Last week in Family Ministries we learned about Mardi Gras and the story of Stone Soup – both of which highlighted  the importance of sharing and therefore celebrating food and resources in times of scarcity rather than hoarding out of fear. 

And this week we are going to extend that metaphor to include the sharing of knowledge in the celebration of Black History! If we leave the teaching of histories to the school system alone, the diversity of stories become whitewashed and generalized into bullet points to be memorized, regurgitated, then promptly forgotten. 

This is unacceptable.

Black history is more than slavery, Rosa Parks, and MLK. 

Thus, a challenge – learn some “alternative” history. – Did you know that Jazz music helped to defeat Hitler in WWII? Or the story of one of America’s first self made millionaire – a black woman named Madame C. J. Walker – the first of her line born free?

Did you know that inoculations (the precursors to vaccines) were first practiced in Africa and brought to America by Onesimu, a slave of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1706? Or that the beloved “Lone Ranger” was based upon the life of an African American man named Bass Reeves who escaped west during the civil war? Or that HeLa cells (the first and only human cell line to continue to replicate indefinitely outside the human body and has since traveled to space and the deepest depths of the ocean, allowed for the creation of the polio vaccine, and the entire industry of cancer research and treatment) were taken from an African American cancer patient named Henrietta Lacks in 1951, without her knowledge or consent, at Johns Hopkins Hospital? Her family wasn’t informed about any of this until a writer interviewed them for her book published in 2010. To this day Lacks’s relatives have received no financial benefit and continued to live with limited access to healthcare. (If you want to be further outraged concerting that last story may I suggest one of my first favorite books – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebeca Soltnit in 2010, the first and only book about this remarkable case).

The point being that history is so much more beautiful and so much sadder when seen in color. To reuse a poem (because that’s the point):