As most of us know, February is Black History Month. It is a month to celebrate and remember black leaders of America. It is a month to remember men and women such as George Washington Carver, W. E. B. Dubois and Rosa Parks who faced and overcame enormous challenges and prospered in the face of adversity.
While February is a time to remember great African-American men and women and their impact on American society, I would also argue that it provides us an opportunity to look back on the struggle of the black population to achieve full citizenship, to assess the current state of affairs, and to look ahead to their challenges.
I have lived my entire life in the Deep South. My father grew up in a segregated school until he began high school some 40 years ago, which is not that far passed. The Jim Crow era still has an effect on our nation today. Not in the form of two separate bathrooms or two different schools in the same neighborhood housing two different races, but in the form of the alarmingly high rate that black high school students drop out compared to their white classmates. It lives on in the form of the high percentage of African-Americans in prison and the high unemployment rate of African-Americans. Jim Crow might be outlawed today, but its effects are still felt.
America began this country with a Declaration of Independence that said "all men are created equal" while slaves still picked the cotton and tended the livestock. America built the White House with slave labor. It took the African-American population many years to gain citizenship, voting rights and basic equalities but they preserved and won them. Today their work and perseverance has paid off, and an African American man is the president of the United States, the leader of the free world.
I call upon you to never forget the racial injustices of our past. To do so, we risk reverting back to the immoral ways of our history. Instead, we must always be conscious of our history and be thankful that as a people we were able to discontinue the depraved and unjust practices that plagued our young country for its first 175 years. Our country is not great because it is perfect; it is great because it always seeks perfection.
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