18-02-2025
Whether Trump gets it or not, there's no American history without Black history
You can't erase Black History for the same reason you can't erase air; because air simply exists whether you want it to or not. It's not multiple choice. Stop breathing and you will find out.
It's science, and it's also fact. These are two things the current occupant of the White House and his merry band of MAGA parrots cannot understand, and therefore cannot tolerate. It's a mentality that says, 'We don't get it, so we're not going to allow it.'
Yeah. OK. Sure.
Except that it's not up to you. Black History is American History, and it happened.
President Donald Trump's executive orders have forced various federal agencies to curtail diversity programming, including observances of Black History Month.
Any attempt to extricate black threads from the American tapestry will result in the entire fabric becoming undone. Just to make it plain; there is no American history without Black history. That's because there is a strong likelihood that America never would have evolved into the economic powerhouse that it became – and might not have evolved much at all – without Black Americans.
As the kids used to say, not brag, just fact.
We can begin with slavery, since that's where it began for enslaved people in America in 1619, when the first enslaved African set foot on these shores more than 100 years before this country became the United States of America in 1776.
During those early years when America was a toddler, cotton was king. That's because the cotton industry was the nation's largest and most profitable export, creating the economic foundation upon which the United States became a world power. The free labor provided by those enslaved African people who picked that cotton was the reason why the cotton industry exploded like it did. Stealing African people from their homeland to work for free in the cotton fields for over 200 years was the only way the cotton industry in America could have become so profitable – and the only way America was able to become so dominant.
Like I said; no Black history? No American history.
But there's more. Actually, there's so much more that I don't have space to include it all, but I can give several relevant highlights. Like the fact that the first man to die in the American Revolution was a Black man named Crispus Attucks. From the National Park Service:
'Crispus Attucks, a sailor of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry, died in Boston on March 5, 1770, after British soldiers fired two musket balls into his chest. His death and that of four other men at the hands of the 29th Regiment became known as the Boston Massacre. Death instantly transformed Attucks from an anonymous sailor into a martyr for a burgeoning revolutionary cause.'
Then there was Benjamin Banneker, who helped design not only the White House, but Washington D.C. From the Benjamin Banneker High School website:
'Banneker's major reputation stems from his service as a surveyor on the six-man team which helped design the blueprints for Washington, DC. President Washington had appointed Banneker, making him the first Black presidential appointee in the United States. Banneker helped in selecting the sites for the U.S. Capitol building, the U.S. Treasury building, the White House and other Federal buildings. When the chairman of the civil engineering team, Major L'Enfant, abruptly resigned and returned to France with the plans, Banneker's photographic memory enabled him to reproduce them in their entirety. Washington, DC, with its grand avenues and buildings, was completed and stands today as a monument to Banneker's genius.'
Oh, and enslaved people played a major role in construction of the White House.
And let's not even get started on the history of American popular music, nearly all of which originated with the blues, which was created by…
Yep.
Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump doesn't get it. Black history is American history | Opinion
