”Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.” President Barack Obama [44th President of the United States] Black History Month, (February)also known as African-American History Month in America, is an annual observance in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom for remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora[ Wikipedia]
Dr. Carter G. Woodson selected the month of February for the celebration of then Negro History Week now changed to Black History month as a way to honor the birth of two men whose actions drastically altered the future of black Americans. Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. President who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, was born on February 12th and Frederick Douglass, one of the nation’s leading abolitionists was born on February 14th.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Minister and an activist who led the U.S. Civil Rights Movement from the 1950’s until his assassination in 1968
Slavery in America ; Slavery and its legacy have shaped American history, from the Civil War to Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s to the struggle over civil rights a century later.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH (17 August 1887 – 10 June 1940)[1] was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).[2] He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.[Wikipedia]African Americans in Government.
Colonel Colin Powell [Military official/diplomat]: Born Colin Luther Powell on April 5, 1937, in Harlem, New York. The son of Jamaican immigrants Luther and Maud Powell, Colin was raised in the South Bronx. Powell was educated in the New York City public schools, and graduated from Morris High. (Served as the Secretary of State under President George W. Bush)
Medgar Evers (1925-1963) was a U.S.civil rights activist and NAACP field secretary whose murder received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the civil rights movement’
Shirley Chisholm: (1924-2005) was the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress
Carol Moseley Braun: (1947-) was elected in 1992 to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate. She was the first African American woman elected to the Senate.
Condoleeza Rice: (1954-) was the first woman to ever serve as the head of the National Security Council. In 2005 Rice became the first African American woman to serve as secretary of state.
Sheila Jackson Lee: represents the 18th Congressional District of Texas, which includes Houston. Jackson Lee sits on three Congressional committees and is currently serving her seventh term.
Susan Rice: (1964-), appointed by Barack Obama in 2009, is the first African-American woman to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Black History Month Quotes by Prominent African American
- “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.” -Maya Angelou
- “Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” -Coretta Scott King
- “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminshes fear.” -Rosa Parks
- “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at.” -Jesse Owens
- “I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge.” -Oprah Winfrey
- “I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom.” -Frederick Douglas
- “The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” -W.E.B. Du Bois
- “We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.” -Carter Woodson
- “The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now.” -Bill Cosby
- “Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.” -Barbara Jordan
- “For I am my mother’s daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.” -Mary McLeod Bethune
- “God gives nothing to those who keep their arms crossed.” -African Proverb
- “Freedom is never given; it is won.” -A. Philip Randolph
- “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.” -Booker T. Washington
- “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” Marcus Garvey
Sources: Encyclopedia of World Bio. History.com; Bio.com. Huffington Post