter and others believe black history would become even more marginalized without it.

"People are hungry for a conversation," said Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of African American Studies at Columbia University, "and I can't be too cynical because I remember that hunger myself as a young person."

[Last modified February 5, 2005, 00:58:03]