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Reasons why it’s important to learn black history and what it has taught me.
“Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it”.
-Ella Baker
I took a black history class this semester in college because I wanted to get more in touch with my roots. As a black women, I didn’t know much about my own history to my embarrassment.
Don’t worry it’s not as bad as I believed before, I was really just regurgitating what was taught to me in grade school and I didn’t really know much beyond that. The only thing I really knew was Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the March on Washington, then all of a sudden segregation became illegal and everything’s all said and done after that.
This is really the only thing they teach you in school as a kid so I thought it’d be a class just going in deeper on those aspects of black history. Little did I know how narrow my view was.
The name of the class was Black Power and the Civil Rights movement and that was really it for me. I really wanted to take it just because even if it was just about Martin Luther King, I would know a little bit more about him at…
