Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Recently I spoke to an Advance Placement class at a high school, and I made an effort to combine the reasons for Black History and Women’s History Month, as well as special recognition for other subjects that are so often forgotten in nation. To say I was disappointed at the absence of knowledge about the simplest facts about Black achievement and the achievement of women is a huge understatement.

I discovered that the seeds of classism and racism are sown early in our education system.  In my early childhood, when television was not as developed and widespread as it is now, there was nothing positive that was mentioned about Black History, Women’s history or history of the working class.

Whenever these groups were mentioned, 99 percent of the time it was pertaining to something negative.  As television matured, these groups were still left out. With Civil Rights legislation, television was forced to hire Blacks, women and other minorities, but we didn’t see these groups as part of Black history, women’s history or the history of  other minorities.     

These new faces we were seeing on television were just a part of television. We didn’t classify them as negative.  With the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, IPads, etc. young people, women and minorities  are now seen all the time, but not in the context of the past.  Many young people, therefore, are not connected with the past. This creates a disconnect from their own past and from America’s past.

If America is to be saved, we’ll need a thorough examination of its past before we can clean up  the negative things that happened not only to women, Blacks, Chinese, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, Irish, Japanese, German and other non-Blacks who were minorities when they arrived in America.  One day the story will have to be told over and over and over about the Native Americans who were here before all of us and were the owners of this real estate that we now call America.  

When the Jews got off the boat in New York, they were placed in a Jewish neighborhood, the Irish in an Irish neighborhood, the Catholics with the Catholics, etc.  The only time the entire groups of immigrants were white Americans is when they went to the baseball games and there was no section set aside for segregating them as they were in their neighborhoods.  When they left the ballpark to go home, however, they were segregated again. 

At that time Black people could neither play nor attend the games.  That is why baseball was such a racist game when it came to African Americans and other people of color. This history should be told quickly and fairly.  With the reach of television, the Internet and other electronic media, the truth could be told quickly and fairly.  With young people in America who have never known what early America was like with all of its racism, sexism and other prejudices, including the horror of Black people being lynched, white women being burned at the stake-- and the only thing necessary for such treatment was for a white man to accuse her of being a witch!

Once all of this information is widely exposed, we should come together and be about the business of honoring all of the victims—from the horrors of slavery and lynching, to the killings and jailing of women from the Women’s Suffrage Movement, to the shameful treatment of Jews, Asians, Hispanics, Philipinos, and the near total destruction of our Native brothers and sisters.  We must come together, fall on our knees, look up toward heaven, pray and ask the universe for forgiveness.

Dr. E. Faye Williams is Chair of the NationalCongress of Black Women and Chairman of the Board of the Black Leadership Forum.  She can be reached at www.nationalcongressbw.org or 202/678-6788.