(RNS) — This February marks the 50th anniversary of the national commemoration of Black History Month, proclaimed by President Gerald Ford in 1976 as part of the bicentennial celebrations. But Black History Month was the result of decades of work by leaders such as the historian Carter Woodson, who first formed the idea of a Negro History Week in the 1920s. Back then, Woodson was intent on focusing on the achievements of Black Americans, even before the Civil Rights movement and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which are so much a part of what we celebrate today.
When I was growing up as a teenage white boy in Detroit, there was no official Black History Month, but the stories of Black Americans began to get through to me in my white neighborhood, school and church as I started really listening to my city. The big question that rose up for me was why life in white Detroit and Black Detroit seemed so different. In my white world, honest answers to those questions were not readily available.
As I took jobs in the city to earn money for college, however, I often worked alongside young Black men whose life stories were different from mine. Those interactions changed my life story. I began to simply show up at Black churches. I was taken in, and I listened, and started to get some answers to my questions. The Black church has been integral to American history, to the success of the Civil Rights Movement and also to me. What is now celebrated in Black History Month became, for me, a lived and life-changing education as a white man in America.
But the truth is that the story of racism and racialized slavery in the United States of America did not simply end in the past. It didn’t end with slavery, or with the success of the Civil Rights Movement, and it definitely did not end when February became known as Black History Month. We still see efforts to roll back civil and human rights for Black people in America, and these racist efforts are evident in the policies and practices of the Trump administration.
The most controversial sentence I have written in my life as a writer (so far) was the first sentence of a Sojourners magazine cover story published in 1987, which read, “The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.”
The response to that sentence was overwhelming and very contradictory. Some called it “outrageous,” while others named it “courageous.” It was neither. Anyone who takes the time to look at our nation’s history would and should consider that statement to be just the facts of history. Yet in every class I teach at Georgetown these days, my students always have a deep response to that sentence, which sparks a wide class discussion.
A decade ago my book on that sentence, “was published with a foreword from Bryan Stevenson. He wrote, “Slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved.” Bryan focuses his work on mass incarceration and the death penalty as prime examples and tells the story of how a police officer approached him as he parked his car outside his own home in Atlanta, and threatened to “blow my head off.”
Black History Month is a time to reflect on the sins we have committed as a nation. America’s original sin has indeed evolved and is very present today in the White House.
The germ of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign was his accusation that Barack Obama was not a citizen of the United States, not a real American — a claim that echoed a long history of treating Black citizenship as conditional. Just last week, Trump shared an image depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, invoking one of the oldest racist tropes in American life. Today, whether in Trump’s rhetoric, imagery or immigration policy, we are reminded that the patterns of racial hierarchy described in our history books have not disappeared, even with the administration’s efforts to erase parts of it.
There is plenty of evidence to brand Trump a racist — it’s well known that he and his real-estate investor father refused to rent apartments to Black people — but whether Trump is a racist is an inadequate question. Our nation’s issue is not Trump or his blatantly racist administration. The real issue is why such rhetoric still finds oxygen in American public life.
Black History Month is a call to repentance. Repentance is not guilt. It is not self-condemnation. It is turning around and refusing to look away. It is allowing truth to change us. If America’s original sin was the creation of a society that declared some more human than others based on skin color, then repentance requires us to reject every modern expression of that lie. The racism we see today is not a departure from our story — it is part of it.
I encourage everyone to listen to the truth of Black History Month and learn the full narrative of America’s past, present and future. This means we must take the invitation and practice introspection and look within to find if we have accepted distorted narratives, benefited from systems we did not question or stayed quiet when we could have spoken up.
Let this Black History Month be a chance to renew our commitment to stand closer to our neighbors who are being targeted. Black History Month should become personal for all of us. Let us heed the calls to action by choosing our better angels over our worst demons regarding race in America.
(The Rev. Jim Wallis is Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair and director of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice and is the author, most recently, of “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.” A version of this commentary appeared on the Substack God’s Politics with Jim Wallis. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
