What do Black History Month, Carter Godwin Woodson, one hundred years, and West Virginia have to do with each other? Why I am writing about this? Our view of history depends on the lens through which we view, if at all, the events that we narrate.
First, let me back up to what Sunnyvale, California and Hardy County have to do with each other… I have written previously that I am a “Come Here” to Hardy County. Where did I come from?
I grew up in Sunnyvale, Californian, at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay. I grew up on a quarter acre track-home in a white suburb. In the 1960’s, that end of the Bay Area transitioned from apricot, plum and cherry orchards to track-home developments. Decades later Yahoo settled in northern Sunnyvale; Google built lots of campuses just west in Mountain View; Apple built just south in Cupertino; several other tech companies sprouted throughout Santa Clara and San Jose to the east. I left Sunnyvale 45 years ago, as these companies’ founders were tinkering in their garages.
I attended De Anza Elementary School (named for Juan Bautista de Anza, 1736-1788, explorer, military officer, and politician in the Spanish Empire lands that would later become California). History, as I learned it, was the Spanish Missions, Coastal Indians (as we understood them in the 1960’s, before the local Native Americans living in Oakland and San Francisco occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969, reasoning that the Sioux Treaty of 1868 applied to the decommissioned rock in the Bay), and the Gold Rush. The Revolutionary and Civil wars were something that happened in distant parts of the country. The lens through which I learned history did not reveal images of Black people.
De Anza school had one black student, Sammy. Willie Mays played for the San Francisco Giant at Candlestick Park. I was not exposed to the the black communities in Oakland to Fremont. After college, I lived in some more diverse neighborhoods in Seattle, east San Jose, and Jackson Heights, Queen, NYC. After I moved to the East Coast, I began exploring Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields. I came upon sites from Peacedale, Rhode Island (where enslaved people made uniforms for the Union) to Charleston, South Carolina (where the hubbub began).
Throughout my “discoveries” of our nation’s historical sties, I was not attentive to Black History Month. I remember reading about the controversy that Colonial Williamsburg generated when they conducted a historically accurate slave auction. Only a couple of years ago did a couple of local neighbors mention where slave owning families lived near Baker, and which plots of land they granted to their emancipated slaves after 1865.
I lived a couple of decades in West Virginia before I read about Carter Godwin Woodson, who grew up and taught in West Virginia. He initiated Black History Week in February 1926, one hundred years ago, while teaching history at West Virginia College (now University in Charleston) an HBCU. He wanted to promote honoring President Abraham Lincoln (whose statue stands in front of our Capital), and Frederick Douglas, both who were born in February. Godwin Woodson wanted to add a lens through which we could view history.
Over the years, Black History Week grew to a nationwide observance of Black History Month. Why do folks think that California is more progressive than West Virginia?
Oscar Larson
Baker, WV
