on the sidelines of history
February is Black History Month and I can’t help but compare this climate of change to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
History books have taught us about different fragments of time that moved humanity into a path unlike the ones they were on; from colonization to the industrial revolution and the people who started those revolutions. Multiple wars have been fought. Generations later, the repercussion of what was lost and won can be seen in statues of soldiers still visited or protested against. Replicas and flags serve as painful reminders of a past history seems to have forgotten.
Or perhaps, it is us who have forgotten our history. I turn on the television and see marches, and wonder what it is we are marching for this time. I see black ribbons pinned on lapels of men and women dressed in haute couture, and wonder if they truly understand what that pin represents to someone still being silenced?
In a few years’ time, what will history write about our generation? What could it say about this climate of social change and growing restlessness?
My response, sadly, is that while we have members of our peers joining resistant marches and shouting loud and proud about these movements, the rest of us have grown apathetic to these tactics. The rest of us wonder who, again, will be “outed” for indecency or deviant sexual conducts. The rest of us wonder what this hashtag means to someone like me who may not have experienced firsthand what abuse and harassment looks like. The rest of us wonder what a pin is supposed to do or resemble. The rest of us sit idly by and wait for the next wave of anger and shouts that seem to be coming closer and louder.
I see the same determined and tired faces of today, as those who took part in marches back in the 1960s. I can hear — and almost feel — the same anger, the same resolve and passion from those who are shouting today as if they echo from decades prior. And most importantly, I see in the background of those black and white stills, images of people who are just walking by, either ignoring the protestors around them, or hanging their heads and rushing, so as not to be “lumped” into the same categories.
I know these faces because they are of me. The same empty glance, the same neutral expression and thought that life will still be the same for me and whomever history deems as the victor. It is this realization that saddens and frightens me because it is people like me who choose to not take sides, choose to go about their daily routines while people are getting shot and killed. We are the ones that society warns about: the silent ones who know what is happening, but choose to do nothing and let the atrocities that history wrote about continue.
But there is hope for those of us in the sidelines. We can choose to befriend a neighbor who looks and thinks differently than us. We can find room on our bookshelf for books that offer different points of view and firsthand accounts on the era that changed our society’s landscape but few seem to have remembered why.
We can find out why we celebrate Black History Month, who we are honoring, and who we are ensuring that we remember. And let’s take that one step further and find more names to the list that we have forgotten about.
There are stories of bravery that history books won’t tell. I think this is why I enjoyed reading Echoes of the Struggle by Janelle Gray. As her characters go on a Civil Rights Pilgrimage Tour, I go with them and, in my mind’s eye, follow along the paths that are well traveled and written into our grade school textbooks. But I also get to visit sites that aren’t mentioned. I get to read the names of people that history hasn’t mentioned but whose lives changed those around them.
So here are a few challenges to you: read about a person during the civil rights movement that may not have gotten some national attention but were prominent in their own town’s metamorphous. Ask yourself if there is a passion that you would march for, root for, and do what you could do to make change happen. And finally, stop sitting on the sidelines and make a stand for whatever it is that you feel compelled to change. After all, it takes one person to make a difference.
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